Richard II by William Shakespeare

African performance,
Richard II
is not among the most successful international exports in the Shakespearean canon. An exception is Germany, where the play was first staged in the 1770s, and where its potential as political commentary has been fully utilized. The fiercely anti-Nazi Jürgen Fehling directed the play in 1939 at Berlin’s Staatstheater, using abstract sets that acted to separate the profligate Richard and his court from the distant problems of their people. Claus Peymann directed a “death-obsessed” 24 Beckettian production in Braunschweig in 1969, which emphasized “Richard’s reflections on man’s existential exposure and separateness.” 25 Three decades later, Peymann directed a far more political interpretation of the play for the Berliner Ensemble, which toured to the RSC Complete Works Festival in 2006. Achim Freyer’s starkly white abstract set became a blank canvas on which history wrote its impact in dirt and blood, most strikingly as invisible hands hurled piles of mud at Richard upon his return to London. While Michael Maertens’ “charismatic” Richard was praised, the production allowed other parts to shine: Bullingbrook was a “repressed bureaucrat [who] was more comfortable with his bowler hat than with the crown,” while Northumberland became “the true Machiavel of this piece.” 26
    On the late twentieth century stage, a fascination with Richard’s performativity was emerging. David William’s production of 1972 marked the first performance of any of Shakespeare’s history plays by the new National Theatre Company. Despite one view that “this Richard was not only unmoving, he was fatally uninteresting,” 27 others found Ronald Pickup’s performance enlightening: “Surrounded by ceremonies and flattery he has complete belief in his authority. But as soon as the externals start crumbling, so does his inner conviction.” 28
    Increasingly, the play was produced as part of a sequence. David Giles’ 1978 televised
Richard II,
one of the strongest productions in the BBC Shakespeare series, featured Derek Jacobi in the title role supported by Jon Finch (Bullingbrook) and John Gielgud (Gaunt), while the casting of Charles Gray and Dame Wendy Hiller as the Yorks “brings alive a whole subplot” 29 often previously cut in performance. The camerawork prioritized actors over spectacle, exploiting the possibilities of television for Richard’s soliloquy of Act 5 Scene 5,which was shot in several sections, drawing out his ruminations over an extended period of incarceration. The English Shakespeare Company’s
The Wars of the Roses
(1986–89), a seven-play adaptation of the two tetralogies which was also later filmed for television, began with a
Richard II
which adapted a “Regency style, Beau Brummell dandyism” 30 that director Michael Bogdanov confessed would probably not have been their first choice for a stand-alone production. In such a large context, “the victim of production was invariably
Richard II
 … the guinea pig that opened the sequence,” 31 and both Bogdanov and his Richard, Michael Pennington, expressed disappointment in the result.
    Internationally, interest in the formal aspects of the play and its pageantry have continued to stimulate directorial interest, though often unsuccessfully. At the Stratford Ontario Festival in Canada, Stuart Burge’s 1964 production ran over four hours when it debuted, losing the favor of many critics. However, it continued a twentieth-century trend to paint Northumberland as the piece’s key mover, with Leo Cicery’s Bullingbrook “a genuinely bewildered man caught up in a situation which he could not comprehend.” 32 Zoe Caldwell’s 1979 production was felt by many to be overly gimmick-led, with three different actors for both Richard and Bullingbrook, no doubt in an attempt to replicate the success of the RSC’s Pasco/Richardson pairing six years earlier. Critics were bored, however, by the pageant-like blocking of