Richard the Fecund
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage RICHARD THE FECUND BY ALBERT BERMEL As soon as it begins, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Richard II (Brooklyn Academy of Music) declares itself a performance, not a recital of history....
...I share your prison...
...And every scene of the production contains one or more of these visual images, which are three or four symbols in one...
...David Scott Milton's Bread (American Place Theater) is set below ground in a Polish bakery, realized to the life in a decor by Kert Lundell that features ovens, pipes, a mixing machine, and a contraption that extrudes loaves of kimmel rye every five seconds...
...The actors submit to Barton's ceremonial treatment by shunning any conversational intimacy...
...They were evidently used a great deal in the medieval theater, persisting into Elizabethan times...
...Raised, it serves as a turret of Flint Castle, enabling Richard to speak down to the rebels below...
...and a royal cloak made of a gold fabric that throws back the lighting like a harsh sun...
...That genteel meeting (more like a pact than a confrontation) between the competing characters and the collaborating performers can be seen retrospectively as the source of the production's energies and amplitude...
...In the opening tableau, two actors lay hands on a crown and exchange knowing smiles...
...instead of salivating over the gorgeous phrases, he lets them well up and make his whole body fervent...
...Did the leading actor opt for an effeminate Richard, a bragging Richard, a brutal, lunatic, libertine, or boozed-up Richard...
...a row of upright lances held in parallel stripes by soldiers...
...the old days, a critic reviewing this play would feel bound to spend most of his space on the King's personality...
...Both men grasping the gold circlet become its victims—it grasps them—as another tableau concluding the play makes' clear: Boling-broke, who has become King, supplanting Richard, steps on to a dais to be clothed in his regalia...
...One, the man playing Boling-broke, relinquishes his hold...
...The play turns allegorical at the end: Three of the characters are piled into lighted ovens, and the bakery becomes Poland and Germany in one...
...Thus, after his coronation Bolingbroke meditates alone in his chamber...
...They address the audience in formal, posed soliloquies of the type that must have gone out in 1857, with Charles Kean's Richard II, the play's first modernization...
...Still, the insertion is not gratuitous...
...it is a bravura effect, and all acting...
...According to the play's text, he is called on in jail by a "groom of the stable," who comes to let him know that Bolingbroke has taken over not only the country but—a magnificent Shakespearean stroke—Richard's favorite horse...
...The shop belongs to an ex-wrestler, but is stolen from him by his intellectual son, his whore of a mistress, and his seedy European cousin who reveals his Hitlerian colors in the last scene by coming onstage in a black shirt...
...When Richardson's Bolingbroke receives the news of Richard's death from Exton the murderer, he lets out a shriek that flies up and down the scale, freezing his listeners...
...Another time he is presented on stilts, garbed in black feathers and hovering menacingly over Richard like an enormous carrion-eater...
...Tony Church as John of Gaunt, however, imbues "Methinks I am a prophet new inspired" with fresh simplicity...
...the other, Richard, is then decked out in the royal paraphernalia...
...Pasco, by contrast, drops his head silently into his hands, then raises his face at a low angle...
...Like Ms...
...In those few hoarse words he captures the suffering of both kings...
...They are both actors of distinction...
...In this case, the director, John Barton, has a pair of monarchs to juggle with, and he works each of them into situations that, while not in the drama as written, do serve to emphasize the production's theme...
...and Barton, a Shakespearean scholar as well as a director, has gone to some pains to remind us of them...
...Within a decade his partner, the Duke of Northumberland, a "ladder to the throne," will turn against him just as he turned against his cousin...
...All three characters might be regarded as stage emblems of the continuing, ill-fated monarchy, rather than as self-sufficient individuals...
...Interpreting the crown as a curse echoes the Greek notion of a tragic flaw passing from one ruler to the next...
...Before the groom's exit, Barton has him quietly raise his hood...
...He is Bolingbroke, and he looks soulfully at Richard as if to say, "I share your fate...
...On it is laid the crown, another emblem...
...When the dressing is...
...Their sheer sides box in the larger part of the acting area...
...Richardson, the more flamboyant, is a dazzling technician with something like a dozen voices, a suggestion of prissiness in his chop-ped-off consonants and ornitholog-ically trilled r's, and a gift for brittle comedy...
...If Barton raises the importance of Bolingbroke and makes him into a not-unsympathetic human being, Richard's reflection and necessary complement, he also emphasizes the villainy of Northumberland...
...As the scene proceeds, we realize he has been dreaming...
...He is mannered to his fingertips but unceasingly magnetic to watch and hear...
...Emblematic, too, are an altar-like dais...
...completed, the trio face the audience but somehow Bolingbroke is no longer in the middle...
...Then it descends to ground level with the king's party on board, equalizing the two sides: At that point, Richard must pay court to Bolingbroke if he wants to live...
...Two staircases in wood and steel, like stalled escalators, reach up and out of sight...
...Two cloaked retainers move to either side of him...
...Barton's interpretation may seem "inhuman" or "bloodless" to critics and spectators who like to get immersed in Richard's grief and to believe, with Holinshed's Chronicles, that "he was a prince the most un-thankfully used of his subjects...
...a sprig of rue...
...He "goes into" the part, whereas Richardson comments on it...
...Under the supervision of Martin Fried, the actors, including Marilyn Chris, Dolph Sweet, Constantine Katsanos, and Rudy Bond, give it all the heart, tongue and yeast they have, throwing themselves into their chores, from lifting real weights to urinating in the doughnut grease...
...Suddenly he goes into the best-known speech (by the same character) from a different play, Henry IV, Part II: "How many thousand of my poorest subjects/Are at this hour asleep...
...looking ruined and blanched, his eyes dead, he whispers, "Exton, I thank thee not...
...Occasionally, they will repeat key lines in chorus: "Long live Henry the Fourth of that name" (he is to live only as "that name") or "The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed/The shadow of your face...
...One of the Duke's speeches is punctuated with the croaking of ravens and crows...
...Chappell, he kneels for his speech...
...Pasco is less impersonal, more sincere, a rebel men would follow out of trust...
...Bolingbroke, for his part, needs to persuade Richard to abdicate, rather than be deposed, in order to maintain a calm public front...
...a mirror that is actually a pane of clear glass...
...The visit, or visitation, occurs with fine aptness after a speech in which Richard relates how he has transformed his cell into a kind of theater, populating it with thoughts that have "humors, like the people of this world...
...A balcony that slides up and down is the set's only horizontal feature...
...But a "moving" Richard (like a "moving" Lear) is a stale conception-anybody yearning for yet another dose of it ought to be sentenced to read the 1930s matinee weepy, Richard of Bordeaux by Gordon Daviot...
...Pasco speaks and behaves with an introspective quality that gets him closer to the poetic and narrative aspects of the verse...
...Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown...
...Nonetheless, it is good to see a quasi-experimental work mounted with so much care and love...
...In this stylized vein, Janet Chap-pell's Queen Isabel is disastrously empty, the evening's blemish...
...Papier-mache horses—signifying power, war and vainglory among other things—the kind of artificial animals first employed by Jean Anouilh for his Paris staging of Becket—are worn by the actors on their hips as equine crinolines...
...Milton's dramaturgy is funny and phony by turns—sometimes both at the same time...
...Bread must have cost a fortune to bake...
...a thin, high wand of a crucifix...
...Did he really come or did Richard imagine him...
...He and Richard now flank a royal figure whose head is a skull...
...The first emblem we see is a huge book, handled and referred to over and over by the main characters...
...Emblems have lately come in for increasing critical attention...
...unlike her, he triumphs over the awkward posture, forcing it to demonstrate his resistance to an imminent death and fully embodying the anguish of the couplet which might serve as Barton's thesis —how "England that was wont to conquer others/Hath made a shameful conquest of itself...
...it is also in line with the RSC's earlier renderings of Shakespeare's histories...
...the mirror's circular frame, lowered by Bolingbroke over Richard's head, as if it were a noose...
...The mock-contest indicates which actor will take which part, for Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson (a fluky profusion of Richards) are alternating in the two leading roles...
...Richard has a similarly oracular experience...
...Pasco and Richardson show us a range of possibilities for the characterization, despite a staging that demands a certain stiffness, if not reticence, to avoid jarring its precision and symmetry...
...men would follow him because they want to ally themselves with his strength...
...As Bolingbroke, Richardson is cold and withdrawn...
...These varied contrivances fit into an awesome, dominantly perpendicular set created by Timothy O'Brien and Tazeena Firth...
Vol. 57 • February 1974 • No. 4
