Richard II - RSC at The Barbican

I have a work colleague who is a bit of a coffee connoisseur. One lunchtime, she left the office declaring that she was going to try the free coffee being offered to loyalty card holders at a nearby supermarket.

When she came back, we asked her what she thought of the coffee.

“Well,” she said, somewhat unenthusiastically, “There was nothing really wrong with it.”

I laughed at the time, but actually I came out of the RSC’s Richard II at the Barbican on Saturday 18^th January feeling the same way.

There was nothing really wrong with the production. But there was nothing particularly inspiring about it either.

David Tennant put in a good performance as the androgynous Richard. Oliver Ford Davies livened things up with his Duke of York. But somehow the production never quite elevated itself above ‘perfectly alright’.

I found myself comparing it throughout to the BBC’s version of the play, which formed part of The Hollow Crown series a year or two ago. I remember watching that version and raving about it afterwards – how beautifully it played with your sympathies and made you uncertain of where your loyalties should lie. How one moment you thought Bolingbroke entirely in the right, and the next you were won over by Richard.

In the BBC version, Rory Kinnear played Bolingbroke as a reasonable, likeable man. In this RSC production, Bolingbroke was a bloodthirsty brute. Both interpretations make sense dramatically, but Bolingbroke never for a moment had my sympathy in this production. But then, nor did Richard for very long.

The programme for the RSC production told us what a risky play this was for Shakespeare to write and to put on. Intellectually, I appreciated that. But there was little in this production that had a similar sense of risk.

One thing I was more inspired by, though, was the Barbican itself. Despite the fact that it’s a hugely confusing building, you can see how carefully designed the whole complex must have been. From the unusual auditorium (with an individual door into each row), to the surrounding estate (a sort of 1960s utopia, hewn from concrete) – the whole construction is a perfect example of its kind.

There are probably all sorts of things wrong with the place, but somehow it’s all exactly right. I just wish Richard II had been a bit more like that.