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Performers Who Have Played Richard II
It’s not Hamlet, but Richard II has still attracted all the great
performers.
Small wonder, then, that the names of so many great
actors, from Gielgud and Guinness to Jacobi and Shaw, are associated
with the tragic king. The young monarch begins by exiling Henry
Bolingbroke—as an arbitrary response to a minor dispute—and ends by
losing his crown to him, largely through his own folly, brittleness and
an overweening belief in his divine right to be king. Richard’s poetic facility is dazzling, as his intellectual
precocity outruns his emotional maturity. He is, too, a prototype for
those other tragic Shakespearian heroes, who, only when they have lost
everything, finally learn what it is to be human.
 Sir John
Gielgud (1929)
“The actor of Richard cannot hope at any time during the action
to be wholly sympathetic to the audience.
Indeed he must be used in the early scenes to create an
impression of slyness, petty vanity, and callous indifference.
In
the later scenes, however, the lovely lines he has to speak can hardly
fail to win a certain sympathy for him, and he gradually becomes more
understandable and therefore more pitiable.
But
owing to his lack of humor and his constant egotism and self-posturing,
there is always the risk that he may become tedious and irritating to
the audience unless the finer shades of his character are very subtly
portrayed.
The
verse is very ornamented and there are too many speeches of the same
kind. It can become
monotonous.”
Sir Alec
Guinness (1947)
When Guinness asked his director, Sir Ralph Richardson, what kind
of a Richard he had in mind, he got the message, “I’ll tell you, old
fellow,” and, snatching a beautiful Venus pencil from the table,
Richardson waved it in front of Guinness’s face:
“Like that. Sharp
and slim, that’s what we want.”
“I
don’t know how to play a Venus pencil,” Guinness remarked. “I’ve
been asked to play Piccadilly Circus by Michel Saint-Denis, and that was
easier.”
Sir Ian
McKellen (1969)
McKellen played Richard II on tour in Czechoslovakia when the
country was in crisis, six months after Dubcek and been deposed.
“When I came to the speech where Richard returns from Ireland
to discover that his nation has been overrun by his cousin Bolingbroke,
and he kneels down on the earth and asks the stones and the nettles and
the insects to help him in his helpless state against the armies who had
invaded his land, I could hear something I had never heard before, nor
since, which was a whole audience apparently weeping.
It shakes me now to think about it, because in that instant I
realized that the audience were crying for themselves.
They recognized in Richard II their own predicament of only six
months previously when their neighbors, and as it were their cousins,
had invaded their land, and all they had were sticks and stones to throw
at tanks.”
Ian
Richardson/Richard Pasco (1973)
Richardson
and Pasco took turns with the roles of Richard and Bolingbroke at
different performances in this celebrated RSC production by John Barton.
Each night, the company filed onto the stage, while Richardson
and Pasco appeared to decide between them who would do which part
tonight. This initial
statement—that these were actors, acting—was echoed throughout the
performance, emphasizing the impression in the text that Shakespeare’s
King Richard is himself a player.
“I
came away from these performances, in this production, ashamedly
wondering if, for all the 30 or so versions I have attended, I had ever
really seen the play before,” wrote J. W. Lambert in The Sunday Times.
Michael
Pennington (1987)
“As a young actor, if someone had given me a choice between
playing Hamlet or Richard, I might easily have said Richard.
It was the romance and lyricism of the part that attracted me.
I was in love with the language at a very impressionable age,
when to get up on stage and utter that stuff was the fulfillment of very
dream.”
Sir Derek
Jacobi (1988)
“It’s one of the easiest of
the histories to follow. It
really is the classic tragedy of the great man falling, of riches to
rags. He starts as the
great sun, the godlike king, and ends as a poor prisoner in Pomfret
Castle, all alone. A man
who had the world at his feet, a court of sycophants, and ultimately
played his cards all wrong. There’s
an almost Chekhovian self-diagnosis all the time, and play-acting.
Richard cries wolf quite a bit and the problem comes in knowing
when it’s for real and where for effect, knowing where the actor in
Richard stops and the man begins. The
line is often tenuous. In
the deposition scene, for instance, the man is obviously at rock bottom
but he gives a marvelous account of himself.
The actor’s instinct there is obviously:
‘If I’ve got to go, I’m going to go in style.’
At the same time, all the emotions are absolutely real for
him—but he can switch it on.”
Fiona Shaw
(1995)
“The way I look at it is that I
am a non-man playing somebody who perceives himself to be a non-man.
The best thing Richard does is to give away the crown because he
discovers what it is to be human by doing so.
The crown is in a way your heart.
He gives away his heart to the person who is most dangerous to
him. He abuses the thing he
should have taken most care of. We all do that at some point in our lives.”
Sources: Michael
Pennington spoke to Michael Wright, Gielgud, Richardson and Pasco from
Shakespeare’s Players by Judith Cook, Guinness from Alec Guinness by
Garry O’Connor; McKellen by Joy Leslie Gibson; Jacobi from John
Wilder’s interview; Shaw from Richard Covington’s interview.
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