Theatre Richard II (National) Antony & Cleopatra (Riverside) Richard HI
(Open Air, Regent's Park)
A curious chapter
Sheridan Morley
The problem with Fiona Shaw's Richard II (on the National's Cottesloe stage) does not have much to do with sex or gender: as Shakespeare's best-known bisexual, she has a perfect, Peter Pan kind of androgynous charm. The problem is rather with her director Deborah Warner's apparent inabil- ity to decide what or who this tragedy is really about. By leaving, for instance, acres of the gage and last-act treachery subplots totally uncut, this often appears across a• nearly four-hour evening to be a play almost entirely abut the Duke of Aumerle and his endearing inability to decide whether to go for Richard or Bolingbroke.
Then again, we get a wonderful trio of elder-statesmen Bishops and Dukes (Gra- ham Crowden, Michael Bryant and John Rogan) who seem to have wandered in from an altogether more orthodox Old Vic staging circa 1956, while Fiona Shaw, and David Threlfall as a Bolingbroke apparent- ly half in love with him/her, seem to be act- ing out some post-modern French movie about role-playing and ambiguous sexuality in power games.
There is, in short, an uneasy clash of styles here, as well as an apparent belief that Shakespeare's Richard II had much in common with Pirandello's Henry /V Shaw plays him as a mad puppet, brain-damaged from the outset and with little evidence of the grandeur or charisma that must once have commanded his followers. From the moment she sucks her thumb all through the Hollow Crown speech, we get the message that we are not dealing with the complete King.
There are some very bright ideas around, but little coherence in the overall concept, one not much helped by a long, narrow set from Hildegard Bechtler which has us sitting like jurors all along the sides of the Cottesloe, peering far left and right. It's a flaky, narrow evening.
In a week of drastically revamped Shake- speare, the Vanessa Redgrave Antony & Cleopatra is just that: not only is she giving her Queen of Nile for the third time, she is also here doubling up as director and designer. Thus it is no surprise to find, at Riverside, that we are amid the rubble of Bosnia, with the whole play now reduced to a kind of historical dream in the mind of a soldier reading, as the lights go up, a book of Roman history.
For reasons equally known only to Vanessa herself, she spends much of the evening dressed as Mary Queen of Scots and then goes to meet her maker, aided of course by a live snake, disguised as the Madwoman of Chaillot. Others in the cast are dressed in ancient and modern: Vanes- sa sings, dances, smokes cigars and gener- ally has herself a ball, leaving her Antony (a bemused Paul Butler, who looks as though he thought he had signed up for Othello), several acts behind her.
As all too often nowadays, and especially in this Riverside season, we are left with the unhappy spectacle of one of the great- est actresses in the world rampaging around a scratch multi-lingual, multi-racial company who look as though they have been recruited from the dregs of the Unit- ed Nations amateur dramatic society in a really bad year. Like the Isadora Duncan she once played so unforgettably, Redgrave is now determined to be judged by the company she keeps and directs, and it is just awful: there is no coherent vision here, but as she goes to her death there is, in the last scene, a curious kind of greatness.
Redgrave may not be a director or a designer, but she has inherited from Sybil 'Thorndike (whom she increasingly comes to resemble) the ability to rise above her stage circumstances and, like, Cleopatra herself, triumph at the last over apparently insuperable odds.
In the Open Air Theatre of Regent's Park, Brian Cox directs that company's first-ever Richard III in a commendable effort to get away from the ritual Midsum- mer Night's Dream, though that too is on offer as usual this summer. The difficulty with the Park has always been that it favours Shakespeare's pastorals and light comedies over the histories and tragedies: but by giving us a much-cut Richard III, with Jasper Britton rising from the grave to hobble his evil, contorted body around the court, we do get a flashy, charismatic star turn, as jagged and angular as Tanya McCallin's scaffolding set. The rest of the cast appears to have come straight from drama school, and rather too soon.
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