Richard II Press Reviews

From the Guardian- Fan tip from Hildegarde:

Tyrant feeds on his divine right to be cruel Richard II
Gainsborough Studios, London

*** Thursday April 13, 2000

At the moment, we have an embarrassment of Richards. At Stratford-on-Avon there is a nakedly political, modern dress production. Now at the old Gainsborough Studios in Shoreditch, east London, Ralph Fiennes gives an unequivocal star performance in a traditional, pyramidal Almeida Theatre production.

The space is astonishing. One feels as if one is in an aircraft hangar. At one end of it sits a wide stage which designer Paul Brown has turned into an image of a disintegrating medieval England. The floor is a grassy carpet implying the demi-paradise that once was. But the rear brick wall is dominated by a huge central fissure which both suggests schismatic disintegration and allows for extravagantly regal entrances.

And Fiennes himself certainly gives us a Richard swathed in kingship. This is not the artist-king created by Frank Benson exactly 100 years ago. Fiennes's Richard is a mercurial autocrat. Entering enthroned to the sound of Te Deums, he soon reveals the flawed being underneath the ceremony. He sticks his tongue out at the corrective John of Gaunt, seizes his lands with arbitrary zeal and skips off to the Irish wars as if going to a fashion parade.

Within the parameters of Jonathan Kent's production, it is a fine performance. Fiennes has a stained glass profile, a resonant voice and a mordant irony. If the lyricism of Richard's downfall is underplayed, Fiennes compensates with a mocking humour. He is at his best in the deposition scene where he exaggeratedly cocks an ear as he cries: "God Save The King" and hugs the crown to his chest as if it were a favourite toy. Stripped of monarchy's protective divinity, this Richard becomes poignantly aware of his own wastefulness and other people's cunning.

What I miss in Kent's production is much sense of the play's politics. We are magnetised by Richard. But Linus Roache's stolidly impassive Bolingbroke gives us no hint of a man who turns injustice into opportunity. And amongst the anonymous Shakespearean nobles only two performances stand out. One is David Burke's ferocious, death-haunted John of Gaunt and the other is Oliver Ford Davies's wonderfully dithering Duke of York who reacts to the dilemmas of power with the uncertainty of the liberal intellectual.

Barbara Jefford also makes an impressive late appearance as a dominatingly maternal Duchess of York. But one looks in vain for an any insight into the way Boling broke's coup d'etat breeds another kind of tyranny. The production feels like an old-fashioned framework for Fiennes's performance and for his agonised discovery that even kings are subject to the imperatives of transience, time and death.

From The Times 4-13-00

Strong profile that exposes a weak king

BY BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE

FOR a man with so famously exquisite a profile, Ralph Fiennes is a surprisingly versatile actor. Here he is in the vast, vaulty mix of old brick, timber, scaffolding and foam-rubber seats that calls itself the Gainsborough Studios, playing Richard II for the Almeida, the same company that staged his fine, courtly Hamlet five years ago; and somehow he succeeds in giving a more various performance in what everyone would agree to be a less rich and rewarding part.

In he comes, borne on a white throne as on a sedan chai r, right up to the rectangle of tufty grass that serves as a stage and presumably symbolises "this blessed plot, this earth, this realm", i.e. the England that he has omitted to keep tended and mown.

Notwithstanding the rather peculiar yellow cycling trousers just visible beneath his shimmering gown, he looks and sounds every inch the monarch. But he proceeds to step down, and then and often afterwards we sense the volatile blend of preciosity, weakness, bitchiness, smugness, sarcasm and folly that eventually loses him his throne.

In Richard II, more than any other of Shakespeare's plays, a key conundrum is posed. The king is God's deputy on earth, untouchable. He is also a man, fallible. What is to be done when the man increasingly gets the better of the divine representative? Fiennes offers us some genuinely regal moments, notably when he emerges on a balcony, and with all the charisma at his formidable command gives the usurping lords an all-too-prophetic warning of the results of their blasphemy and hubris. But he is all too frequently a spoiled man with an unreconstructed child inside him.

After all, what are his subjects to do with a king who skips with such shallow ease from mood to mood, instant idea to impromptu decision? Fiennes's Richard formulates a punitive tax policy in the time it would take Gordon Brown to take a sip of water in mid-budget. What are the nobles to make of his lightly disguised distaste and half-open mockery of so many of them? He grins at his flatterers, he waggles his tongue at the dying Gaunt, he seizes the dead man's goods while he casually picks petals from a flower. Roache's Bolingbroke, incisive yet not insensitive, strong yet wan and troubled by the end, is in every respect the better equipped to rule.

Jonathan Kent's production is brisk and pacey, and gets especially good supporting performances from Oliver Ford Davies, a flummoxed and at times comically hysterical York, and from David Burke, who transforms Gaunt's famous elegy for England into a pained and wistful lament for his own imminent death. But finally any Richard II must be judged by its Richard II, and in the later stages Fiennes moves beyond imperious bluster and mandarin self-pity.

In his prison he is, as he should be, a man but no longer the same man. There he stands, in a thin yellow light, occasionally succumbing to bitterness, yet also carefully enunciating the syllables in which he acknowledges his blasted aspirations and wasted life. He's physically withered - but he's also done what Shakespeare wanted. He has grown.

This Is London 4-13-00

Fiennes's King is low on voltage
Richard II
Dir: Jonathan Kent.
Ralph Fiennes
Where it's playing
by Nicholas de Jongh

I did not expect to see a high and mighty star like Ralph Fiennes acted off the stage by the sets and the setting. But so it proved at an Edwardian power station in Shoreditch that once served as a famous film studio.

In this thrilling make-shift arena the Almeida launched its Shakespeare season, with a bravado that has characterised the constant glamour of its nine-year existence. The space and stage design are eye-catching and ideal for theatre.

In the eerie atmospherics of Jonathan Kent's darkness-at-noon production Fiennes manages to squeeze only a few, reluctant drops of sympathy for his ice-box Richard II. His colourless king is more tyrannical than tragic, more remarkable for flashes of power and fury than for anguished self-pity after losing crown and country.

Comparisons are essential, and Sam West, who has no star rating, captured the pathetic essence and vulnerability of Richard II with far more effect and poignancy, in Stephen Pimlott's remarkable Royal Shakespeare Company production at Stratford's Other Place studio last month.

Designer Paul Brown has worked transforming wonders with the hangar-like space, which now receives a last lease of creative life before demolition. The essential structure has been left untouched. The stage-area is high and wide, dominated by its back-wall, with a balcony and unbricked windows, doorways and entrances. The back-wall through which Brown has blasted a rift looks as if a lightning blast has left a fissured or brickless gap from top to bottom. This dramatic, scenic gesture powerfully implies even before the play begins that Richard II's realm is an insecure country, at the mercy of schisms. So David Burke's impassioned John of Gaunt delivers his "royal throne of kings" as an elegy to a country almost on the rocks.

The forestage area, decorated with grass and orange trees that wither as the country feuds, completes this stark evocation of medieval England.

Here ,with plain-song chants and shafts of murky light Richard II's decline and fall is staged. Yet in Kent's production there's insufficient sense of a country almost at the daggers-drawn of civil war.

Linus Roache's Boling-broke musters as much rebellious menace and sense of danger as a monk shooing off a cat in the monastery garden. It's Oliver Ford Davies's lugubrious old York who sounds as if he has the guts to do down a king.

Fiennes, whose withdrawn personality and reluctance to make eye contact with other players makes him more suitable for films than stage, neither plays Richard as narcissistic performer nor victim of immaturity. His monarch is mired in bland haughtiness. Fiennes appears carried aloft on a white throne, wearing crown, yellow trousers and white coat. With camp, ungainly walk, affected hand gestures, tongue stuck out at favourite courtiers, or ears covered to shield himself from Gaunt's accusations, he seems no more than grandly petulant and aggrieved.

Even Emilia Fox's touchingly desolate queen leaves him unaffected. The production makes spectacular impressions: Richard, stands on a high balcony in a blaze of golden light at Pomfret castle before his abject descent. But here, and when facing deposition, Fiennes is full of a sound and fury that rings quite hollow. This is a Richard II for the admiring eye. The heart and mind are less engaged.

From The Telegraph, contributed by Warwolf:

Fiennes tears down walls to shake up Shakespeare
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent

THE badlands of Shoreditch in east London twinkled like Hollywood, with some of the biggest names in films picking their way through the council estates.

Glenn Close, Cate Blanchett, Miranda Richardson and Donald Sutherland were among those headed for one of the most ambitious theatre projects undertaken in London for years. In the teeming rain on Wednesday night, they came to a derelict Edwardian warehouse and stayed, many of them celebrating beyond midnight, bearing witness to the box office pull of the British actor Ralph Fiennes.

At a cost of £2.3 million, the cavernous Gainsborough Studios has been converted into a temporary theatre as a vehicle for the Oscar-winning Fiennes to play two Shakespeares back-to-back, Richard II and Coriolanus, every night from now until early August. Fiennes got good-to-mixed reviews for the first, Richard II, yesterday but if there was a real star, it was the warehouse, seating and standing 850 people and fit for the best party.

A huge stage, almost 100ft across, was covered with turf and trees. Great fissures had been hacked in the brick walls. Through these Fiennes and his team, including Linus Roache, Emilia Fox and Oliver Ford Davies (all of them on the very sub-West End rate of around £500 a week), could enter and exit the stage. Sir Cameron Mackintosh, the West End impresario, said at the party afterwards: "It's an absolutely amazing place. I've often driven past it but never knew what was inside.

"It's wild and weird and almost a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I've only had a buzz like this in a theatre once before, 20 years ago when I saw Peter Brook's Carmen in Paris in his Bouffes du Nord." Glenn Close, in England filming 102 Dalmatians at Shepperton, said she had come because she was a good friend of Fiennes. Dressed in a black Armani cape and sandals, she looked out of place next to the peeling walls of the studios.

She said: "I've only seen Richard II once before, at Stratford. This production was amazing. Ralph was wonderful and this theatre is the most extraordinary place I have ever been to." Prominent cheerleaders for Fiennes were his girlfriend, Francesca Annis, and his actor brother, Joe. The production is the brainchild of the fashionable Almeida Theatre in Islington, which wanted a dramatic setting for the two Shakespeares.

Fiennes and the Almeida had previously linked up to stage Hamlet at the Hackney Empire. After a string of films, including The End of the Affair, Fiennes is giving eight and a half months to the two plays. Rehearsals started in early February. Coriolanus opens in June, then both plays go to New York followed by Japan, with the very last night on Oct 29 in Tokyo.

Shoreditch has had its fashionable moments before. England's very first playhouse, James Burbage's Theatre, was opened there in 1576. Many actors lived in the area and are buried in the parish church. The dramatist Ben Jonson fought a duel in the local park in 1598. For a while this century, the warehouse was even known as Hollywood on the Canal because it served as Alfred Hitchcock's film studio when Will Hay and Margaret Lockwood were the stars of the day.

Now Shoreditch is being cast as one of London's hippest residential areas. But when Richard II and Coriolanus go abroad in August, the last great days of the Gainsborough Studios will be over. A small film studio will be built there but the vast auditorium will be demolished to make way for apartments.

Build It and They Will Come---by BiGeorge (forum member)

When Ralph Fiennes plays the most important player in the Almeida's new production, "Richard II" does not have any lines. Indeed it has no voice. But no one can doubt the overpowering presence of the makeshift theater itself.

By gambling over one million pounds, Jonathan Kent, The Almeida's Artistic Director, has created a space more like a forgotten church than a vibrant, daring stage venue. The bands of light and fog stir within the exposed brick walls and eventually settle like dust on icons. And what an icon hollows this hall.

Ralph Fiennes plays Richard II. Only an actor with the talent and fame of Fiennes could draw such a diverse and large crowd to the Gainsborough Studio. This large dilapidated building which once protected the art of Hitchcock quietly aged until Kent sought to revive Shoreditch neighborhood, the long age home of Shakespeare. This revival has brought a motley mass to bleak East London.

The audience ranged from smartly-dressed, stiff theater goers to giddy young ladies. Such varied expressions were mirrored in the black and white portraits of the Company that hung above the refreshment counter. (This enterprise is not without traditional theater niceties. You can still buy wine, a program or an Almeida chocolate bar.) But gone are the curtain, flamboyant costuming and elaborate hydraulic effects that are so common in today's Broadway spectacles. In place of awe there is masterful decay.

A grassy stage floor and a crudely cut triangular fissure confront the viewer. With ingenious back lighting, through this derelict looking massive crack kings make magnificence entrances. This stark production may come close to the play that Shakespeare intended. With such a mixture of history and risk afoot, the actors would have to be bankable as well as talented.

Supporting the sometimes-whimsical performance of Fiennes is Linus Roache as Bolingbroke, Emilia Fox as Queen Isabel and David Burke as John of Gaunt. All these actors have fine credentials. Therefore, it was a surprise that the relatively new face of Stephen Campbell Moore, playing Harry Percy, shined with enthusiasm while Burke appeared encumbered by his famous line, "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England..." His dying Gaunt lacked subtlety and enunciation but not volume. Unfortunately similar fault could be found with Roache's Bolingbroke. He seemed wooden rather than deliberate especially when contrasted with Fiennes animated, impulsive King.

The lack of nuances however can be attributed to Kent's heavy direction that had Bolingbroke/Henry IV melodramatically dressed in black while Richard II floated in white. Henry IV never sits on this throne nor is he ever lit in the radiance reserved for Richard II. Bolingbroke is bathed in cool white light from below, yet Richard II glows in golden rays from on high.

Fiennes appears most at home in the glow. Richard II is confident, cocky and funny. Initially he zealously uses men like toy soldiers. His voice and expressions are clear. His frenetic movements joyfully convey Richard II's passion and naivete. But such force is abandoned when delivering Richard II's prison soliloquy about time and human frailty. Fiennes famous speech is delivered will emphasis and timing, not volume.

We hear Richard II's defeated breast labor. He speaks with bitterness, self-recrimination and wisdom in equal measure. Such a role is fitting rather than a stretch for Fiennes, but this is good. We need to know that just as an actor is a man, a king is a man. And while most men work actors and kings do play.

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