Richard II (Vol. 81) | Carol Chillington Rutter (review date autumn 1997)
Carol Chillington Rutter (review date autumn 1997)
SOURCE: Rutter, Carol Chillington. “Fiona Shaw's Richard II: The Girl as Player-King as Comic.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 3 (autumn 1997): 314-24.
[In the following extended review of director Deborah Warner's 1995 production of Richard II starring Fiona Shaw in the title role, Rutter highlights the significance of this feminized, cross-gender, and comic stage interpretation of Shakespeare's play.]
… Richard, that sweet lovely rose, … this thorn, this canker Bolingbroke.
(1 Henry IV, 1.3.173-74)1
Even before it opened at the National Theatre in June 1995, every major British newspaper had an opinion about Deborah Warner's Richard II. “Gimmick casting,” said the Independent on Sunday: “The sort of thing you might expect to see at the end of term in a boarding school.”2 A “Kingdom under...
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