Writer: William Shakespeare
Director: Nicholas Hytner
What happens when a man with the right to rule is an unpredictable, impulsive narcissist? It’s a topical question. Nicholas Hytner’s compelling modern-dress staging of Richard II makes a play about the intricacies of medieval history seem urgent and necessary. Richard kicks off the play’s volatile action by breaking up a duel he has reluctantly called for and banishing the participants. The Bridge Theatre’s adaptable thrust stage adds to the immediacy, becoming variously a gladiatorial pit, courtroom or intimate prison, with the surrounding audience made to feel almost complicit.
The star turn as King Richard is Jonathan Bailey, recently lording it in Bridgerton and Wicked. Bailey’s performance swings vertiginously from the nervy cocaine-fuelled exercise of arbitrary rule to whimsical contemplations of monarchy and mortality. He is ably matched by Royce Pierreson, playing Richard’s royal cousin Henry Bolingbroke or Bullingbrook as this production dubs him, taking the spelling with its bullish connotations from the First Folio. Personable and authoritative, Bullingbrook is a natural leader, a calm counterpoint to Richard’s wildness, impatient with his cousin’s antics, but ambitious enough to profit from them.
There’s a sense that Richard is cosplaying kingship, fetishising the ornaments of royalty. While others wear suits or tracksuits, he enters in a frockcoat and velvet slippers. He appears on the battlements of a besieged castle (in the audience gallery, relayed on screens) wearing a saintlike white shirt with light gleaming off his crown. In his repeated offering and snatching away of the crown, the simple gold circlet feels imbued with the Tolkienesque power of a totemic item (“my precious”). Bullingbroke tries to keep his dignity in a childish tug-of-war. Then, arms outstretched, crucifixion-style, the monarch becomes a martyr. The messianic vanity of both roles is made concrete when Richard calls for a mirror to look at his own grief.
As Richard loses the trappings of command, he becomes increasingly philosophical. His lines on the true nature of grief prefigure Hamlet. Bailey’s performance has an extraordinary freshness that makes familiar words written more than four centuries ago sound newly-minted and relevant. He suggests the warping effect of being given absolute authority and the impossibility of charting a just course through the conflicting currents of family, friendship, propaganda, ideology, morality, realpolitik.
There is no easy mapping of modern parallels in this complex exploration of power. Lines like “Free speech and fearless I to thee allow” carry new resonances. A leader illegally taking over on a shifting wave of populist acclaim could be even more dangerous than an erratic, solipsistic ruler. In this version, the Bishop of Carlisle is an abbess, movingly played by Badria Timimi, aghast at the destruction of the old order and (correctly) prophesying war. The casting, although presumably decided long before January, gives these scenes an eerie echo of the real-life Bishop who recently asked Donald Trump to show mercy. It also lends the role a Cassandra-like quality, able to see the future but ultimately powerless to prevent it.
Michael Simkins, playing the Duke of York, humanly conveys the challenges of keeping his integrity in this fast-moving political scenario. After the realistically rubbish-strewn patch of earth where Bullingbrook plants his howitzer and Richard sits on the ground to “tell sad stories of the death of kings”, York is suddenly grappling with existential problems at a farmhouse-style kitchen table with flowers and homemade cake. Bob Crowley’s minimalist set design and Lily Mollgaard’s props give the audience just enough specific detail to embody each scene: the near-empty pints of the plotters at a bar or the wheelchair and hospital bed, bringing extra poignancy to John of Gaunt’s death speeches.
The lighting, designed by Bruno Poet, is a vital component in these pacy shifts in the action. The initial glow of chandeliers above gilded furniture swiftly segues into smoky shadows and sudden stabs of spotlight or slanting shafts of sun through prison bars. Carolyn Downing’s evocative sound design and Grant Olding’s portentous score, pertinently reminiscent of the music from Succession, lend the pared-down production a cinematic richness.
Shakespeare’s plays often return to the theme of power. Hytner also directed the Bridge Theatre’s 2018 promenade production of Julius Caesar, another hybrid of history and tragedy, with a similar visceral urgency. Richard II can sometimes feel slightly pointless or self-indulgent. Here, in the hands of a skilled cast and crew, the poetry of an age-old dynastic struggle raises crucial contemporary questions.
Runs until 10 May 2025
