The throne of England was given center place in John Bury's model set of steel-clad walls and metallic stage, conveying the stark, cold reality of a brutal power politics. The tetralogy of Richard II, Henry IV Part I and Part 2, and Henry V was added to The Wars of the Roses (1963), which comprised a two-part adaptation of the three Henry VI plays (Henry VI and Edward IV), followed by Richard III. In this earlier production the central image was a great steel council table that alienated the action in Brechtian fashion, revealing the strategies of the self-serving opportunists who grouped around it, as they jostled for position and power. Hall and Bury banished romanticized pageantry by creating costumes attuned to their metallic setting. Colin Chambers describes some of Bury's experiments to achieve texture: "Glue crystals, marble chippings, chicken grit and stone gravel swept up from tennis courts in Southern Lane were all thrown onto the 'gunked' costumes while still wet."48
Margaret Shewring commented of the whole cycle: "John Bury's stage picture provided a sustained visual image" that helped to link the tetralogy and trilogy.49 One reviewer observed:
John Bury's settings for Richard II are an impressive part of the production, and allow scene changes to be made with maximum smoothness.
Heavy armour-plated walls have a coppery tint and can quickly be revolved to bring something fresh into the exciting pictures created on the stage.
For many scenes there is a background of trees, woven together like some delicate tracery. Mellow, autumnal colours are used at one point--suggesting the beginnings of decay which Richard's mismanagement has brought about.50
David Warner played the saintly but weak and ineffectual King Henry VI in the earlier trilogy, and brought a corresponding impression of weakness to his role as King Richard II. The critic J. C. Trewin observed:
It is the gilded throne of England that one sees first on entering the theatre. Even so, one hardly observes Richard's entrance. In this production, he is deliberately insignificant, the vain indulgent weakling--strange offspring of the Black Prince, that Mars of men--who, like one of his forerunners, dies for the sweet fruition of an earthly crown.51
Shewring felt that the impression of weakness was a reading that "could be accommodated in Richard II played as part of a full cycle, but would, perhaps, have been less appropriate had the play stood on its own."52 However, Harold Hobson took an opposing view:
If one sees Richard II alone, even in the unsurpassed performance of Sir John Gielgud, one sees only the sad downfall of a tragic poet who is overthrown by a rebellious and dynamic subject. But in Mr Hall's programme Richard II, placed in its proper sequence, takes on a more cataclysmic significance. The deposition of Richard is seen, not as in any way excused by the tyrannical vagaries of his rule, but, quite simply and unforgivably, as a crime against God.53
However, the king's downfall could not be romanticized. One reviewer commented that Richard's actions were "firmly anchored in the world of practical politics," for example, in the Mowbray-Lancaster quarrel, where the king could be seen "meting out subtly different degrees of intimacy to his kinsmen and his favourites."54 Eric Porter played Bullingbrook as a strong-willed opportunist, displaying "just the right amount of blended patience and impatience with the weak king he manages to depose."55 The theater program suggests that Bullingbrook be viewed as "the new man, the coming man of integrity" who "becomes a rebel almost against his will." This idea was borne out in performance, one reviewer remarking on Eric Porter's "fine study" in "restrained but ruthless ambition," a portrayal that suggested "an underlying hint of unease and guilt at having deposed the king."56
John Barton (1973)
In 1971, Richard Pasco played King Richard in the touring production by Theatregoround which took the company's work to theaters, schools, colleges, and community centers throughout Great Britain. The production served as the "prototype" for his exciting and innovative "mirror image" version in 1973 with Pasco and Ian Richardson alternating the roles of King Richard and Bullingbrook. Irving Wardle remarked on the need to break with the history cycle mentality:
For nearly 10 years the Royal Shakespeare Company have lived in the shadow of The Wars of the Roses. Apart from an erratic revival of Richard III they have left the English histories severely alone. Now, at last, they are laying the ghost starting with the first play in the cycle which John Barton (a co-director of The Wars of the Roses) has cast in a determinedly fresh optique. The last production was the cornerstone of an epic; the new one is a work in itself.57
As Robert Shaughnessy relates, apart from "a poorly received" production of Richard III, directed by Terry Hands in 1970, Barton's Richard II (1973) "was the first major production of a mainstream history play since The Wars of the Roses," and is "often cited as the most influential, if not the definitive, modern production of the play."58 The enduring significance of this production lies in its ability to make relevant the analysis of kingship so keenly worked by Shakespeare in the "now of Elizabethan England." The program for the 1973 production contains a short essay by Anne Barton entitled "The King's Two Bodies." Ernst H. Kantorowicz in The King's Two Bodies (1957) explores an idea of kingship found in Edmund Plowden's Reports (collected and written under Queen Elizabeth I) that "the King has in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic."59 In Anne Barton's explication of the concept:
3. John Barton's "mirror image" production of 1973. Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson alternated the roles of King Richard and Bullingbrook. Here they enact the metaphor of the two characters as buckets in a well, one going down as the other is pulled up.
One of these bodies is flawless, abstract and immortal. The other is fallible, individual and subject to death and time. These two natures are fused at the moment of coronation in a way that deliberately parallels the incarnation of Christ, whose representative on earth--as Richard continually reminds us--the king henceforth will be.60
For John Barton, as for Kantorowicz, the notion of kingship with its fusing of the king's two bodies is at the center of the play. To give this dramatic expression, Barton's production took up Shakespeare's own use of the parallel between monarch and actor with their common assumption of roles, but whereas previous directors had seen the acting imagery only as a key to Richard's histrionic personality, Barton applied it to his whole production and, most important, to the other king in the play--Bullingbrook: "The alternation of the two actors playing Richard and Bullingbrook constantly focussed attention on the theme of kingship."61
The set and stage blocking helped to formalize these relationships, working with the stylized and symmetrical pattern of the play:
Symmetry, of course is a natural feature of the play (for example "On this side, my hand; and on that side, thine" [4.1.177]), and Barton developed this element and made it an important part of his production. The play began with a meta-theatrical device in which an actor representing Shakespeare (and carrying a large book) appeared to nominate one of the two Richards to play the King and to put on a mask, robe and crown. Removing the mask the designated Richard assumed the role and the play began.62
In Act 1 Scene 3, two ladders rose up behind the combatants "with between them a platform on which Richard literally rose and fell."63 B. A. Young of the Financial Times commented:
On this eccentric set the scenes are strictly formalised. There is no furniture but a tall golden cenotaph standing for a throne which comes and goes. The attendant characters are marshalled into rigid military ranks.64
Theater historian Robert Shaughnessy describes how
Movement, grouping and gesture were highly choreographed, formalised and symmetrical, with many speeches directed straight out to the audience, and others divided and distributed among the cast in choric fashion. Barons appeared on wooden horses or on stilts, the Queen and her attendants in half-masks ... For the Flint Castle scene, Richard appeared on the bridge high above the stage wearing a huge circular golden cloak which transformed king and actor into "glistering Phaethon"--an image of the sun-king
which "set" as the bridge descended to the floor.65
In the deposition scene, when Richard broke his mirror, Bullingbrook placed the empty frame over the king's head, creating a noose. At Pomfret, a ragged Richard unburdens his soul to the groom, who turns out to be Bullingbrook, eliciting sympathy for the variable fortunes of the two "kings" but to some critics straining the text too far.66 Michael Billington felt that Richardson's king "ranks with Redgrave and McKellen as one of the classic Richards,"67 while J. C. Trewin observed that "Mr Pasco tastes every word as he moves from the contemptuous smiling sun-king, through the arias on the Welsh shore, to the agony of Westminster Hall and the ultimate time-spinning metaphysics at Pomfret."68 However, Trewin's final praise was reserved for Richardson as Bullingbrook: "no actor in my memory has so governed the 'silent king' of Westminster Hall."
Terry Hands (1980)
Irving Wardle's review of Richard II for the London Times catches the way in which the highly unusual "cycle" directed by Terry Hands was to position the play:
Having begun in the middle of the English histories with Henry V and worked outwards in both directions, Terry Hands now arrives simultaneously at the beginning and the end of the cycle with this production and tonight's Richard III ... we have a version of Richard II which converts the play from a lyric prelude into a compressed epic.69
The "cycle" opened a season in 1975 celebrating the centenary of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre from its beginnings as the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. The "asymmetrical, even arbitrary" cycle, directed by Hands, comprised the Henriad in 1975, the Henry VI plays in 1977, with Richard II and Richard III completing the histories in 1980. Alan Howard played the lead role in all eight plays. Hands disregarded historical chronology and "opened out of sequence with Henry V in order to let the Chorus provide a prologue to the whole enterprise with his appeal to 'imaginary puissance' and 'the brightest heaven of invention.' "70 Hands also revived his 1968 The Merry Wives of Windsor to round off the cycle, making a connection between "a jaundiced depiction of the condition of England," emerging through the Henriad, and the "run-down England" which "was ripe for the reappearance of an enfeebled Falstaff."71
The pairing of Richard II and Richard III in 1980 suggests a compression of time, projecting a retrospective light on King Richard II's tenuous grasp of the political realities that will unseat him and unleash bitter power struggles for the throne in years to come. At the same time, the unlikely companion piece of Richard III offered "a chance of showing another actor-king."72 Stuart Hampton-Reeves suggests that the productions were "a self-conscious challenge to the monumental histories of the 1960s. History was represented on a stage (designed by Farrah) which had been stripped to reveal the wood and brickwork of the theatre."73
4. Terry Hands' 1980 production: from affability to opportunism to "a haunted figure bent under the weight of a usurped kingdom."
B. A. Young described the effects of the minimalist staging in Richard II:
As we begin, the King stands before a costly panel of gold inlay and dons his crown with a gesture that speaks wordlessly of his divine right. Later this panel inclines backward to give a big open stage to which men climb up unseen stairs upstage, sometimes to fine effect, as when the savage Welsh come, lit from behind, to learn that they are too late.74
Shaughnessy argues that Hands' approach repudiates the politics in the Henriad and Henry VI plays, "concentrating upon the private self rather than the public role."75 In his production of Richard II, Hands shows the protagonists responding personally to the pressures of their situations. Thus, as Irving Wardle notes,
The first thing to be said of Mr Howard's performance is that he does Richard out of the arias. "What shall the king do now?" is delivered in a terrified gabble. He really wants to know. It is the panic-stricken demand of an actor who has forgotten his lines.76
Wardle notes that the emotional journey for John Suchet's Bullingbrook moves from "an affable open-hearted invader" to "a coldly-masked opportunist" and, finally, "a haunted figure bent under the weight of a usurped kingdom."
Barry Kyle (1986)
Barry Kyle's production of Richard II opened with colorful medieval scenic splendor, announcing its distance from the harsh steel world of the history cycle, directed by Peter Hall and John Barton in 1963-64, and from the minimalist staging favored by Terry Hands (1975-80). As Margaret Shewring relates, "It was the stage picture for Barry Kyle's production that attracted most column inches of critical attention."77 However, "This visual feast was not gratuitous. On the contrary, it was an essential image of the cultural richness of the Ricardian court."78 Other critics were less impressed:
Barry Kyle has adopted a pop-up picture book approach to this play and William Dudley's set, steeped in the artificial world of "The Book of Hours," is an enclosed garden surrounded by castellated walls and turrets against a brilliant, azure background with the passage of time marked by an astrological arch which spans the stage. It is an exquisite set which becomes increasingly irrelevant as the tragedy moves out of the claustrophobic luxuriance of Richard's court to the reality of Bullingbrook's camp, not to mention Pontefract Castle. At times it is seriously counter-productive: "Come down--down court, down King, / For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing" [3.3.183-4]. And sure enough, Richard goes spiralling downwards on a miniature turret, the very same turret that Bullingbrook leaps onto later--going up naturally.79
Stanley Wells also found the set "less than wholly successful" where "Richard, facing the audience, addresses his abdication speeches to Bullingbrook, who is seated above and behind him, through the back of his head," but argued that the production represented "an honest and intelligent attempt to objectify the style of this highly formalized play."80
5. Barry Kyle production, 1986. The "colourful medieval scenic splendour" of the set proved problematic for some, where "Richard, facing the audience, addresses his abdication speeches to Bolingbroke, who is seated above and behind him, through the back of his head."
The play started with Jeremy Irons' Richard
first discovered resplendent in peacock blue and gold, spread-eagled on the ground, the leopard encaged in his kingdom that will become his tomb. He looks up wearily, as if to say: I know I'm not playing the kingship game with the degree of seriousness everybody else expects of me.81
Without the context of a history cycle, the production can suggest an elegiac response to the ending of a medieval kingship. However, the "startlingly messianic" portrayal by Jeremy Irons of the tragic downfall of a divine king, a man "more or less crucified by his assailants," is in fact "another aspect of the poseur."82 Richard plays his role ineffectually and dangerously, misjudging the political climate. Critics were impressed with the ceremonial joust scene, "a public ritual whose essential meaning is obvious to everyone present and the actors brilliantly convey the sense of unspoken but thoroughly understood accusations," and Michael Kitchen's "mesmerising performance" as Bullingbrook, "a formidable figure: an unpleasant, unglamorous and devious man but one who simply radiates competence, shrewdness, and a cynical likeability."83
Ron Daniels (1990)
While Jeremy Irons suggested the self-destructive path taken by the last undisputed medieval English king, Alex Jennings showed the repercussions of a tyrannical regime on the people subjected to his rule. Ron Daniels' "stand-alone" production had a modern context: the world of realpolitik. The theater program included a double-page spread on tyrannical regimes throughout history with a printed quote across the centerfold in red: "Mussolini would have liked to have been a poet just as Hitler would have liked to have been a great painter--most dictators, it seems, are artists manques."84 Maria Jones describes the start of the performance:
The tyranny of Richard's regime was suggested through his personal bodyguard, the Cheshire archers, who trained their crossbows on the audience ... Sinister guards in greatcoats and fur helmets recalled East European guards and referenced the tyrannical regime in Romania under Nicolae and
Elena Ceausescu who were executed in December 1989 ... Richard (Alex Jennings) entered "magnificently attired," wearing "the kind of crown a Holy Roman Emperor might have worn." His divine authority was emphasized through the presence of the Bishop of Carlisle (John Bott) standing behind the throne in ceremonial robes and bishop's mitre. Sinking "voluptuously into the throne," Jennings portrayed a monarch "utterly entranced with the role, the power, the trappings of kingship."85
The presence of a "false" white proscenium arch cast Richard as the "leading actor" of an illusory world and the production conveyed the idea that dictators appropriate images to produce distorted versions of reality, feeding off illusionary visions of themselves.86 A huge, extravagant baroque Guido Reni backdrop created an effect that mythologized Richard's tragic downfall through the story of Atalanta stooping to retrieve Hippomene's apples, creating "a pictorial analogue of Bullingbrook's ascendancy, an image of victory through flight from a diverted opponent. Atalanta stoops just as Richard, the glistering phaeton, descends."87 Richard appeared like a spoiled child, jealously guarding his favorite "toys," the orb, scepter and crown, which he kept in his "toy-box" and that would later be carried into Westminster Hall. Michael Billington of the Guardian commented on "a highly exciting performance from Anton Lesser" who played Bullingbrook: