Why stage Richard II in 2025? Perhaps, post-Brexit, because it kicks off Shakespeare’s eight-play retelling of the Wars of the Roses, a conflict which saw England so riven with internal division that it shrunk irrevocably on the European stage, eventually losing its influence in France. Perhaps, given our era’s interest in sexual identity, because it is rooted in the history of one of the few English kings widely believed to have had erotic relationships with other men. Perhaps because its imagery is repeatedly concerned with conservation of the environment. Or perhaps, in a world where resurgent ethnic nationalism clashes again with the liberal model of nationhood built on values of community, because it has the capacity to ask us what being English means.
Nicholas Hytner’s production, running at the Bridge Theatre with Bridgerton star Jonathan Bailey, addresses none of these questions. It is serviceable, functional and buttressed by Hytner’s trademark clarity with Shakespeare’s language. My companion, who had never seen Richard II before, found the dialogue faultlessly lucid, a mark of an experienced director’s training of his actors.
For a Shakespeare play rooted in metaphors about the cultivation of the English landscape, however, this Richard II seems to gain little from becoming a lengthy boardroom battle between suited-and-booted former frat boys (Grant Olding’s incidental music is a cloying echo of the Succession theme tune.) We get it: in this universe, Bailey’s Richard II and Royce Pierreson’s uneasy Henry Bullingbrook are fighting for majority shareholder control of Grandad Edward III’s England-Corp. The question is: why?
Bailey’s Richard is charismatic enough, as one might expect from an experienced Shakespearian. (He played Cassio to Adrian Lester’s Othello in Hytner’s 2013 production, long before Hollywood came calling; at the age of 13, he was a young Prince Arthur in Gregory Doran’s King John, which is a thankless initiation to Shakespeare’s histories.) Bailey understands the language, especially the power of this play’s verse sequences; he understands the family relationships which underpin this story.
Yet, as Richard’s power unravels, Bailey verges overly on the frenetic. His Richard, we establish early, is a cokehead nepo baby, gleefully raising taxes to pay for his habit. During his confrontation with the victorious Bullingbrook, Bailey plays Richard as an addict on the edge of withdrawal—itching for a final hit of power as deeply as any other drug. The result, however, is as relentless and as repetitive in tone as the monologue of any other tedious addict in need of a fix.
In his early scenes, Bailey is a Richard we can recognise from Helen Castor’s superb recent dual-history, The Eagle and the Hart (Castor summarises the themes of the book in an article for Prospect here); utterly entitled about his right to financially exploit his inheritance; uninterested in the counsel of his elders except to summon a perfunctory huddle of advisors and demand a chorus of empty nods. Or, as Castor puts it in her excellent programme notes, “his obsession with the rights of his crown was not matched by any understanding of its duties”.
The production loses Shakespeare’s understanding of divinely appointed kingship
Yet, by shifting the action from throne room to boardroom, the production loses Shakespeare’s understanding of Richard’s royal aesthetic and of the mystic culture behind divinely appointed kingship. If you’ve ever seen the Westminster Abbey image of Richard II at his coronation, complete with lavish golden backdrop, you’ll understand, as Shakespeare did, why he thought he was so special. A good Richard II need not swathe its actors in medieval garb to apprehend this: Doran’s 2000 modern-dress production with Samuel West ably captured this sense of a god-blessed golden boy gone bad.
It doesn’t help that Hytner’s production shows little interest in England itself. This version is concerned with leadership and power, but not with nation. Bob Crowley’s set gives us a brief glimpse of England’s soil, when sparse patches of a waste-strewn litter dump appear towards the end of the second act. The metaphor is undeveloped. Shakespeare’s garden scene, in which two gardeners compare the governance of England to their own experience of horticulture, is cut.
There’s still plenty of good stuff here—I suspect Hytner is incapable of directing a production that it is qualitatively bad. Yet this Richard II feels like a missed opportunity. It comes at a time of increased interest in Englishness and its feudal roots. The Middle Ages are back, with the British Library’s enjoyable Medieval Women exhibition, the success of biographies such as Castor’s or Thomas Penn’s The Brothers York, as well as the slew of historical-fiction blockbusters adopting women’s perspectives during the Wars of the Roses (most notably, Annie Garthwaite’s Cecily and The King’s Mother.)
It’s bad critical form to review the production you wished for, not the one a director chose to create. But this corporate-coded production, without a nation at its heart, feels as though it lacks a soul also.
