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[译]Richard II – review

坑上再坐一会。

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https://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/dec/06/richard-ii-review-donmar-warehouse

Eddie Redmayne as Richard II at the Donmar. Photograph: Johan Persson
Michael Grandage ends his dazzling tenure at the Donmar with a Richard II that has many virtues: clarity, speed, superb set and sound design.

But the big question is whether Eddie Redmayne, currently hot in movies but inexperienced in Shakespeare, is ready for the title role. My feeling is that he has the temperament but not yet the technique to play the king.

It is clear from the opening that Redmayne's Richard is a man encased in ritual: he sits silently on the throne in an incense-filled chamber as the audience assembles, loftily accepts courtly obeisance and clutches a sceptre as proof of his divine right.

I was reminded of Ian McKellen who showed us a Richard so cocooned in ceremony he seemed to be gliding on castors and who was shocked into an awareness of his vulnerability. That's pretty much the line taken by Redmayne but to somewhat less effect.

For a start he replaces the king's self-conscious rhetoric with a jagged naturalism. Harley Granville-Barker once told John Gielgud that you have to give Richard variety of tone and colour but "within the frame of the verse."

But Redmayne neglects the formal pattern of lines such as: "I'll give my jewels for a set of beads, My gorgeous palace for a hermitage." Like many Shakespearean tyros, he also falls into the trap of seeking to illustrate virtually every line with an appropriate hand gesture: thus when he offers "to write sorrow in the bosom of the Earth" he mimes a signature forgetting that the potency of the idea lies in the words.

Redmayne is at his best in the abdication scene which ideally suits his vein of patrician irony. He does everything possible to humiliate Bolingbroke, snatching back the surrendered crown and even thrusting the usurper into the vacant throne. There is pathos too in Redmayne's sudden realisation that, as a deposed king, "I have no name."

Moving in his decline, Redmayne pierces to the heart when, imprisoned at Pomfret, he utters the simplest of lines about his old horse: "Rode he on Barbary?" All this proves that Redmayne understands perfectly Richard's descent from vain tyrant to exposed victim; what he needs to acquire is the technique that comes with Shakespearean practice.

Fortunately, there is plenty of evidence of that from the senior members of the cast.

Even if Andrew Buchan's Bolingbroke misses something of the character's political craftiness, there is much first-rate support.

Ron Cook is a brilliantly dithering Duke of York constantly torn between national duty and familial loyalty, Michael Hadley gives full weight to John of Gaunt's angry attack on Richard's irresponsibility, and Sian Thomas as the dying Duchess of Gloucester memorably shows how a word like "despair" can be imbued with intensity of feeling.

As always with Grandage, the production looks and sounds marvellous. Richard Kent's two-tiered set is filled with early Gothic arches, decorated tracery and weathered columns, while Adam Cork's sound design echoes with the distant sound of choral music. Anyone who didn't know the play would get a clear sense of its architecture from this production. But, much as I admire Grandage's achievement at the Donmar, I suspect he has for once asked too much of a rising star.

Until 4 February. Tickets: 0844 871 7624

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