review of Richard II at Shakespeare's Globe, as broadcast by the BBC
macmauve, you may rest easy now. ;)
So I am terribly, terribly stuck on the stupid diss and associated efforts, and so instead I shall write that review of the Globe production, which I watched again last Sunday while taking a mental health day. I shall endeavor to say things more intelligent than "SQUEE!" on occasion, but I can't make any promises. After all, I've been waiting to see this for...well, over two years actually, and indeed I was a bit afraid to watch it, since I suspected I was doomed to disappointment, having heard so many good things about it (and a few that gave me some reservations). And then I did see it and really loved it but when I think about it I've got a lot of stuff that I want to comment on but am not sure how. Hence I shall, no doubt, be typically tangled and semiarticulate.
I am happy to report (though I've said so before) that it was, in fact, pretty much as good as I expected. I had to watch it twice to make sure since the first time through I think I missed half of it for grinning blissfully and wibbling like a mad wibbling thing (frequently at the same time). I think that by and large it was a very good production, very energetic and a great deal of fun to watch. I do have a few quibbles, because I am incapable of watching Richard II and NOT having quibbles; I just know it too well -- but I really did love watching it.
A lot of the quibbles I have - well, this sounds sort of weird really, considering how much I've been squeeing about it lately to all and sundry. A lot of my interpretive quibbles center on Mark Rylance's performance as Richard. Which makes it sound like I didn't like his performance, when I did, very much really -- my reaction to it is strangely bifurcated. Rylance, basically, plays Richard as very childlike, very much the "clumsy and twitchy but endearing dork" routine that Rylance has managed to raise to an art form. He's clueless rather than calculated; this Richard II is not so much attempting to manage his self-representation as he's never really been aware of it in the first place. I tend to think that Richard, as, erm, interesting (and frequently self-destructive) as his grip on reality may be, should be a bit more with-it, more adept at appearing kingly, than Rylance generally makes him. He seems to be lacking in in agency, whereas I think it's important, for the play to work the way I think it ought, that he really is in the driver's seat the whole time, and I don't really get that from Rylance's Richard. (One wonders, really, how he's capable of doing some of the really nasty stuff Richard does/is said to have done...) It influences the production's politics, such as they are -- this production gets at them largely through psychology, false a dichotomy as that is -- we're presented with an entirely clueless ruler, rather than a tyrannical one with a highly warped worldview, and that's a very different thing (or is it? Now I'm not entirely sure. Certainly the real-world parallels to be drawn present themselves very easily).
And now, having said all of these things that make it sound like I really disliked the production (or that I disliked Rylance's performance, since as Richard goes so goes the play), I'll turn around and say that the weird thing is that I have all of these intellectual objections about this interp and yet when I watch it, it works for me anyway. And this is mostly because, though I may disagree with his interpretation, Rylance is talented and charismatic enough to make me believe it (I've never seen anyone who can work an audience so well -- this was very much in evidence when I saw him in Twelfth Night and it comes across even filmed for television. Also, okay, I have a bit of a Mad Fangirl Crush which renders me not entirely objective, although his Richard II was too childlike really to be properly crushable). In some ways his interp radically defamiliarized the play for me; as I indicated above, my mental Richard II is much more calculated and Rylance's Richard II-as-savant reading meant I was not watching a play I was particularly used to, which is probably good for me given the amount of time I spend thinking about Richard II! As my adviser said to me yesterday -- we got to talking about this production - "That would take a hell of a Brechtian alienation effect."
Which, now that I think of it -- okay, Brechtian isn't really the proper word at all, but actually alienation is somewhat of a useful concept to describe how Rylance handles the role of Richard - the really salient quality of his performance, besides the emphasis on Richard's arrested development, is that he gives Richard this weirdly dissociative capacity, so that a lot of the big rhetorical flourishes feel, I don't know, escapist. Like the lights are on, but whoever's home is seriously tweaking. There are these moments -- it's really noticeable, for instance, before the "death of kings" speech -- where you can just sort of see this switch flipping: "Can't cope with reality. Will be poetic instead." And then there are these moments where the emotion breaks through anyway: at the end of that speech, actually ("taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, / How can you say to me I am a king?"), and at Pomfret when he says "This music mads me; let it sound no more," he just completely breaks down and it's entirely wrenching. And then he'll go back to the almost lighthearted delivery - you know, "Wait, I FEEL THINGS! And they SUCK!" And it's surprisingly effective -- both of those moments really got to me. But Rylance manages to wring a lot of comedy out of the part as well (which I understand is a bit of a trend, really, for actors playing Richard II -- I believe Sam West did that, in the stage version though not so much in the radio version I know and love, and Fiona Shaw tried but didn't really get there). Which I think stems from the dissociation thing, too: actually it sort of reminded me of Shaw's performance, since her Richard II had a certain detached appreciation for the sick irony of what was happening to him (though I think she played the character as more, I don't know, thoughtful than Rylance does, or at least as less overwhelmingly childlike. "Thoughtful" isn't the right word. More, I don't know, "self-consciously intellectual"?). You see it especially during the deposition scene -- so, for instance, during the "I give this heavy weight from off my head / And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand" he goes to the throne and divests an imaginary self of crown, sceptre, and so forth, and then pitches his invisible alter-ego from his seat and pantomimes burying him -- and it's funny, in a painful sort of way, but also devastatingly sad. So the performance really got to me emotionally even though there are so many things Rylance does that, if I think about them I kind of step back and say "wait a minute..." Speaking of dissociation!
Okay, so. On to the other performances and possibly even, if I'm up to it (you do NOT want to know how long it took me to write the preceding three paragraphs) some general unifying remarks. As for Liam Brennan's Bolingbroke, I must get this out of the way up front: OMGUHSOHOT *flutters about and squees*. But ANYWAY. In contrast to Rylance's hyperactive if dissociative Richard, Brennan is a very strait-laced, almost puritanical Bolingbroke (they even have him dressed in black throughout, so he looks like a Puritan), so they really play up the contrast there. Although it is, classically, a very Richard-centric reading of the play, as opposed to some more recent productions where the opposition between Richard and Bolingbroke is seriously stressed (the platonic ideal of this being John Barton's production where Pasco and Richardson alternated in the roles). Brennan's Bolingbroke tends, I think, toward the earnest -- like when he says he's only back for his lands one is inclined to believe him, but then he deals really well when he gets the crown, for the most part. Like, his straight-man act during the York Family Follies (5.3, for those playing the home game) is brilliantly amusing (I especially love his delivery at "MY DANGEROUS COUSIN...let your mother in," and when he says the "Beggar and the King" couplet Brennan breaks character and drops the [occasionally dodgy] English accent he's been doing, an interesting choice I'm not entirely certain I like). And then, of course, it all goes to hell at the end, and it just kills me when he says "I hate the murderer, love him murdered" and his voice breaks -- you get, throughout, these occasional unsettling moments of affection, like here, and at the very end of the deposition scene where there's this Richard/Bolingbroke embrace which isn't really something the scene's prepared you for but which is terribly wrenching.
For the most part, the rest of the cast was quite strong. The older generation came off especially well in this production, I thought: John McEnery was of course superb (as always!) as John of Gaunt (he is now number two on my list of all-time favorite Gaunts, after Gielgud, because, you know, it's Gielgud), while Bill Stewart was a very prickly Duke of York and Peter Shorey a very funny and at least a little scary Duchess of York. I had previously seen Stewart and Shorey as Sir Toby and Maria in Twelfth Night a couple of years back, so it was amusing to see them together again; they were much less scary as the Duke and Duchess of York! (Twelfth Night really emphasized the nastiness of Sir Toby and Maria, who were both played as sort of entertainingly gleeful sadists.) Also less scary than in Twelfth Night, though this is really perverse, was Albie Woodington, who played a stringy-haired and possibly syphilitic Sir Andrew in the former production, and here was a Northumberland who looked rather like a Jacobean outlaw biker. Not a bad performance, though rather more forbearing than most Northumberlands I've seen (an interesting choice).
Not faring so well, which surprised me as I quite liked him as Viola in Twelfth Night, was Michael Brown as Queen Isabel, as he was unfortunately bland and lacking in feeling. To a degree this might be because the Queen was somewhat marginalized by some of the interpretive choices made with Richard -- since Rylance's Richard is highly desexualized their one scene together is rather lacking in any sort of real spark. Chu Omambala as Aumerle is completely upstaged by his costume (he is dressed, from head to toe, in a truly alarming shade of pink). I very much liked Terry McGinity as Mowbray though I'll admit I'm fond of him anyway because he said hi to me during the Twelfth Night pre-show prep. William Osborne as both Carlisle and the Duchess of Gloucester (a doubling that amuses me, as DSP did the same) was terribly disappointing, as he was playing two roles that require serious ass-kicking skills and yet utterly failed to display them (indeed his Carlisle was downright nebbishy). The minions (Justin Shevlin as Bushy, Patrick Brennan as Bagot, Richard Glaves as Greene), although faintly useless as Richard was probably not shagging them, were nevertheless probably the best and most attractive set I've seen (also, they returned as Exton and friends, which was cool). Gerald Kyd as Percy is cute but gave a largely unmemorable performance and also has funny hair.
So! That took forever, no? And ended with a highly irrelevant comment about Gerald Kyd's hair. I think a lot of what I wanted to say came out there, though, because as I said somewhere in that huge mass of blithering up there, it really gets at the Major Issues through the performances. Which I suppose is an obvious thing to say really.
I will also say, though, that although I may be one of those people they make fun of in the Guardian who is highly susceptible to English Heritagey period stuff and fetishizes sixteenth-century undergarments, I loved all of the original-practices stuff -- the costumes, music, use of the Globe space, and so forth. And THE DANCING at the "curtain call" (metaphorically, as there is no curtain), which is just brilliant! The Globe itself, incidentally -- and I knew this because I've been there, but it deserves repeating over and over again -- is absolutely gorgeous. If it were a person I would totally shag its brains out.
Egad, I have a crush on a building. This is bad even for me.
Also, I want to commend the people responsible for the TV broadcast -- filming stage productions is always dodgy business and they never feel quite right. This one was handled quite nicely, and had a nice variety of shots, angles, whatever, without being intrusive -- and a lot of the energy of the stage performance came across, which doesn't always happen. So many props to the BBC crew!
Okay, so. That was really amazingly long, and I feel like I could probably go over it a bit more, but I shall spare you for now. ;)
So I am terribly, terribly stuck on the stupid diss and associated efforts, and so instead I shall write that review of the Globe production, which I watched again last Sunday while taking a mental health day. I shall endeavor to say things more intelligent than "SQUEE!" on occasion, but I can't make any promises. After all, I've been waiting to see this for...well, over two years actually, and indeed I was a bit afraid to watch it, since I suspected I was doomed to disappointment, having heard so many good things about it (and a few that gave me some reservations). And then I did see it and really loved it but when I think about it I've got a lot of stuff that I want to comment on but am not sure how. Hence I shall, no doubt, be typically tangled and semiarticulate.
I am happy to report (though I've said so before) that it was, in fact, pretty much as good as I expected. I had to watch it twice to make sure since the first time through I think I missed half of it for grinning blissfully and wibbling like a mad wibbling thing (frequently at the same time). I think that by and large it was a very good production, very energetic and a great deal of fun to watch. I do have a few quibbles, because I am incapable of watching Richard II and NOT having quibbles; I just know it too well -- but I really did love watching it.
A lot of the quibbles I have - well, this sounds sort of weird really, considering how much I've been squeeing about it lately to all and sundry. A lot of my interpretive quibbles center on Mark Rylance's performance as Richard. Which makes it sound like I didn't like his performance, when I did, very much really -- my reaction to it is strangely bifurcated. Rylance, basically, plays Richard as very childlike, very much the "clumsy and twitchy but endearing dork" routine that Rylance has managed to raise to an art form. He's clueless rather than calculated; this Richard II is not so much attempting to manage his self-representation as he's never really been aware of it in the first place. I tend to think that Richard, as, erm, interesting (and frequently self-destructive) as his grip on reality may be, should be a bit more with-it, more adept at appearing kingly, than Rylance generally makes him. He seems to be lacking in in agency, whereas I think it's important, for the play to work the way I think it ought, that he really is in the driver's seat the whole time, and I don't really get that from Rylance's Richard. (One wonders, really, how he's capable of doing some of the really nasty stuff Richard does/is said to have done...) It influences the production's politics, such as they are -- this production gets at them largely through psychology, false a dichotomy as that is -- we're presented with an entirely clueless ruler, rather than a tyrannical one with a highly warped worldview, and that's a very different thing (or is it? Now I'm not entirely sure. Certainly the real-world parallels to be drawn present themselves very easily).
And now, having said all of these things that make it sound like I really disliked the production (or that I disliked Rylance's performance, since as Richard goes so goes the play), I'll turn around and say that the weird thing is that I have all of these intellectual objections about this interp and yet when I watch it, it works for me anyway. And this is mostly because, though I may disagree with his interpretation, Rylance is talented and charismatic enough to make me believe it (I've never seen anyone who can work an audience so well -- this was very much in evidence when I saw him in Twelfth Night and it comes across even filmed for television. Also, okay, I have a bit of a Mad Fangirl Crush which renders me not entirely objective, although his Richard II was too childlike really to be properly crushable). In some ways his interp radically defamiliarized the play for me; as I indicated above, my mental Richard II is much more calculated and Rylance's Richard II-as-savant reading meant I was not watching a play I was particularly used to, which is probably good for me given the amount of time I spend thinking about Richard II! As my adviser said to me yesterday -- we got to talking about this production - "That would take a hell of a Brechtian alienation effect."
Which, now that I think of it -- okay, Brechtian isn't really the proper word at all, but actually alienation is somewhat of a useful concept to describe how Rylance handles the role of Richard - the really salient quality of his performance, besides the emphasis on Richard's arrested development, is that he gives Richard this weirdly dissociative capacity, so that a lot of the big rhetorical flourishes feel, I don't know, escapist. Like the lights are on, but whoever's home is seriously tweaking. There are these moments -- it's really noticeable, for instance, before the "death of kings" speech -- where you can just sort of see this switch flipping: "Can't cope with reality. Will be poetic instead." And then there are these moments where the emotion breaks through anyway: at the end of that speech, actually ("taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, / How can you say to me I am a king?"), and at Pomfret when he says "This music mads me; let it sound no more," he just completely breaks down and it's entirely wrenching. And then he'll go back to the almost lighthearted delivery - you know, "Wait, I FEEL THINGS! And they SUCK!" And it's surprisingly effective -- both of those moments really got to me. But Rylance manages to wring a lot of comedy out of the part as well (which I understand is a bit of a trend, really, for actors playing Richard II -- I believe Sam West did that, in the stage version though not so much in the radio version I know and love, and Fiona Shaw tried but didn't really get there). Which I think stems from the dissociation thing, too: actually it sort of reminded me of Shaw's performance, since her Richard II had a certain detached appreciation for the sick irony of what was happening to him (though I think she played the character as more, I don't know, thoughtful than Rylance does, or at least as less overwhelmingly childlike. "Thoughtful" isn't the right word. More, I don't know, "self-consciously intellectual"?). You see it especially during the deposition scene -- so, for instance, during the "I give this heavy weight from off my head / And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand" he goes to the throne and divests an imaginary self of crown, sceptre, and so forth, and then pitches his invisible alter-ego from his seat and pantomimes burying him -- and it's funny, in a painful sort of way, but also devastatingly sad. So the performance really got to me emotionally even though there are so many things Rylance does that, if I think about them I kind of step back and say "wait a minute..." Speaking of dissociation!
Okay, so. On to the other performances and possibly even, if I'm up to it (you do NOT want to know how long it took me to write the preceding three paragraphs) some general unifying remarks. As for Liam Brennan's Bolingbroke, I must get this out of the way up front: OMGUHSOHOT *flutters about and squees*. But ANYWAY. In contrast to Rylance's hyperactive if dissociative Richard, Brennan is a very strait-laced, almost puritanical Bolingbroke (they even have him dressed in black throughout, so he looks like a Puritan), so they really play up the contrast there. Although it is, classically, a very Richard-centric reading of the play, as opposed to some more recent productions where the opposition between Richard and Bolingbroke is seriously stressed (the platonic ideal of this being John Barton's production where Pasco and Richardson alternated in the roles). Brennan's Bolingbroke tends, I think, toward the earnest -- like when he says he's only back for his lands one is inclined to believe him, but then he deals really well when he gets the crown, for the most part. Like, his straight-man act during the York Family Follies (5.3, for those playing the home game) is brilliantly amusing (I especially love his delivery at "MY DANGEROUS COUSIN...let your mother in," and when he says the "Beggar and the King" couplet Brennan breaks character and drops the [occasionally dodgy] English accent he's been doing, an interesting choice I'm not entirely certain I like). And then, of course, it all goes to hell at the end, and it just kills me when he says "I hate the murderer, love him murdered" and his voice breaks -- you get, throughout, these occasional unsettling moments of affection, like here, and at the very end of the deposition scene where there's this Richard/Bolingbroke embrace which isn't really something the scene's prepared you for but which is terribly wrenching.
For the most part, the rest of the cast was quite strong. The older generation came off especially well in this production, I thought: John McEnery was of course superb (as always!) as John of Gaunt (he is now number two on my list of all-time favorite Gaunts, after Gielgud, because, you know, it's Gielgud), while Bill Stewart was a very prickly Duke of York and Peter Shorey a very funny and at least a little scary Duchess of York. I had previously seen Stewart and Shorey as Sir Toby and Maria in Twelfth Night a couple of years back, so it was amusing to see them together again; they were much less scary as the Duke and Duchess of York! (Twelfth Night really emphasized the nastiness of Sir Toby and Maria, who were both played as sort of entertainingly gleeful sadists.) Also less scary than in Twelfth Night, though this is really perverse, was Albie Woodington, who played a stringy-haired and possibly syphilitic Sir Andrew in the former production, and here was a Northumberland who looked rather like a Jacobean outlaw biker. Not a bad performance, though rather more forbearing than most Northumberlands I've seen (an interesting choice).
Not faring so well, which surprised me as I quite liked him as Viola in Twelfth Night, was Michael Brown as Queen Isabel, as he was unfortunately bland and lacking in feeling. To a degree this might be because the Queen was somewhat marginalized by some of the interpretive choices made with Richard -- since Rylance's Richard is highly desexualized their one scene together is rather lacking in any sort of real spark. Chu Omambala as Aumerle is completely upstaged by his costume (he is dressed, from head to toe, in a truly alarming shade of pink). I very much liked Terry McGinity as Mowbray though I'll admit I'm fond of him anyway because he said hi to me during the Twelfth Night pre-show prep. William Osborne as both Carlisle and the Duchess of Gloucester (a doubling that amuses me, as DSP did the same) was terribly disappointing, as he was playing two roles that require serious ass-kicking skills and yet utterly failed to display them (indeed his Carlisle was downright nebbishy). The minions (Justin Shevlin as Bushy, Patrick Brennan as Bagot, Richard Glaves as Greene), although faintly useless as Richard was probably not shagging them, were nevertheless probably the best and most attractive set I've seen (also, they returned as Exton and friends, which was cool). Gerald Kyd as Percy is cute but gave a largely unmemorable performance and also has funny hair.
So! That took forever, no? And ended with a highly irrelevant comment about Gerald Kyd's hair. I think a lot of what I wanted to say came out there, though, because as I said somewhere in that huge mass of blithering up there, it really gets at the Major Issues through the performances. Which I suppose is an obvious thing to say really.
I will also say, though, that although I may be one of those people they make fun of in the Guardian who is highly susceptible to English Heritagey period stuff and fetishizes sixteenth-century undergarments, I loved all of the original-practices stuff -- the costumes, music, use of the Globe space, and so forth. And THE DANCING at the "curtain call" (metaphorically, as there is no curtain), which is just brilliant! The Globe itself, incidentally -- and I knew this because I've been there, but it deserves repeating over and over again -- is absolutely gorgeous. If it were a person I would totally shag its brains out.
Egad, I have a crush on a building. This is bad even for me.
Also, I want to commend the people responsible for the TV broadcast -- filming stage productions is always dodgy business and they never feel quite right. This one was handled quite nicely, and had a nice variety of shots, angles, whatever, without being intrusive -- and a lot of the energy of the stage performance came across, which doesn't always happen. So many props to the BBC crew!
Okay, so. That was really amazingly long, and I feel like I could probably go over it a bit more, but I shall spare you for now. ;)