[In the following review, Billington appraises Steven Pimlott's 2000 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Richard II, focusing on how its stark setting created a contemporary mood that underscored the universal relevance of the play.]

A great adventure has begun. Over the next year the Royal Shakespeare Company is to stage all eight of Shakespeare's Histories in chronological sequence. It kicks off with Steven Pimlott's fiercely intelligent, modern-dress Richard II in the Other Place, converted by David Fielding into a space resembling a white-walled squash-court or science lab: a perfect setting for this masterly dissection of kingship.

Modern dress, even when stylised with lots of maroon and grey maxi-coats, creates problems for this most ceremonial of plays, one that is steeped in medieval myth and that shows the notion of the king as God-sanctioned monarch giving way to personal ambition and legalistic statecraft. But Pimlott and his designer, Sue Willmington, pull it off in various ways. They suggest Richard presides over an already divided kingdom: one in which rancorous bullies confront each other in the lists at Coventry, with lethal axes. They make good use of symbolic props, including a long wooden casket which variously becomes throne, vertical mirror and coffin. Above all, with the aid of Simon Kemp's bright, overhead strip-lighting, they give the work a strong European dimension: it becomes a Brechtian analysis of the nature of power. One could pick holes in the execution: I distrust the modern habit, already seen in Macbeth this week at London's BAC, of plucking lines from the fifth act to use as a choric refrain. But the abiding impression is of dazzling clarity. Samuel West's Richard moves from heedless tyrant to Christian martyr with absolute, and absolutist, conviction. Donning crown and ermine when it suits him, West shows the raging wreck that lurks beneath: he lunges at the prophetic John of Gaunt like a berserk thug and, having been likewise ticked off by the Duke of York, promptly makes him Lord Governor.

West also captures Richard's accelerating self-consciousness, he wraps himself in the national flag for the Westminster deposition scene, and mordant irony: his cry to Bolingbroke of ‘Here, cousin, seize the crown’ ripples with taunting ambiguity. I have known more lyrical Richards: what West conveys is the character's progress from Ceaucescu to Christ.

David Troughton's Bolingbroke is also brilliantly effective: an overweening politician who cloaks driving ambition under a sense of wrong, ‘I am a subject and I challenge law’, and who swiftly dispatches Richard's followers with a bullet through the brain. But, having staged his takeover, Troughton also captures the hermetic isolation of power, making redundant the decision to end the play with the opening lines of Henry IV, Part One. David Killick's dithering York, Christopher Saul's Machiavellian Northumberland and Adam Levy's armed-to-the-teeth, SAS-style Harry Percy lend unflinching support.

The production, since the Histories will have a variety of directors, may not provide a pattern for the future. It does, however, rescue Richard II from medieval pageantry and reveal its modern relevance as a study of the way revolution often begets tyranny.