Richard II

The Royal Shakespeare Company enters a new era under Gregory Doran with this decisive, intelligent and notably well-spoken revival of a chronicle play that usually makes of its leading character a preening cissy or a plaintive saint.

David Tennant, resuming a partnership with Doran that gave us an electrified Hamlet five years ago, could not be less like the stereotype: he’s lanky, fierce, sardonic and obviously regarded, not least by the no-nonsense, politically ambitious Bolingbroke of Nigel Lindsay, as a bit of a liability. And not just because of the Tiny Tim hairstyle and varnished fingernails.

Something peculiar is going on with Richard’s own estimation of his role in life. The great speeches of entitlement are skewed through a critical lack of conviction, as if he’s sleep-walked into the monarchy by mistake. And in the context of the emblematic severity of the rest of the play, it makes for a performance that is as curiously enigmatic as it is sometimes unfathomable.

Doran and designer Stephen Brimson Lewis have ignored the difficulties of the new thrust stage by creating a scenic backdrop of a Gothic ecclesiastical interior, soaring stone arches on a shimmering backdrop, where we first see the widowed Duchess of Gloucester (Jane Lapotaire) draped across a catafalque.

Lapotaire’s subsequent scene with Michael Pennington’s John of Gaunt, Richard’s uncle and a dismayed visionary as the country goes to hell in a handcart, is a notable highlight; another, late on, is the squabble between the Duke and Duchess of York – Oliver Ford Davies and Marty Cruickshank – as their son’s treason (Oliver Rix is a superb Aumerle) is discovered.

All of this creates a national canvas on which Tennant’s king seems increasingly alienated. And whereas Ben Whishaw, who played the role on television recently, hugged his own tragedy to himself like a blanket, Tennant becomes flintier, and angrier; his waste of time (as time wastes him) is a source of impatience, not regret.

Having created his own self-image as the glistering Phaeton on the castle gantry, he descends to the other extreme of isolation, a manacled hermit in Pomfret prison, with exactly the same amount of pride and arrogance. Whatever he does, however, he reveals himself, this weird and dangerous Richard’s a political embarrassment, and best extinguished.

The lists at Coventry are played as a hieratic sword fight, the sound of horses offstage only, and the scheming gaggles of barons and clergymen interestingly delineated, from Sean Chapman’s watchful, understated Northumberland, to Jim Hooper’s fussing Bishop of Carlisle and the bustling trio of Bushy, Bagot and Greene (Sam Marks, Jake Mann and Marcus Griffiths).

There are sure signs of a fresh ensemble purpose here. Emma Hamilton even manages to make something of Richard’s pallid queen, and the scene in the garden (beginning with my favourite Shakespearean imperative: “Go, bind thou up yon dangling apricocks”) is well despatched, too, the moment when the imagery of the body politic is fully expressed at its lowest level; Joshua Richards has by this time exchanged a lordly persona for that of a distressed and frustrated gardener, carrying the watering can, you might say, for the right regal rumpus.