SOMETHING startling is happening at the Ludlow Festival. This year’s Shakespearean production is presented, as usual, in the castle grounds, with Steven Berkoff at the helm, and is performed in the director, actor and playwright’s trademark expressionistic style.
Subtlety is, unsurprisingly, hardly its keynote — not necessarily a bad thing in a staging that must compete with such imposing surroundings; but this Richard II also lacks the raw, rollercoaster energy of its director’s best work.
Berkoff resets the play in Victorian England, and turns its investigation of the issue of the divine right of kings into a much blunter attack on the ruling classes in general.
Tableaux of top-hatted toffs provide a shifting backdrop to the action, brandishing their canes, striking grotesque poses and pulling faces — a curled lip here, a quizzically arched eyebrow there. Their vowels are strangulated and their movements exaggerated, executed in slow motion to Mark Glentworth’s intrusive synthe - sised music, which is one moment doomily chugging, the next pastoral and syrupy.
As for King Richard, he is played by Timothy Walker as a Wildean figure with floppy hair and an effete manner, sniggering behind his handkerchief as his uncle John of Gaunt lies dying before him and taking an undisguised and unwholesome pleasure in his power to manipulate his subjects’ lives.
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The interpretation recalls Berkoff’s plays Decadence and West; but in the context of Shakespeare’s text it feels reductive. While at times the physicalisation is effective, as when courtiers play an invisible game of billiards using their canes as cues, the movement is not as expressive, as sharply choreographed or as disciplined as it needs to be. Occasionally it looks plain silly: Julia Tarnoky as Richard ‘s Queen expresses grief by undulating her arms in front of her face.
Remarkably, however, both Walker and Joseph Millson, as Bolingbroke, succeed in bringing a dignity and humanity to their roles that transcends the crudeness that the production’s concept imposes on them.
Millson gives the rebellious Henry an authoritative presence that he maintains even when cantering about the stage on an imaginary horse; while Walker manages, as Richard sees his crown slipping from his grasp, to show us a foolish, thoroughly dislikable monarch whose mask is sliding off his face to reveal an ordinary, frightened man.
Their performances make you wish that Berkoff had done more throughout the production to underpin his heightened theatricality with a sense of emotional urgency.