We went to the Gala Night performance of Richard II at Ludlow Castle on Saturday night which is part of this year's Ludlow Festival. We have a tendency to forget that Ludlow is only thirty minutes away.
The billing of the play was more about the director Steven Berkoff than it was about the actors in it and you could certainly tell it was a Berkoff production. There was much use of mime, extravagant hand gestures and cinematic movement rather than theatrical. The movement occasionally approached the farcical as the actors mimed riding horses in almost exactly the same way as children do.
At times though the mime and dance was threateningly effective as they used their silver topped walking sticks to thump the tattoo of hooves together with the drum accompaniment.
It was dressed (the only real scenery is costume the castle itself is the scenery), as fin de siecle England with Richard II as a kind of stupider Oscar Wilde. This does have some virtue, the foppish King, the sycophantic court but it is deeply flawed. Wilde would never be as casually venal as Richard II nor so led astray, he was willful and verbally cruel but not physically so. Richard II, as written by Shakespeare, is a vacillating ruler unable to keep all of his Plantagenet cousins in check. In this production he seems merely weak.
Bolingbroke in Richard II is an odd character, seemingly the innocent, the traduced cousin exiled for speaking the truth and being forced to invade to secure his lands and property from being siezed by Richard and yet in that siezing almost too easily secures the throne by bloodless coup.
For the characters to work in the play, both have to be unsure as to their own motives, both of them find themselves both guilty and traduced and both of them have deeds done in their name which they later repent.
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