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 he’s in over his head is an interesting one. At the very least he clearly has doubts, abusing substances to get through the pressure of an insanely high pressure job that was forced on him at birth. Whether the text bears this out is debatable. But as a read on the character it’s certainly not implausible, and somewhat born out by stuff like his rapid acquiescence once he realises the vastly more competent Bolingbroke has usurped him.
But despite a committed performance from Bailey, I struggled to get my head around some of the details. Richard returning from Ireland with his crown in a placcy bag is perhaps a droll illustration of his smallness as a man, but it left me struggling to see the exact point. He’s still the king of England – doing a version of the play where he is just an in-over-his-head executive would be interesting, but it never quite feels like that’s what Hytner is pushing.
After usurpation Bailey’s Richard switches to a shrill, bitchy defiance, perhaps largely jealous that Royce Pierreson’s gruff Bolingbroke has stolen all his royal toys. When a loyal groomsman visits him in jail and tells Richard that the new king rode into London on his favourite horse, Richard seems genuinely vexed with his erstwhile steed for not throwing its new master. It’s a fair reading, and often witty. But the final passages lose considerable poignancy through Richard’s triviality. And then he gets a weirdly kick ass death scene, which is jarring.
Elsewhere and the abiding sense is of a no-frills production that prioritises clean, fluid historical storytelling over flashiness. There are some nice turns, especially from Pierrson as a Bolingbroke who feels wearily obliged to depose Richard, and Vinnie Heaven as the Duke of Aumerle, Richard’s waspy hanger onner. But I frequently felt a bit confused as to whether I was watching a boardroom drama or a story about a literal civil war – the bit where Bolingbroke trundles out a literal artillery gun suggests the latter, but the tone leans toward the former.
Although there’s something to be said for the intimacy of Bob Crowley’s thrust stage set, it lacks the spectacle of Hytner’s National Theatre productions, or the thrilling dynamism of the previous Shakespeare outings at the Bridge, which were freewheeling immersive affairs.
It’s still pretty entertaining, a treat to see this play performed with a top-notch cast. But it’s the first Hytner Shakespeare I’ve seen where the pieces didn't fully click into place conceptually. There is interesting territory to be explored in the hinterlands between Richard’s supposedly divine appointment and his mediocrity as a person. But too often Hytner’s production gets lost in them.
