[In the following review, King offers a positive assessment of the National Theatre's staging of Richard II, directed by Deborah Warner and starring Fiona Shaw as an impressive Richard.]

The National Theatre presented Richard II in repertory with Skylight in the smallest of its three houses, the Cottesloe. Of all Shakespeare's kings, Richard is the most dependent on speech to assert a self because for much of the play he has no real power. The director, Deborah Warner, who had her King Lear enter in a party hat and wheelchair, cast a woman in the title role, the justly acclaimed Fiona Shaw. Richard seemed ready to take a wild ride. From the seating arrangement to Shaw's forceful resistance to death, however, the production honored and illuminated Shakespeare's text. The audience at floor level was divided into four sections, two on either side of a rectangular space with open areas at either end and small spaces between them. Boarded in the front, they were slightly oversized jury boxes, apt places for evaluating competing speech. I think that the Warner/Shaw Richard sprang, almost literally, from Henry IV's characterization of him in 1 Henry IV: “The skipping King, he ambled up and down / With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits.” In one exit, Shaw did indeed skip like a boy miming a horse ride, and she did an impromptu jig to mock the Irish before her courtiers, “shallow jesters” whose flattering emptiness came through strongly. In the first scenes, Shaw seemed like an adolescent boy, bemused by all the serious talk going on around her. She was a youth reciting a well-worn truth, smug and casual, when she told the banished Mowbray, “It boots thee not to be compassionate.” The delivery of many of her early lines was equally self-satisfied, specifically when Richard exercised or delegated power, and this tone sharply and appropriately set up the longer and more desperate speeches as kingly power wanes and is transferred. In a more direct anticipation, Warner had Shaw admire herself in a small mirror in scene one; when this image is later smashed, we appreciate its deeper meaning for Richard. Swathed in bolts of white, her hair close-cropped, Shaw—taller by far than the historical Richard—never exploited her sex. She did kiss Bolingbroke full on the mouth in scene one, held him in a full embrace and kissed him in the deposition scene. They kept the contested crown between them by the pressure of their waists. The suggestion that Richard is physically attracted to Bolingbroke and Shaw's actual clinging to him offered fresh insights about Richard, one part “skipping” and one part “king,” enamored of the power he would not use effectively. Surely Shaw conveyed much of the role's poignant ambivalence because she is a woman but mostly because she acts so well. …