Richard II

Synopsis

At the age of only ten, Richard Plantagenet succeeded his father Edward III as King of England. It was 1377 and a time of great hardship following the Black Death, but Richard lived lavishly at home and, abroad, pursued an expensive and futile war with France. The taxes he imposed provoked the famous ‘Peasants Revolt’ of 1381 and his attempt to rule autocratically alienated both nobility and Parliament. Shakespeare’s loosely historical but theatrically wonderful account of Richard’s last days concentrates on his most fateful error - the exile of his cousin Henry Bullingbrook and the seizure of his Lancastrian estates. Bullingbrook would return to England, topple Richard and take the throne himself as Henry IV, setting the stage for the bloody ‘Wars of the Roses’ between York and Lancaster. The play’s extraordinary beauty and simplicity, and its study of a man reduced from – as he saw it - divinely appointed King, to a mere mortal without role, freedom or friends, put it among the most moving of all Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Our Review:

15 May 2003

You wait ages for the Number 1 bus to come along, and then two arrive at once. The day after Nicholas Hytner led his regime change at the National with Henry V, just down the river at Shakespeare’s Globe a season that goes under the title ‘Regime Change’ has opened with another of Shakespeare’s plays about kings and kingship, Richard II.

Both productions seek to underline the contemporary resonance of their stories, but while Hytner’s is explicitly modern in its propulsion of the storytelling into the media age, at the Globe it is more implicit in the season it is a part of.

As the Globe’s artistic director Mark Rylance puts it, “400 years after the transition from Tudor to Stuart rule, and faced with a modern world which increasingly turns to violence in order to effect security or regime change, I offer you a season at the Globe which explores power and change….”

In this “original practices” production that seeks to recreate the staging cond...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (212.211.104.43) - 10 September 2003:

Alongside last year's Twelfth Night, the best thing the Globe has done. They have breathed new life into a difficult play. Great performances and magnificent costumes. I'm beginning to wonder what's the point of going anywhere else to see Shakespeare?...

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