10 June 2001: Shakespeare, King Richard II
American Repertory Company, Cambridge. Directed by Robert Woodruff (new artistic-director designate), with Thomas Darrah as Richard
A very controversial production because of Woodruff’s heavy emphasis on homosexual aspects of the play (as the twentieth century views them). The emphasis is so pervasive in the first scenes of the play that, my companion and I thought, it gets in the way completely of the play itself. The style in these scenes is an eclectic combination of Chinese Opera and Italian opera. Richard is in Whiteface, as are his wife (played by an Asian actress) and one or more of his retainers, in effect boy toys. Richard’s dressing table is off — no, on — stage right, and before the play begins we see him, stripped to the waist, and around the waist a form similar to a classical tu-tu to go under the sort of skirt-suit he wears in these scenes. He is stroking his body (his back to us), looking into the mirror and loving what he sees. The by-play in the first scenes is extremely distracting; we can hardly follow the action itself. Woodruff has altered the sequence of scenes, conflating I.i and I.iii into one scene, which follows I.ii (now the opening scene) between the Duchess of Gloucester and John of Gaunt. (Alvin Epstein is game for anything, but he looks distinctly uncomfortable in a red ruff that encloses his head — frames it, in fact.) Richard’s cavorting and antics are played up, deliberately, it seems, to be way out of proportion to the business of the scene. A little later, when Richard gets the news that John of Gaunt is dying, he gets it in what seems is his own private male brothel, where a half-dozen or so of prime male specimens, clad only in white dance belts laced at the back like corsets, are receiving from Richard loving strokes and other ministrations that go about as far on stage as indecency permits. (Several members of the audience walked out at this point.)
It’s often said that in his tragedies Shakespeare begins by giving us a central figure who seems highly unpromising as an incipient tragic hero (Lear comes to mind at once). Woodruff would seem to be pursuing this rhetorical line, with a vengeance. This Richard is the epitome of loathsome, repulsive self-indulgence, completely preoccupied with self-pleasure.
And then the sky falls in. The banished Bolingbroke, claiming he comes “but for my own” — his wealth, confiscated by Richard to fund his wars with those Irish “rug-headed kerns,” arrives on English soil in Richard’s absence. And Richard on his return finds himself faced with a fait accompli. He has lost his base of power completely, and his downward course begins. This is the scene in which he protests that “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.” (Later, in the deposition scene, he talks of his tears as accomplishing the task the rude sea could not.) The sea, and water itself, elemental water, becomes a central facto