Richard II, Richard III
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

Audiences tend to be as dis-obligingly catholic as reviewers; the all-or-nothing response craved by theatre people is rarely an honest possibility. A lady with a personal stake in the new Stratford productions of Richard II and Richard III told me during an interval that she wanted the shows to be either loved or hated. She’s an old and dear friend and I hate to disoblige her, but I have to confess that though temperamentally out of tune with Terry Hand’s hectically operatic approach, I thought these examples of it pretty good.

Mr Hands is an avowed enemy of realism and he can justifiably assert that these two early Shakespeare histories are stylized pieces, full of emblematic characters and elaborate verbal tropes. But I suspect that the war between realism and stylization is a phony one. There never was a wholly realistic play or production, never will or can be. Complete stylization is a possibility, but it is unlikely.

In practice the two modes always co-exist, and if a text tilts in one direction it is the director’s job to restore the balance. (I expect to contradict myself on this point, and rapidly.) For example: in the Flint Castle scene of Richard II, after Alan Howard as Richard has expressed his willingness to come down and surrender to Bolingbroke in the base court, he executes a highly unrealistic and acrobatically impressive walk down the wall of Farrah’s burnished-copper set. This should be a stunning image, but though arresting it doesn’t work because Richard has already made the point verbally and at formal length. What we need here is a nifty prosaic exit on one level and entrance on another. Similarly Richard III’s hoodwinking of the Lord Mayor of London is as written a pretty crude affair: it may be that instead of staging it as an outsize Punch and Judy show it might be better to opt for a sober treatment that might add a sense of Realpolitik.

Both productions are at their best in the scenes that follow these central episodes. In Richard II Mr Howard abandons the stunning and/or mournful approaches most actors bring to the deposition. He is almost playful, even in comparing himself to Christ, and by so much the more disconcerting; he almost embarrasses Bolingbroke on to the throne, and it is plain that David Suchet’s usurper (hitherto a plain and rather likeable opportunist) will never get over it. Mr Howard is almost coy when he looks at himself in the glass: overpowering when he breaks it to pieces. This may be the motif that links the two plays; R2 loves his own image, R3 hates it.

Mr Howard’s Crookback goes heavily for deformity, taking the first soliloquy rewardingly at face value. His prize scene is the coronation when he must heave himself painfully up the steps, and sits on them to take counsel from a diminutive page on the Princes’ murder. He makes more than any actor I have seen of Richard’s nightmare, prompted by a posse of ghosts who mark the climax of Mr Hand’s boldly helter-skelter production. (The spirits of Rivers, Vaughan and Grey even get away with playing ring-a-ring-a-wars-of-the-roses.)

The play also has the best of Stratford’s support with Derek Godfrey a ruefully witty Buckingham with an excellently charted relationship to Richard, Mr Suchet a helplessly sick king, Richard Pasco a resounding Clarence, Domini Blythe, Barbara Leigh-Hunt and Sinead Cusack a powerful pack of queens and Joe Melia, no less, turning unexpectedly up as the Second Murderer.