"I'm Enjoying This! I'm Enjoying This!" A Final Banging On About the Formal Run of Richard II

 Firstly, I admit that contrary to the date given above this post is actually going out on Monday evening. So I'm glad to be getting back into Full Shakespeare, but I'm also going to blame it for how late I'm now getting everything else done, including it.

 

At least the weather's broken. (Does pinterest count as a source?)

 Secondly, I recently received some typically clarifying thoughts from Gemma Brockis about the "Formal Run" of Richard the Second (viewable HERE) which I hope she won't mind me sharing: "He's normally played as a bit of an odd ball or outsider," she wrote "But if he's powerful then his descent feels weirder. Which it should... In making it glamorous, and epic, you kind of don't care so much about liking people," which is a relief. She also uses the word "majestic", which eluded me and is spot on; really I should rename these the "Oddball" and "Majestic" runs. But what exactly is Majesty? How does one picture it?

  It's not really seen as a heterosexual, cis male quality these days, and I wonder if that's a Post-Revolutionary thing, not just because capital-R, poets-on-crags-with-pamphlets Romanticism promoted a more egalitarian, no-frills idea of masculinity but because – and this is something I only realised yesterday – for the majority of its history since the French Revolution, Britain hasn't actually had a king.1800-1837, a couple of Georges. 1837-1901, sixty-three years of Queen Victoria. 1901-1952, an Edward and a George and an Edward and a George. 1952-2020, sixty-eight years of Queen Elizabeth. Another friend wondered whether if Britain had actually had more kings we'd still have a royal family at all, or would the men have blown it. Playing the "Majesty" of Richard feels apt then but also, at least initially, inescapably female, which reads as camp, which is presumably why noone does it. Even Fiona Shaw played Richard as an "odd ball".

 Another problem – and perhaps the source of a lot of my initial impatience with this play – came from unfavourably comparing it to Marlowe's Edward the Second, in which a King's misplaced love for his favourite, and his subjects' hatred of that love, drive the whole story. There it doesn't matter what you think of the Crown; a man is imprisoned for an unrequited love, his tragedy is clear, and in the shadow of that tragedy Richard's own fall feels squeamishly underwritten. But Richard's sexuality or lack of it isn't actually a contributing factor to his tragedy, it just provides Bolingbroke with slurs whose utterance make him as despicable as everyone else. Rather this is a tragedy about a God-appointed show off. When Richard's understanding of himself as a king is contradicted, he reinvents himself as a saint, and in prison we see him discover this is even more naive an ambition, and that he might as well pretend to be a clock. He's entirely ready for death, until it comes, and good for him. This is a play about a failing artist. Audiences like those and so do actors.

 And there's something genuinely fun about the old-school use of an actor's voice to do everything but imitate natural human speech, a fun that transmits even though its power is ungenerous and of no use to anyone else on stage. Nowadays it's something we see women use more than men. Men just shout. It's an isolated voice, and Gemma's right, it doesn't matter if we actually like the owner. Here's another way of looking at the Formal Run then: Richard nailed the performative aspect of Majesty to the bitter end, but botched the policy. He may or may not have been Elizabeth the First but – and again this is something that only occurred to me yesterday – bloody hell does he remind me of Margaret Thatcher.