Industrial-Strength Shakespeare





By Susannah Clapp
Observer
Theatre
April 16, 2000




The Almeida's Richard II is the hottest ticket in town. Only it's not at the Almeida...



Richard II
Gainsborough Studios, London N1


You cross the pavements of Shoreditch, step into an old Metropolitan Railway power station, and find yourself in a version of pre-industrial England. The space is huge; around it are long windows, domed as if they belonged in a cathedral. Light drizzles through the dusk; you can see a few knights standing around; you hear birdsong and plainchant. The stage of the Gainsborough is a wide, green field. You might begin to think things are all right, but at the back of this pleasantness a brick wall is cleft by a giant jagged fissure the shape of a lightning streak.

It's long been obvious that the Almeida's short tenancy of the old Gainsborough Studios was going to provide some of the hottest tickets of the theatrical season. Any Almeida Shakespeare is an event, as the theatre's Hackney Hamlet proved: at Shoreditch, Jonathan Kent directs first Richard II and then Coriolanus . Any production with Ralph Fiennes will be sure of an audience, and he appears in both plays. The surprise factor is the building itself: the Gainsborough is its own drama.

Constructed 100 years ago to generate electricity, this lofty brick slab has been visited by glamour and neglect. In 1919 it was converted into film studios by the Famous Player-Laskys; it later became a base for Hitchcock, who made The Lodger there, starring Ivor Novello, and in 1938, The Lady Vanishes . It had a further life as a whisky-bottling plant and as a warehouse for oriental rugs. When the Almeida moves out, the building will be redeveloped as flats.

It is brilliant of the Almeida to have alighted on this space, and brilliant of them to have given it to the architectural firm of Haworth Tompkins to convert. This was the firm that refashioned the Royal Court, plaiting together contemporary and Victorian features. It is a firm that is helping to redefine the idea of what a theatre can look like, sheering away both from twentieth-century concrete blocks and the enduring nineteenth-century notion of a West End theatre, fantastic and imperial, with an interior like a ballgown, folded and looped and swagged with gold. The new idea is more intimate, more democratic.

In the Gainsborough, nothing is made to look perfect: you can see where the bones are buried, with the existing surfaces - bricks and timber and steel - being re-used, and rubble from demolition piled up for the rake of the seating. What could be better for a history play? The aim is to use the building's ecclesiastical qualities for Richard II and its industrial strength for Coriolanus.

There is a powerful sense of history in Kent's production of Richard II , very much helped by the space. It does not have the biting, dangerous quality which the play had recently at Stratford, with the crisply sardonic Sam West; there are too many blurred moments early on, and too much roaring, particularly from David Burke as John of Gaunt. But it does have its own coherence. Ralph Fiennes's Richard is always intelligent and always interesting. There's not an unthought moment, from his early appearances - awkwardly pleated like a playing-card king, all elbows, sceptre, crown and frown - to his later pets and rages and sudden introspections. He has the perfect foil in Linus Roache who is chillingly contained as Bolingbroke. He has perfectly judged support from Oliver Ford Davies. And the stage is ignited by the great and insufficiently praised actress Barbara Jefford, who makes a small part sing with a Shakespearean truth and makes you wish that Shakespeare had written Queen Lear .


 

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