CAN YOU SPEAK UP A BIT, YOUR MAJESTY?; RICHARD II





By Robert Butler
The Independent
Theatre
April 16, 2000




GAINSBOROUGH STUDIOS, LONDON




One of the most exciting aspects of Ralph Fiennes's Richard II is the way that the venue, the Gainsborough Studios, is about to be turned into a block of residential flats and penthouses. We need more new theatres that are on the verge of disappearing. Ephemerality is one of the chief pleasures of drama. You can still get to see the films that were made here 70 years ago. But if you are interested in seeing Fiennes's Richard (or later his Coriolanus) you will have to visit this converted film studio off the New North Road in North London by 5 August because you won't be able to get it out on video.


New venues are a gamble. However deeply the actors work out their relationships with each other, their biggest challenge is to work out their new relationship with the audience. For this Richard, it's tricky. Jonathan Kent's staunch medieval production employs choral chants, swords the size of the men that wield them, and a maidenly Queen Isabel whose flaxen hair descends to her thighs. It isn't the period that is responsible for our sense of remoteness. That comes from the designs and the central performance.


The event itself - the Almeida's spectacular conversion of this venue - always threatened to be bigger than the production. Paul Brown has designed the broadest stage imaginable (this is the wide-screen version of Shakespeare) and scenes unfold at either side. Brown has also covered the entire stage with a carpet of thick, hillocky grass, as if allowing for the houses of York and Lancaster to settle their differences by playing six-a-side. As the cast tramp back and forth across the unmown grass, the impact is visually stunning and dramatically diffuse.


The Shoreditch Shakespeares have been lovingly constructed around Fiennes, and he's very impressive. We sit there for a couple of hours thinking how forceful his Richard is, admiring his voice, his technique, his capacity to play against any Hollywood persona with ugly grimaces and malign stares. He snaps, snarls and skips around the grassy stage. This king can be a bit of a queen. Fiennes packs each moment with detail, whether picking on "Coventry" as the venue for the duel as if it was a piece of sheer whimsy, or sticking his tongue out to John of Gaunt, or fending away a unpleasant news as if troubled by a gnat.


But just as we're wondering exactly how Fiennes's Richard could have made this hectic trip from the chin-jabbing petulance of the opening act to the poetic figure who returns from Ireland in the second half, in comes Barbara Jefford as the Duchess of York and delivers her lines in a way that we haven't heard all evening. The Duchess has to persuade the new king, Bolingbroke, to spare her treacherous son. Her main gag is that she refuses to rise from the ground until the king has said "pardon". You can feel an immediate response from the audience. And then an awful thought creeps up on us: maybe it could all have been like this. Jefford's biographical note tells us she has played 37Shakespeare roles in 50 productions of 32 plays. When she speaks, 800 people walk in step with her thoughts. No one else can match that.


Linus Roache is a trim, compact and slightly lightweight Bolingbroke, and Oliver Ford Davies wrings more notes of weariness out of the Duke of York than I could stand. At the centre Fiennes's Richard emerges as a character at odds with himself, sexually confused and unable to control his physical mannerisms. His biting, posturing character can lock us out. Fiennes is a virtuoso at describing the exterior results of his inner turbulence. It is as if his character knows that he is a monarch and we are not. If he wants us to share in his emotional state, he'll need another level of stillness and simplicity.

 

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