brief, insufficient, and extremely belated thoughts on Tennant's Richard II
I wrote these for someone I met on tumblr who saw and loved the production but was previously unfamiliar with the play, and thought I might share them because I didn't write a proper review. It's not even that I am lazy or didn't have enough to say; I just loved the production so much and thought it was so close to my perfect production that there was WAY TOO MUCH PRESSURE TO DO IT RIGHT and then it got to be like six weeks after seeing it and now I am all "I WILL WRITE IT WHEN THE DVD COMES OUT." So in case you guys have good memories and want some details (geared toward someone who's already seen it) here's a repost of my comments:
I mentioned before that what I love about Tennant's Richard is his fierceness, and his self-awareness -- there's something of a tradition in depictions of Shakespeare!Richard to make him sort of, I dunno, ethereal and otherworldly? Since you mentioned you hadn't seen the play before, I'm assuming you haven't seen the recent BBC version with Ben Whishaw in the title role, but it's a really good example of that kind of interpretation. Whishaw is an acting prodigy so he does it as well as it can be done, but I love that with Tennant's Richard that sense of otherworldly distance from his subjects is very clearly performative and that it's something he does out of his sense of what kingship is about. The play owes a great deal to the medieval/early modern concept of "the king's two bodies" -- the idea that monarchs are always dual personae, one of which is immortal and unchanging (the body politic) and the other mortal, frail, gendered, and so forth (the body natural); it's an idea that Shakespeare plays with a lot in the histories, and in this production you have a real sense of conflict there -- with Tennant's Richard there is a distinct sense of the difference between his persona as king, cool, ethereal and unapproachable (that moment in the first scene where Mowbray makes to grab his arm and earns a look that nearly spontaneously combusts him actually drew gasps from the audience) and the much more passionate individual who inhabits that persona. The whole distance thing is clearly by choice, which makes for a more intelligent Richard and thus a more interesting one.
I also love love love that the production makes Richard's queerness the fulcrum for this conflict. The "big-picture" argument of my dissertation is that monarchs who exist outside the gendered norms of what kingship should be are problematic (not in a tumblr sort of way, in a makes-things-more-complicated-than-Tudor-ideology-wants sort of way) because they expose the fact that kingship has an intensely queer component just inherently (in the sense that the monarch is in a lot of ways the focus of subjects' desire and in the sense that making oneself an object to be looked at tends to be coded as feminine, but it's such a huge part of kingship). What Shakespeare does with Richard that's so great is that he makes this a source of *strength* for Richard -- he is always in control of his own representation, even when he's politically at a disadvantage, and thus, although he doesn't have the leverage to hold on to his crown, he is able to define what kingship means in a way that's eventually going to destroy Henry. And what Tennant does with Richard that's so great is that he makes that crystal clear -- I've seen a couple of reviews that tend to read him as personally (rather than politically) frail and weak because of the long hair and nail polish and plucked eyebrows and swishy robes, but I always wonder what production they were watching; it really read to me as, if you will, weaponized femininity, as the kids on tumblr are calling it these days. (Which doesn't work that well, it turns out, if you're a dude and especially if you're a dude in medieval England, but it works for me. ;)) But at the same time the production doesn't only associate Richard's queerness with his kingly self-presentation; the scene with Aumerle at Flint Castle serves to crystallize our growing sense of his humanity, because it's the first time he demonstrates that he's genuinely capable of seeing outside of himself, and I love that it's a gesture of love for another man that's used to underline that.
(Which helps somewhat to blunt the potentially-homophobic undertones of replacing Exton with Aumerle, but I still don't like that choice and I wish it weren't becoming a Thing -- they also did it in the Hollow Crown version. It's almost harder to swallow in this production, since Oliver Rix was so good at conveying Aumerle's helpless, abject love for Richard. I am therefore writing approximately billions of words of fic to make it make sense, because that's what you do.)
I mentioned before that what I love about Tennant's Richard is his fierceness, and his self-awareness -- there's something of a tradition in depictions of Shakespeare!Richard to make him sort of, I dunno, ethereal and otherworldly? Since you mentioned you hadn't seen the play before, I'm assuming you haven't seen the recent BBC version with Ben Whishaw in the title role, but it's a really good example of that kind of interpretation. Whishaw is an acting prodigy so he does it as well as it can be done, but I love that with Tennant's Richard that sense of otherworldly distance from his subjects is very clearly performative and that it's something he does out of his sense of what kingship is about. The play owes a great deal to the medieval/early modern concept of "the king's two bodies" -- the idea that monarchs are always dual personae, one of which is immortal and unchanging (the body politic) and the other mortal, frail, gendered, and so forth (the body natural); it's an idea that Shakespeare plays with a lot in the histories, and in this production you have a real sense of conflict there -- with Tennant's Richard there is a distinct sense of the difference between his persona as king, cool, ethereal and unapproachable (that moment in the first scene where Mowbray makes to grab his arm and earns a look that nearly spontaneously combusts him actually drew gasps from the audience) and the much more passionate individual who inhabits that persona. The whole distance thing is clearly by choice, which makes for a more intelligent Richard and thus a more interesting one.
I also love love love that the production makes Richard's queerness the fulcrum for this conflict. The "big-picture" argument of my dissertation is that monarchs who exist outside the gendered norms of what kingship should be are problematic (not in a tumblr sort of way, in a makes-things-more-complicated-than-Tudor-ideology-wants sort of way) because they expose the fact that kingship has an intensely queer component just inherently (in the sense that the monarch is in a lot of ways the focus of subjects' desire and in the sense that making oneself an object to be looked at tends to be coded as feminine, but it's such a huge part of kingship). What Shakespeare does with Richard that's so great is that he makes this a source of *strength* for Richard -- he is always in control of his own representation, even when he's politically at a disadvantage, and thus, although he doesn't have the leverage to hold on to his crown, he is able to define what kingship means in a way that's eventually going to destroy Henry. And what Tennant does with Richard that's so great is that he makes that crystal clear -- I've seen a couple of reviews that tend to read him as personally (rather than politically) frail and weak because of the long hair and nail polish and plucked eyebrows and swishy robes, but I always wonder what production they were watching; it really read to me as, if you will, weaponized femininity, as the kids on tumblr are calling it these days. (Which doesn't work that well, it turns out, if you're a dude and especially if you're a dude in medieval England, but it works for me. ;)) But at the same time the production doesn't only associate Richard's queerness with his kingly self-presentation; the scene with Aumerle at Flint Castle serves to crystallize our growing sense of his humanity, because it's the first time he demonstrates that he's genuinely capable of seeing outside of himself, and I love that it's a gesture of love for another man that's used to underline that.
(Which helps somewhat to blunt the potentially-homophobic undertones of replacing Exton with Aumerle, but I still don't like that choice and I wish it weren't becoming a Thing -- they also did it in the Hollow Crown version. It's almost harder to swallow in this production, since Oliver Rix was so good at conveying Aumerle's helpless, abject love for Richard. I am therefore writing approximately billions of words of fic to make it make sense, because that's what you do.)