Why bother?: Richard II at the Almeida
The Tragedy of King Richard the Second
Almeida Theatre
Stalls L8, £10
5 January 2019
Almeida page
‘What were they thinking?’ evolved into ‘Why did they bother?’ over this dispiriting 90 minutes at the Almeida. I went from trying to fathom why someone given the opportunity to direct Richard II would do what director Joe Hill-Gibbins has done, to sharing the nihilistic disinterest that I can only presume prompted Hill-Gibbins in his unremittingly bleak take on beauty and responsibility.
Though it will almost certainly prove memorable. Hill-Gibbins and designer ULTZ’s gimmick is to set the play entirely within a prison cell: no wings, no doors, no exits, no sets beyond five uniform walls, no props beyond a set of black buckets ominously marked ‘WATER’, ‘SOIL’ and ‘BLOOD’. The cast of eight are all on all the time, every player except Simon Russell Beale as Richard and Leo Bill as Bolingbroke doubling up as courtiers and chorus. There are no castles nor gardens, no scene changes nor costumes.
It’s a bold idea, and of course has its foundation in Richard’s later incarceration. Perhaps it could even have worked had it been intended as a plangent evocation of Richard’s loss of liberty and his perpetual gilded cage, or an empathetic appeal to the imagination to construct the love of nature that sings so loudly in the text, or a gentle reminder of the need for imagination that must exist in every theatre production. But it was none of those things.
Rather, Hill-Gibbins uses this constraint to pursue an unusual interpretation of the play as absurdist. All except SRB gurn chaotically, gliding over what is left of the text as though the words mean nothing, clumping together buffoonishly, shouting over one another and generally larking about. At first I was only bewildered (ok, and annoyed) – what were they getting at? What could the idea be? Then finally I got it, or a glimmer, anyway: Hill-Gibbins shows us that people are idiots, and what idiot would fight to be responsible for them?
The upside of this approach is that it does make sense, and allows for some dramatic interventions that would otherwise be difficult to conceive; while I might not have liked versioning the gardeners as Pinterian goblins cackling at Richard’s soul, I won’t forget it now I’ve seen it. The downsides are that all characters other than Richard and Bolingbroke are squished into nonentities; that Shakespeare’s words are of tertiary consideration; and that SRB, undeniably a great Shakespearean actor, looks at most times utterly lost.
Try as he might – and he does try – SRB can’t relinquish his interest in the text enough to keep pace with his manic colleagues. He seems caught in a no-man’s-land, sometimes attempting to do as he has been bidden, sometimes taking refuge in his delivery of verse, sometimes presenting a Richard from a completely different production. The last of these provided, when the level of surrounding chicanery was low enough, the greatest interest of the play, SRB’s beautiful rendering of the verse a precious glimmer. But these moments were few and snatched, soon disrupted by shrill clamour or a flung bucket of blood.
Which led me to ‘Why bother?’ Why do Shakespeare, why cast a traditional Shakespearean, when you don’t care about the text? When any of nuance of character holds no interest for you? Why bother?
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