Tyrant feeds on his divine right to be cruel 
            
            Richard II
            Gainsborough Studios, London 
            (***  enjoyable)
            
            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. 
            
            
            (Thanks to Antonieta, who sent this to me! Mari)