Richard II *****

The Donmar Warehouse, London

*****

"I watched a person lose all sense of himself before my very eyes and, though it was achieved without the exclamatory pomp of Lear or Bill Maitland, it was no less powerful for it."

I left Michael Grandage’s production of Richard II feeling that, as a play, it really isn’t one of Shakespeare’s finest. The plot’s a little slow and there’s no mesmerising Lear/Othello/Richard III equivalent to entice and entrap our fascination. All credit, then, to the Donmar’s cast and crew, who manage to pull it off with such aplomb.


I honestly felt that this was one of the best Donmar productions I have ever seen. The Donmar continually comes up top trumps, producing classic plays that attract brilliant leads and are performed in beautifully rendered sets. It is almost always perfect, but sometimes the lead is so phenomenally magnetic that the supporting cast’s inadequacies are highlighted (I’m thinking particularly of King Lear and Inadmissable Evidence). Not so with this production, where Eddie Redmayne’s exquisitely sensitive portrayal of an all too fallible King is enabled by the support of a wonderfully talented cast. I was quite in awe with how understatedly, and yet effectively, Redmayne managed to convey Richard II’s incompetence whilst retaining our sympathies. I watched a person lose all sense of himself before my very eyes and, though it was achieved without the exclamatory pomp of Lear or Bill Maitland, it was no less powerful for it.

At this point I should perhaps make a confession. I have fallen in love with Eddie Redmayne. I’m not usually one for the celebrity fads (and Eddie is becoming quite the fad) but having seen him in this, my respect for him has shot through the roof. Given my predisposition that way and the nature of the history play (one cannot escape from the fact that Bolingbroke’s traitorous actions make Richard depose himself), it is perhaps all the more incredible that I liked Bolingbroke (Andrew Buchan) so much. Rather than give in to temptation and encourage audiences to empathise in black and white terms (with the unfairly exiled Bolingbroke and - whilst Richard is a dictator; then with Richard as he falls from grace), Grandage’s vision, and Buchan’s execution of it, makes for a stunningly subtle reading of the play. Relying on its language to succeed, the play needs a cast that can pull everything out of it. This they did, with beautiful readings of character and an exposition of comic elements that was done so well that I didn’t feel the lack of the comic duo interludes that Shakespeare usually brings into his plays to lighten their load.

I am not really sure the play could have been done better. A great set was complemented with some stunningly good lighting (the shaft of light for the prison scene was particularly well done, creating exactly the right atmosphere for one of Shakespeare’s most poetic and, in my opinion, finest speeches). Good hero plus good play equals a bloody great night.