Richard II
The first new Bridge Theatre production in over two years is a bit like excitedly running off to meet an old friend you haven’t seen in ages and then finding the conversation is… okay but a bit stilted.
Bridge boss Nicholas Hytner is a brilliant director of Shakespeare and Jonathan Bailey is a great stage actor. Hytner’s take on Richard II does nothing to make me think I’m wrong about either of these things. But it falls short of the rigorous textual reinvention of the typical Hytner Shakespeare revival – although he gives it a good try.
There is a clear nod to Succession in Grant Olding’s stringy score, and also in the modern dress production’s prevalent visual of besuited men trading a country away over glasses of expensive scotch.
If Bailey’s doomed king was one of the Roy brothers then I guess he’d be Roman. Richard’s defining characteristic is usually his absolute belief in his own divine right to rule England, which blinds him to the fact he’s really terrible at it. Bailey’s king, however, is a self-loathing fuck-up who at his best presents the air of a smug but inept middle manager: see his botching of the duel between Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke, when his constant changing of his mind over whether to have the men fight to death or not looks incompetent, not simply capricious. And at his worst, well: he honks a load of coke and decides that screw it, he’s going to invade Ireland (we’ve all been there).
The strong suggestion that Bailey’s Richard knows...
