Crowning Glory






Sunday Times
April 16, 2000




Richard II





The opening image is one of confident, undisputed power. King Richard, resplendent in glittering white and gold and wearing his crown, is carried in on a chair, his face controlled by a slight frown, remote and impassive. The great noblemen of his court stand in weighty silence, clearly aware that something of importance is about to occur. This first scene of Richard II (Almeida at the Gainsborough Studios) seems, on the face of it, one of the least modern in Shakespeare. The grave, pompous formality, the resonant, ceremonial speeches and counter-speeches, charges and counter-charges, can look and sound like mere theatrical pageantry. But Shakespeare knows exactly what he is doing. This is not ceremony enacted as part of the national heritage, nor is this a king who annually needs to renegotiate the civil list. You have to imagine a world in which the king's power was sanctified by God. To observe ceremonial rules was to observe the operations of a divinely sanctioned and protected institution.


Yet it soon becomes clear that there are cracks in the edifice. Something is amiss. The king seems smug, even by the standards of God's deputy. His first cousin, Henry Bolingbroke (Linus Roache), son of his uncle, John of Gaunt, is accusing another great nobleman, Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk (Paul Moriarty), of embezzlement and treason. At this level, such accusations can cause a lot of problems, but Richard's expression suggests this is only a little local difficulty that he can easily smooth away. The trouble begins when Bolingbroke comes out with something far more serious: that Mowbray was in some way responsible for the murder of another of the king's uncles, the much-loved Duke of Gloucester. And when Bolingbroke compares this murder to the shedding of Abel's blood, it becomes clear that this is a family affair: the king himself may be implicated.


Roache's playing of the scene is masterly. His Bolingbroke is angry but controlled; from this moment on he reveals himself as the master of any situation he finds himself in. The accusation breaks from him almost as if he had lost control for a moment; but Roache's performance makes it clear that it is a deliberate move, carefully timed for maximum effect. In fact, Bolingbroke is acting; and one difference between him and Richard that this Jonathan Kent production will reveal is that he acts when he needs to, like a professional, whereas Richard, who has an actor's temperament but not his skill, acts out of an emotional need, for an imaginary audience but mostly for himself.


Bolingbroke's accusation is the real turning point of the play, and Kent's direction is precise in observing its effects. There is an audible intake of breath on the stage. The reaction of the noble bystanders suggests they may have known, or at least suspected, the facts, but are still shocked at the revelation. The monarchy itself is publicly tainted now: there can be no way back and nothing will be the same again.


Here Shakespeare begins his long farewell to medieval England, with all its certainties and its divine seal of approval. His vision of this England is frequently at odds with the historical facts; but dramatically it is an image full of political and psychological dynamism that energises the entire cycle of history plays. The significance of this whole, apparently mannered scene is that under these reassuring formalities something has exploded and shaken the foundations. A long, bloody collapse is to come; and John of Gaunt's deathbed speech will be its requiem. David Burke delivers it with a magnificent power, not as a homily or a funeral oration, though it has elements of both, but as a declaration of faith in civil order, the duties of kings and a proud but unchauvinistic patriotism.


When Bolingbroke makes his accusation, observe Ralph Fiennes's Richard closely. The bland, self-assured image of power seems to crack slightly; his face suggests, extremely subtly, annoyance and unease. You begin to realise that Richard's remoteness and glacial affability were partly a pose, resting on the complacent assumption that power, once bestowed, would function at his bidding. Like some modern political leader with an overlarge majority, Richard had assumed he was impregnable, to such an extent that the alternative has not, until now, even crossed his mind.


In public, Fiennes's Richard is a performer, constantly re-enacting his favourite lines in some divine script. But you notice, too, that he is entirely aware of this. He watches himself exercising power, displaying feelings, indeed almost actually having them. In private, the picture subtly changes. It is as if a mask has slipped off, revealing another. This private Richard is boisterous, dashing, reckless: a charming but dangerous daredevil. He likes this image and cultivates it lovingly. Kent and Fiennes discard the notion that there is anything homoerotic between him, Bushy, Bagot and Green; the three men are simply obedient political advisers and henchmen (but the actors need to give them rather more individuality).


When Richard visits the sick John of Gaunt, you can see that he can barely control his impatience, and Gaunt is not deceived. Neither is Gaunt's only surviving brother, the Duke of York, whom Oliver Ford Davies portrays brilliantly as an avuncular master tactician who knows exactly when changing allegiance becomes first feasible, then permissible and finally necessary. His scene with his duchess (Barbara Jefford, excellent), his son Aumerle (Oliver Ryan) and the newly crowned Bolingbroke is expertly poised between broad comedy and shrewd political bargaining.


Richard's fall is both tragic and deserved: or, more precisely, tragic because deserved. It is not only a question of his greed and his high-handed way with the nobility. Roache's Bolingbroke is a study in how much a politician can achieve by doing very little. Richard, by contrast, is the self-absorbed actor who writes his own script, with the presumed assistance of God, and watches himself lovingly as he acts it. This is precisely why crisis unsettles him and exposes him to his own uncontrollable feelings. These are Richard's most terrible moments, and Fiennes portrays them with the most brilliant, hard but humane perception. Richard realises that the body of the king is not the king, and that without kingship he, this body, has no name. But still he does not go quietly. In the superbly articulated deposition scene, he alternately stands ironically on ceremony and lashes out with contemptuous anger. Richard knows he is defeated and knows why, but he never quite accepts it: perhaps his worse flaw is that he is not great enough for his own faults and not strong enough for his griefs. The reckoning will be reserved for his successors.

 

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