[In the following review, Mullen commends Deborah Warner's 1995 Cottesloe Theatre production of Richard II, which, the critic contends, emphasized the ritualistic ceremony of Shakespeare's drama. In addition, Mullan praises Fiona Shaw's Richard as “always interesting” and “sometimes brilliant.”]

Most of the publicity for this production has been stirred by the casting of Fiona Shaw in the title role. Getting its retaliation in first against those who might object, the programme brandishes some “quotes” chosen to alert us to the appropriateness of a woman acting as king. Yet despite its assurances that nineteenth-century theatre-goers thought nothing of a woman playing Hamlet or Iago, and its sternness about “the modern sense of this cross-dressed portrayal as a stunt or trick”, Deborah Warner's production relies on our sense of oddness of the choice. The director has called Richard “feminine”, and there is a good deal in this: his distance from and distaste for other characters' displays of manliness; his fanciful way with words, often puzzling to the men of action and politics who listen. Her identification of his unmanliness as that which disturbs those around him, and thus the realm itself, is entirely reasonable. Translating this into the casting of a woman in his part, and trading on our awareness of the incongruity, is certainly a kind of “stunt”.

Yet the first thing to say is that the headline casting is the only stunt, and that this production succeeds because it entirely trusts in the power of the play's conflicts. Exceptionally, it is performed uncut, managing to bring to life aspects of its drama that are frequently neglected. Usually excised is the sub-plot in which Richard's former supporter, Aumerle, schemes against the successful usurper, Bolingbroke. Disowned by his own father, Aumerle is finally saved by the pleas of his mother as she kneels to the new ruler. Here it is anything but unnecessary; a partly comic, partly chilling parody of all the other supplications and kneeling declarations that we have witnessed. The scene in parliament in which nobles from different factions in turn challenge each other's honour, hurling down gauntlet after gauntlet in angry self-righteousness, is electric as well as faintly ridiculous. Warner has managed to show these strutting competitors not only as political realists, but also as men who truly need to believe in the language of honour that they exploit.

The staging concentrates the mind and the eye on the play's ceremonious, deadly competitions. The space is arranged as for a joust; we sit in the lists or watch from overhead as the duellists manoeuvre. The actual duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray proclaimed in the first scene is, of course, interrupted by the King before weapons can “arbitrate” their “settled hate”. Yet the sense that violence and formality might belong together is perfectly preserved throughout the rest of the play. The animosities of its rivals, who are also mostly relatives, makes them all the more attentive to the proprieties of speech and gesture. The truthfulness of Warner and her cast to the sheer ceremony of the drama (often the most unconvincing aspect of modern productions of history plays) rarely wavers. Above all it is brought to life in the clarity of the strained, decorous verse. Richard II is full of rhymes, and here is a production careful enough to let one hear those ceremonious oppositions within speech itself.

Those oppositions engage us because our sympathies are variously, but not predictably, engaged. David Threlfall's Bolingbroke is certainly ambitious, but his respect for the monarchy that he undermines is treated as genuine, even pained. He and Richard are doomed to each other. Threlfall manages the difficult task of suggesting that even this political winner has had his losses. Also outstanding are Michael Bryant's York, both a true patriot and a man who, for that very reason, will pledge allegiance to whomever he believes the likeliest winner, and Struan Rodger's Northumberland, a frightening political operator who has a clear-eyed intelligence that is almost engaging. Most of Warner's cast have found the oppositions within their characters: the malevolence that goes with the sadness of Paola Dionisotti's Duchess of Gloucester; the fatalism that sounds in all the better hopes of Graham Crowden's Gaunt.

And at the heart of it all, cause of conflicts, is Fiona Shaw's Richard. Her performance is always interesting, and in the second half of the play it is sometimes brilliant. Everything she says has an idea behind it. In the first two acts, however, the idea is sometimes pretty odd. While he still rules unchallenged, her Richard is facetious and flippant. The text distinguishes between the King's self-important formality in the presence of the court, and his casual cynicism when alone with his favourites. Shaw gives us no such distinction, and acts a king who rather obviously mocks the very forms that give him his status. Some of his regal rhymes are designed to be unconvincing, but not to be turned into waggishness. Full of invention though it is, this seems a self-indulgent version of Richard's self-indulgence. It is difficult not to think that a woman in the part has been all too completely freed from the masculine ceremonies that shape confrontations as well as allegiances.

Then Richard is beaten and abandoned, and Shaw's performance starts making sense. Once she is desperate, her flippancy becomes necessary; once she is a loser, a talent for mockery becomes an important resource. What Shaw really gets is all Richard's insight his belated acuteness about others' motives. She is at her best in the famous, much censored, “deposition scene” where she makes Richard sardonic rather than pathetic, a provoking analyst to whom his enemies must listen. They squirm, and Bolingbroke flinches, as he satirizes their attempts to seem respectable to themselves. By the time of Richard's prison soliloquy, just before his murder, Shaw's performance has combined the King's self-pity and his perceptiveness. “Unkinged”, her difference from the men who have betrayed her is her source of bitterness and her privilege. Finally, the stunt is justified.