Apocalyptic implications of the deposal of a king potentially lost on a nonreligious audience are ingeniously reinstated in Trevor Nunn's self-consciously political update of Richard II at the Old Vic, with the theatre's artistic director Kevin Spacey in the lead. Nunn brings to the modern world a disturbing medieval parochialism, transposing the play's preoccupation with family feuds and favouritisms into a contemporary obsession with party politics; envisaging high tech warfare, mass media, and long distance communications in the role of deity. Wide screens either side of the stage display football hooligans, political demonstrations, and military operations, Shakepeare's 'attendants' are whispering spin-doctors and news reporters, his 'messengers' Soho motorbike couriers. Important speeches such as John of Gaunt's famous evocation of 'this scepter'd isle' are reconceived as unequivocally rhetorical or insincere, and political satire perpetually threatens to eclipse the humanity in the text.
      Veering oddly between 1950's twin-sets and pearls, wide shouldered '80s suits, and the latest designer fashions, from baroque strings to 90's electronica, with the set comprising old brown sofas as well as futuristic glass and metal panels, and moving from rural Wales to Richard's body appearing finally in bin bags and a flight case - the time period of this production is updated but totally indeterminate. Nunn's revisions moreover do not always sit easily with the plot. It is simply unclear given all the technology how Richard fails to hear in time of his enemy's arrival, or how he takes so long to return from Ireland. But the eclectic mixture is a success, its incongruities conceived on a large scale, the direction confident and cinematic. If its gimmicks and caricatures sometimes fall flat (the queen at a Tatler-esque fashion shoot), these same devices also charge the best moments (York's amazing televised speech, repeatedly chopped and replayed on the wide screens as the plot unfolds; the treasonous teenager Aumerle's biker jacket, his graduation portrait hanging on the living room wall).
The oddities of this striking and beautiful production are made possible and complemented by a clean, spare, deep stage, the immaculate formal constraints of Hildegard Bechtler's set. And by exquisitely beautiful lighting due to Peter Mumford, who boldly asserts his presence as the curtains rise up on a crown in a large glass case casting luminous panels in four directions. The crown each time it appears is encrusted with lights like a jewel; Bolingbroke and his men walk in perpetual shadows; Richard kisses the earth in morning sunlight, and appears with sharp piercing splinters cast around him as he gives up his title; and we encounter three quiet and almost incidental gardeners bathed in an impossibly lovely early evening glow.
      The plot revolves around an accumulation of apparently selfish or thoughtless decisions that put Richard II out of favour with his subjects and sow the seeds of a popular uprising, led by his exiled and disinherited cousin Bolingbroke whose brilliantly ruthless and deceitful maneauvres enable him rather quickly to usurp Richard's throne. The play's complexity and interest lies partly in its political dimension, which this production thoroughly brings out.
      What of psychology and metaphysics? There is a distinctive greatness to Shakespeare's central figures which is integral to their distinctive undoings: the poet's most striking individuals exist in situations that were not made for their peculiar virtues; we see what in other worlds they might have been, even as we recognize what in this world they are. Macbeth's ambition, Hamlet's sense of justice, Antony's love - in these plays we find the natural effects of noble qualities distorted and ruined by contingent circumstance. Richard II is a history play, not straightforwardly a tragedy - but its text is replete with symbolism on larger themes. As Richard remarks, "external manners of laments / Are merely shadows to the unseen grief, / That swells with silence in the tortured soul; / There lies the substance". The silent soul is where to look for the inner 'substance', and while Richard's usurper Bolingbroke conquers in outward rhetoric and action - with almost every speech in this production a full-blown press conference - Richard himself claims to reign untouchable within. This places special demands upon Spacey to make plausible the idea of a human character lacking the opportunity to express itself or flourish.
      These demands for psychological depth are complicated by the fact that the eponymous protagonist is notable for his outward changeability, his 'inner substance' textually obscure. Traditional responses have been divided: sometimes the character has been assimilated to Hamlet, conceived as too philosophical or thoughtful for his appointed office, with concern for the effects of his actions practically paralyzing him with scruples. Other times his inconsistencies have been brought out as artifacts of insincerity or spin, thus treating him as a counterpart to his deposer Bolingbroke. The Hamlet interpretation is uncongenial to Spacey's natural dramatic mood, as well as off-stage persona. The political interpretation by contrast misses a fragile human aspect of the play, and fails to concur with Richard's all too evident ineptitude and carelessness. None of these traditional views quite captures the strange whimsicality found in the text, which casts Richard neither as so subtle and conscientious as Hamlet, nor as so ruthless and assured as Bolingbroke.
      While Ben Miles' compelling usurper is serious, energetic, decisive, ready to delegate in order to distance himself from moral responsibilities while enjoying their benefits; the interest of Richard is not as a failed leader of this kind. Richard is by turns authoritative, then familiar; anxious for his kingdom, then leaving it; loving his uncle, then wishing him dead; ironical, then full of grief; wanting power, then despising it, profligate then austere. In act III, he prevaricates over his identity as king, and in act IV, upon Bolingbroke's question whether he will resign the crown, his famous reply "Ay, no;-no, ay" leaves it mysterious where his commitments lie, or what his deepest motivations are.
      Despite the general politicization of the play, Spacey's early scenes suggest one intriguing alternative to understand the king's apparent lack of strategy. Spacey presents a man almost scornful of his regal authority; a figure whose ironic distance stems not from philosophy nor from confidence, but from a lack of solemnity about his position. Destined to his title by birth and appointed by God, at the start of this production we see him as condemned to an authority he would like to shake off - suggesting a deep sense in which his fall from power, though politically a disaster, might be conceived as a motivated personal liberation. Aspects of Nunn's direction emphasize the idea: the most solemn parts of Act 1 are cut, permitting early focus on a nightclub scene in which Richard's disastrous decision to go to war in Ireland appears to be made for a laugh in a drunken moment.
      Spacey excels where Richard is most obviously provocative, dismissive, impatient and ironic; where he sees through his opponent's motives and despises them - as when Bolingbroke bows and flatters while usurping power, and - fearful of the technicality of seizure - tries to make his cousin give up the crown voluntarily. These scenes are unravelled by Spacey with knowing and playful derision. But the king's distant irony, his scorn even, is not fully sustained or worked out in the course of the production. Spacey frequently collapses into hopelessness and desperation, which jars with the reckless quality of his sometime flippancy. As the Observer's critic remarked, 'Spacey is a king who goes from smirk to tantrum'. His ultimately hysterical rendering of Richard's emerging downfall fails to lift a sharp and gorgeous political drama into a more personal human exploration.
Naomi Goulder