Richard The Second- Omnibus Theatre, London

Writer: William Shakespeare

Adaptor and Director: Anna Coombs

Shakespeare’s history plays are tricky beasts, mostly in that people are more unfamiliar with them than the comedies and tragedies, and as a consequence they’re more difficult to get to grips with. Anna Coombs’ adaptation uses this as a strength, radically slicing through the text to produce a stonking version of the play performed by an exceptional cast.

Coombs leans into both the political—lines re-emphasise the economic turmoil and legacy of empire—and personal aspects of Shakespeare’s text, as the relationship between Richard the Second (Daniel Rock), Aumerle (Lebogang Fisher) and Henry Bolingbroke (Raheim Menzies) is brought to the foreground. Aumerle’s character undergoes the most transformation, although you wouldn’t know it until the second act—here they become almost a second lead, and Fisher deals well with the emotional horror of political turmoil. Richard too is transformed – in Rock’s portrayal almost a second Hamlet. He seems almost too certain at first, a world away from the fey interpretations of previous productions, before losing his cool alongside his crown and giving Rock plenty to play with. His interpretation combines a sly wit, sudden anger and deep pathos in a magnetic performance that only grows with the production.

Courtney Winston’s Gaunt is a touch underpowered, but his Northumberland is enjoyably Machiavellian. However, by far the most assured performance is that of Sibusiso Mamba as York: a funny, touching and righteously furious portrayal that pulls together the themes of the personal and political perfectly. The actors play many parts and Coombs draws neat parallels between characters in casting (Menzies also portrays the Lord who informs Richard of Henry’s triumph). Overall, though, their greatest skill is to make familiar speeches sound new—there is a freshness of interpretation amongst the cast that allows for each line to sound like a new thought, surely basic stagecraft but also forgotten by plenty of practitioners.

Alongside the radical cuts to the text is a radical score, composed by John Pfumojena, which adds a choral touch that works beautifully across the play and particularly in Richard’s death scene, but at times is a little surplus to requirements, particularly when Bolingbroke is given a semi-musical-theatre number, one would imagine to beef out how Shakespeare wrote his part. The use of ladders in the set not only ties back into the original text (when referenced an audience member audibly went ‘ohhh’) but adds an unforgivingly industrial harshness to proceedings. The set reinforces that a country is reduced to five men, part of one family, deciding over a world we never see and that is “represented” by elements suggesting only their own struggle for power.

Richard The Second should be applauded for making Shakespeare’s most underrated history accessible, fresh and exciting. With star-making turns from all its cast and particularly its Richard and York, it injects a sense of reality and modern concerns into a play as old as the hills. Shakespeare would be proud, and possibly a bit jealous.

Runs until 27 November 2022