Down, Down He Comes, Glistening

Richard II
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

The most celebrated speech that Shakespeare gave to his Richard II is the one in which this king of England embraces defeat. He has learned that, while he was off campaigning in Ireland, his cousin Henry Bolingbroke has returned from banishment and, backed by the most powerful nobles, seems all set to replace him on the throne -- which, as Henry IV, he duly does. Ostentatiously spurning his followers' attempts at consolation,

Richard embarks on the famous aria about sitting upon the ground and telling sad stories of the death of kings. It is a tribute to Geordie Johnson's performance and to the intelligence of Martha Henry's direction that they can make this well-worn anthology piece the living centre of the evening. When this Richard sits on the ground, the image radiates outward; horizontal contact with the Earth is a leitmotif of this production.

Earlier in the same scene, with disaster hovering but not yet present, we have seen him prostrating himself and embracing the soil of his kingdom -- a sacramental gesture that embarrasses his friends by being at once monstrously self-indulgent and painfully sincere.

Earlier still, in his glory days, we have seen him lolling on carpets, living out a gay story about the life of a king. I use the adjective advisedly; Shakespeare himself used it by happy historical accident, making repeated references to "gay apparel" that now ring with prophetic irony. In this production, a figure we initially took for Richard's queen turns out to be one of his male favourites in drag. More intriguingly, Richard seems physically fascinated by the cool, stolid cousin who eventually supplants him; both when sending Bolingbroke off into single combat at the play's beginning and when handing him the crown at its climax, he clasps him an embrace that lasts considerably longer than etiquette would demand.

The death-of-kings speech culminates in the now proverbial image of the hollow crown, its wearer constantly mocked by his own mortality. It sends Johnson's Richard into a kind of trance, one in which he remains until his death. The text calls for him to come down from the battlements of Flint Castle in order to confront his enemy; "down, down I come, like glistering Phaethon" is his own operatic response to this request. This production's simple platform of a set can only afford him a modest flight of steps, but he descends it, zig-zag fashion, as if enacting a personal ritual, briskly self-mocking and deadly serious.

Within his own dream he is perfectly lucid, perfectly in control. "Hath Bolingbroke deposed thine intellect?" asks his queen (the real one this time) at their last meeting. No, he emphatically hasn't; this Richard retains to the last the ability to talk and think rings around everyone else in the kingdom.

This means that when reality hits him, it hits hard. His turning- point is a simple and brilliantly realized single line: "Set on towards London" he says, as one accustomed to giving orders. Nobody moves. He turns to Bolingbroke, and asks pitifully for his endorsement: "Cousin, is it so?" And at that moment everybody knows who's won.

Vocally, Johnson is remarkably fluent, and his ability to take any number of lines on a single breath -- very useful for the baroquely loquacious Richard -- speeds the play excitingly along. He only seems able, though, to hit a limited variety of notes; anger escapes him, and so do the full depths of Richard's irony, especially when directed at the successor whom he should embarrass on to the throne.

Physically he is a fair-haired boy dressed, with presumably purposeful anachronism, in white singlet and shiny silver pants (everyone else is unobtrusively mediaeval) -- a pointed contrast to John Dolan's practical Bolingbroke, who is grey and balding and interestingly ambiguous about the extent of his own ambition. (He is still equivocating on the subject at his death, two history plays later.)

The real dirty work here falls to his aide Northumberland, played by Robert King as a mixture of flatterer, which he has to work at, and unscrupulous hit man, which he doesn't.

The production also offers a new and effective reading of Richard's queen, usually presented as his contemporary; historically, though, she was a child and she is played here as -- or at least by -- a 16-year-old, who playfully perches on her husband's throne while his back is turned. This makes very credible both the king's oddly distanced affection for her and his boyfriends' head-patting solicitude toward her while he is away.

Technically, the actress (Maggie Blake) is not up to the lines, but the price is worth paying: The scene in which she learns of her husband's downfall is better interpreted than I have ever known it, with the gardener (Richard McMillan) who breaks the news movingly convincing as both man and messenger. The episode begins with a lady- in-waiting offering to play at bowls; and the bowling ball becomes the symbolic focus of the scene.

The director makes equally resourceful use of the mirror that Richard, a mean man with an image, smashes at his abdication.

The production takes time to hit its stride; the first half is clogged by cliches: baronial stomping, offstage monastic chanting, and much anonymous emoting by actors who plainly know that they are angry about something but haven't figured out precisely what. After the interval, Richard comes into his own, even while losing it, and the play comes with him.