Untold numbers of Bardolators are wholly identical in the shared belief that they on an individual level understand and appreciate Richard II more deeply than anyone else. Belief in and love for the Poet King is the Shakespearean silent majority. While the tragical history isn't exactly performed often, its defenders are legion, and its story of an ineffectual politician, Richard, being deposed by his populist cousin, Bolingbroke (who later becomes Henry IV), inspires intense devotion. While reasons for this fanaticism may vary, Richard II is without a doubt Shakespeare's great epic poem: a play entirely written in verse, its rhythms and oratory create a singular universe to the attentive listener, and its specific flavorings of poetry make one feel as though they had been transported to the "other Eden, demi-paradise" that John of Gaunt calls England in the play.
Well, not in this production. At the Stratford Festival, that speech is cut. Many passages of note are gone. Major sections of Mowbray's banishment speech, where he declares the prime reason for his exile-blues to be the lack of ability to speak his native language, also absent. Gaunt and Bolingbroke's tearful goodbye, York's origin story, the Duchess of Gloucester, and innumerable other shimmering passages both great and little, have been excised from the text by director and "conceiver" (thus spake the playbill) Jillian Keiley, and adaptor Brad Fraser. The two transpose Shakespeare's medieval drama to the 1970s New York City gay community, with Richard as a fabulous, dancing denizen of Studio 54, and his court a glamorous Queer underworld of sequins and bathhouses. Adaptation is both standard and rather too severe a term for what has been concocted by Keiley and Fraser: every production of Shakespeare takes some liberties with the full, extant text, and is in that sense an adaptation of the original uncut gem. The act of crediting an adaptor for a particular show implies a more radical rewrite than one finds here: Fraser's primary contributions are an extended focus on the love between Richard (Stephen Jackman-Torkoff) and Aumerle (Emilio Vieira), and an added subplot between the lords of Ross (the excellent Matthew Kabwe) and Willoughby (Charlie Gallant). The production makes Richard and Aumerle's passion for each other explicit, and Keiley and Fraser expropriate dialogue from other Shakespeare texts (Coriolanus and Venus and Adonis caught my ear) to remove any doubt of romance. Gallant's Willoughby is portrayed as a closted Republican, by day supporting the conservative faction of the usurping Bolingbroke (Jordin Hall), and by night reveling in the bathhouses with Richard's supporters, a fact which eventually causes him to contract an unnamed disease (clearly HIV/AIDS). The addition of this thread is curious: since Richard's party is the party of gay liberation, that makes Bolingbroke the reactionary right to a notable degree. What exactly this production is saying by rendering the executions of Bushy (Andrew Robinson) and Green (John Wamsley) as a hate-crime, or by the implication of Willoughby, the closted gay man, being the one who contracts the then-deadly illness, goes more hinted-at than fully explored. Shakespeare's history never tells us who to side with, but this production does. (The Winter's Tale, King Lear, and Twelfth Night and possibly others make cameos in the actor's mouths in this subplot; it's a real smorgasbard.)
I found myself frustrated that so much new text was being added at the expense of text already provided: do we really need Aumerle telling Richard "I do love nothing in the world so well as you" when a perfectly delightful Much Ado About Nothing is already running up the road at the Festival Theatre? Isn't such well-meaning public-domain plagiarism kind of awkward? On some level I object to so many precious words being excised in the face of what feels like ambience: club-dancing and theatre-movement (the production has an ensemble of angels) is a poor substitute for the dialogue of one of Shakespeare's most lyrical plays. Perhaps this is overly conservative on my end, I just don't get why you'd want to do Richard II if you're not interested in what makes Richard II special.
I don't often find myself complaining about auteurism. I personally enjoy when the individual personality of a director is apparent in the onstage production. I just think Keiley's production over-values its socially-specific setting and undervalues the whole wealth of virtuosic poetry that could have made that era sing. And do you as a director really need a playwright to serve as adaptor when all the transpositions are going to be rooted in extratextual additions from other Shakespeare plays? The ability to copy-and-paste is not inherently adaptation.
Writing about a production of Richard II without mentioning the actor in the title role feels obscene: as the boy who grows into the poet, we certainly have no trouble believing Jackman-Torkoff emerged from the chrysalis of Christopher Street. You mainly wish Keiley's production allowed him a broader tool-kit: his Richard tends towards the frivolous and the weepy, and while his "sad stories of the death of kings" monologue has its intrigue, his performance tends to feel ornamental and upstaged by the world-building Keiley imbues the show with throughout. Michael Spencer-Davis as York brings his customary effortless charisma to the role of the company-man duke, though casting David Collins as Gaunt and not giving him the great ‘England’ speech should be considered elder abuse.
Richard II as a Queer figure is nothing new, nor are comparisons to Jesus or Saint Sebastian. Rewriting and cutting and altering Shakespeare's text is even less new, and so the way this production goes so far out of its way to telegraph that this rendition has been newly adapted and conceived strikes this critic as showboating. The production generally runs cool-to-the-touch, and it's a shame the raw material so many Bardoloators treasure is barely on display at the Tom Patterson Theatre.
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