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Mickey Jo
This is current man of the moment, heartthrob of the screen large and small, Jonathan Bailey returning to the London stage to play Shakespeare's Richard. Specifically Richard II. Richard 2 Electric Boogaloo. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel, or hello to you if you are listening on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I am a professional theatre critic here on social media. I am a theatre fan, a theatre goer, a theatre pundit, a theatre content creator and I am also currently very unwell. Something I am letting you know because it is very likely that I will cough, sniff, turn a different colour and sweat profusely all during the course of today's review. Of course, those of you listening on podcast platforms will just hear the sound of me wishing I was dead. So I apologize for all of that and I don't wish for anyone to become concerned. Also, don't worry, I'm fine. Who wouldn't want to experience all the major flu symptoms while seeing back to back Shakespearean press nights? It's a good thing I love my job. And today we're here to discuss the first of this week's two major Shakespearean openings with Richard II at the Bridge Theatre, notable for its starry casting. Jonathan Bailey returning to the London stage. Not the first time he has done Shakespeare in his career. The first time I ever saw him on stage. Technically it was via a live stream, but it was the National Theatre live broadcast of Othello starring Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear from the National Theatre. Jonathan Bailey reuniting with the same director, Nicholas Heitner, at his new creative home, the Bridge Theatre. And I dare say many of you will be intrigued about this one, potentially, because the idea of getting to see Jonathan Bailey on stage post Wicked movie post, all of his other recent success is incredibly appealing, but with several examples recently of starry casting proving divisive. I'm talking about the recent openings of Elektra in the West End and Oedipus at the Old Vic, as well as one of our most recent Shakespeares in the West End, the Tempest, starring Sigourney Weaver. Who's to say if this is actually going to be any good? And that is the question we will be answering today. So we're going to be talking all about Richard II and Jonathan Bailey's central performance. For those of you with little familiarity with the play, I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of the plot. So if you're going to see it and you haven't yet, that might be helpful. Of course, if you don't want spoilers, then feel free to go and see it for yourself first and then come back to this review once you have done so. And if you have already, as always, I would love to know what you thought about it in the comments section down below. Share your review with all of us. And if you enjoy mine, make sure you are subscribed right here on YouTube with the notifications turned on so you don't miss any of my upcoming reviews or following me on podcast platforms. And while you're at it, feel free to seek me out across the rest of the theatrical Internet. You can find me on TikTok, Instagram, Bluesky Threads, and LinkedIn for business inquiries. It's a wonder I got ill in the first place. Clearly I have an abundance of free time. Anyway, here is what I thought of Richard II so I have seen Richard II before. I have never thought of this play as one of Shakespeare's most gripping histories. This converted me a little bit. This is a thrilling, utterly contemporary production of Richard ii. It is infused with a very kind of modern political sensibility. It is designed with a modern aesthetic, with modern set pieces, contemporary dress, and it is empowered through that to evoke a sense of real political thrill. This feels like a Shakespeare akin to watching an episode of the Wire. I've never actually seen the Wire, but I'm given to understand that that's what it's like. And for a narrative which concerns itself with the dethroning of a king, a reasonably corrupt king at that, by a member of his own family who has gone about endearing various other noble lords to his cause beforehand, is really ripe for a lot of, like, contemporary political potency. I also think that reson lot more with a modern audience than doing the whole thing with, you know, traditional medieval pageantry and trying to find some other way to endear the audience to that narrative and make us care about these characters and these historic power battles. Instead, you have this company wearing boots and business suits and outdoorsy jackets, stalking about the stage and shooting each other in the back of the head when they've been betrayed, which is obviously a lot more dynamic, even if the sound effect is a little bit dodgy. Now, the synopsis is quite brief. Richard II is on the throne and we find ourselves towards the end of his reign, although he doesn't know that yet, he is in many ways naive to the precarity of his position, especially as the play progresses right at the start of the thing he attempts to settle a debate between two other members of the court and, in an act of resolution, banishes the both of them. They are Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke. Now, this is important, actually, because David Tennant says Bolingbroke, Jonathan Bailey and the company here say Bolingbroke. So it's a real choose your own adventure moment. And they're all some kind of cousins if you go back far enough, which you know. British royalty. But Henry and Richard are more closely related. They actually share uncles. And it's Henry's father, Richard's uncle, who appeals that he shorten his banishment sentence to only six years, which is basically a holiday. It is during this time, however, that that same old man, John of Gaunt, unfortunately dies due to a very traditionally Shakespearean combination of old age and abject grief. And when his exiled son learns both of this and of Richard's various financial wrongdoings in order to fund an ongoing war with Ireland, he returns to Britain and decides to try and take the throne for himself, which he manages to almost entirely accomplish before the interval. He really. He really goes about it quite well, which is one of the dramatic challenges of the play. It's not a very sexy occupation. He comes back, announces his intentions, and then we see it all playing out quite steadily, but without much challenge. The interest of the thing is the amount of time before Richard realizes what's really happening. And it's also less about the revelations of who actually defects, and it's more so about the emotions of what that really means. There is huge and considerable weight and meaning in this given to the idea of betraying your current king. And no character struggles with this more so than another of Richard and Henry's uncles, the Duke of York. He, for almost every act of this play, is Stretch Armstrong in the middle of a very aggressive game of tug of war, telling Henry Bolingbroke that, you know, he couldn't possibly betray Richard, the current king, but when Henry very shortly thereafter becomes king, then he can't possibly betray Henry because he's now the current king. He's even ready to give up his son as a traitor when he finds out that he's going to betray the current king in favor of the person he thinks should be the current king, even though he also was very recently loyal to the man who was the current king. Like, it's very, very difficult to be the Duke of York. And a huge factor here is the idea of the divine mandate and the legitimacy of the monarch, as, you know, appointed By God. This is why there's always so much consequence in these dethronings and abdications, in these changes of power. The struggle here being that Richard, even though corrupt, is said to be, you know, God's chosen ruler. Now, I thought the second act of this production was actually considerably stronger than the first. By this point, Richard understand, understands what's happening. He is a captive of the new king, soon to have a coronation, Henry Bolingbroke. And he is asked to peacefully and politely cede power and hand over his crown. And we see what an emotional challenge this is for Richard. And by this point, Jonathan Bailey's Richard has found a little more depth beforehand. He's, he's a little shallow, he's a little petulant. It's interesting actually. There were two young women behind me who were talking about how excited they were to see Jonathan Bailey on stage. And believe me, I understand. And they were saying, if he makes contact at any point during this, I'm just gonna lose it, I'm just gonna scream. And I thought that was so charming because I wonder if that's how people used to feel during Shakespeare's lifetime about the famous actors of the stage. And, you know, indeed, in all of the years since, the more things change, the more they stay the same. But also, I think it was really hard to find Jonathan Bailey attractive in this role, which is a statement of quality about his acting performance, not because he doesn't look great, but because he is so petulant, he is so whiny, he is self righteous and narcissistic and ignorant to the consequences of his choices and, you know, equally misled by those around him. But it's not until the second act when he gets to indulge in all of that sorrow and the melancholy that he really feels like a more developed character. And I enjoyed his performance in this. I think he clearly has a great understanding of Shakespeare. I don't know if the pathos that he delivered towards the end, when he is imprisoned, when he is reckoning with all of this despair and everything that's happened to him really feels earned because of the childishness with which he conducted himself. In the first act. He does similarly to, as we've seen him before on stage, bring a rather hysterical quality to a lot his scenes. He appears at one point in the gallery amongst the audience, with Bolingbroke & Co. Having brought a cannon onto the stage and they are outside the castle where he is residing, asking that he come outside in order to like, complete the transactional nature of overthrowing him. And this is played particularly by Jonathan Bailey in quite a comic and spiteful way. This continues into the second act when he is trying to bring himself to hand this crown to Bolingbroke, to actually put it onto his head. And he keeps holding onto it, or just, like, pulling it away and pacing around the stage and extending this sequence whereby he's talking around and around it and talking about how unfair it is and talking about how acutely this betrayal from all of his countrymen wounds him. But while it's clear that his Richard is experiencing nothing but pain and sorrow, he is delivering it in a way that is deliberately comic and a little insincere, all of which is funny and witty. And it's great to see those qualities in contemporary Shakespeare, particularly, like dark and biting contemporary Shakespeare, that can be tense and funny at the same time and deliver this with both hands. But it also creates, I think, a little too difficult a mountain to climb. By the play's final moments. We enter a real gear shift in those moments as well. Also in the staging, you know, we find him alone in his cell, and there are going to be spoilers here, if you don't want to know how the thing ends, but he is paid a visit by a young man who worked in the royal stable and who still has, emotionally, at least, loyalty to him as the former king. And they have a very emotional exchange. He talks about the fact that one of Richard's horses was ridden by Bolingbroke, and Richard decries the horse for being complicit in this takeover and blames the horse for neither falling down nor faltering again. It's played in a comic way, even given all of his sorrow. But moments after this, the prison guard brings in a tray of food, which Richard suspects is poisoned. He asks him to eat it first, and the guard says that he cannot. Kind of giving up the game here. Richard then grabs him from behind, pushes the food into his mouth. A second runs in to try and, like, chloroform him. Richard, like, grabs him from behind, chloroforms him, throws them both on the bed. And then finally, one of Richard's former loyal associates, a man named Baggert, who, every time they say his name, sounded a little bit like a slur to me, but I had to work to unhear it. Injects Richard in the neck with a syringe, this being the thing that finally kills him. And this little sequence is so slickly directed in terms of the fighting. There's such adrenaline in it. Which isn't really present throughout the rest because it is such a calm coup and there are a couple of people who get shot in the back of the head, I'm not going to lie to you. But like I said, it's a dodgy sound effect. And then they run off together in the darkness. It doesn't feel as gripping or as threatening. You wonder if perhaps we could have had a little bit more of that kind of aggressive intensity present in the physicality of the rest of the thing. And I think a contemporary audience, particularly one that isn't at the RSC and isn't at the Globe, probably would appreciate that as well. I think alongside all of the deifying of the role of the monarch and the state of the nation, the, you know, a little bit of bloodshed doesn't go amiss. One of my favorite scenes took place in the middle of the second act, and this was, as I mentioned, when the Duke of York discovers that his son is part of a conspiracy to overthrow, to assassinate, in fact, the new king, Henry Bolingbroke, in order to presumably avenge and reinstate the ousted Richard ii. And such is the Duke of York's loyalty that he immediately calls his son a traitor and heads straight to go and warn the King, despite his wife begging him not to give up their child, who will surely be imprisoned and. Or put to death for this conspiracy, it being fairly sizable, treason and all. And these two scenes between these characters, so, so brilliantly staged and directed, between the Duke of York, the Duchess of York, and their son, the Duke of O'Merl. It begins with such careful family intimacy. It then shifts into this dangerous place, this thrilling place. And then the brilliance of it all is how funny it gets, because the Duke of York sets out for the King. His wife, the Duchess of York, then compels her son to chase after him and get there first to appeal to the King for a pardon before he hears about it from the boy's father. The Duke of O'Merl is the one who arrives first, begs the King to lock the door. Very shortly afterwards, however, before he can really tell him what's happened, his father, the Duke of York, arrives, bangs on the door and tells him that he's not safe. He lets him in. The Duke of York insists that his son be punished entirely and resents the fact that the King wants to pardon his son because of his father's loyalty and how much he respects the Duke of York in this moment. And the Duke of York is like, what are you talking about? Kill my son? He's an awful, treasonous traitor. And it's at this point that his wife, the boy's mother, the Duchess of York, shows up and begs for the pardon that has already been issued, falls to her knees, the boy falls to his knees. Everyone's on their knees, crawling around after the King, who increasingly is just fatigued by the whole thing. And it gives us a lot of what I think we don't necessarily get much of in contemporary Shakespeare, which is the ability to be witty alongside that sense of threat and alongside the darkness and the intensity and the brooding quality of it all, because there are stakes here, and there is high drama here, and there is this mother who is desperate not to lose her son, and there's this father who feels betrayed by his son and is ready to give him up entirely out of loyalty to the King. But then there's such a comedy that arises from their desperation and from this clash between this married couple, each begging the King not to listen to the other one. All the actors involved in this sequence do brilliant work here. This is Amanda Root as the Duchess of York, who is so wonderful across these two scenes. Vinnie Heaven as The Duke of O'Merl, who also gets another defining moment towards the start of the second act, when he is appealing throughout the auditorium for anyone else to speak on his behalf while his name is being slandered in the court of the new king. And finally, Michael Simpkins as the Duke of York, who is staggeringly good throughout this production. Just wonderful veteran Shakespearean performance. The conflict that he experiences as his loyalty shifts from one of his nephews to another. The betrayal from his own son. He is fantastic in this production, which isn't at all surprising. He's a master thespian. Now, someone considerably newer, however, who I was hugely impressed by was Royce Pearson, who played Henry Bolingbroke, a huge role in this production, very much the other side of the coin to Jonathan Bailey's Richard. And sort of in many moments, especially in the first act, feeling as much like a leading central character. He, in characterisation, felt often like the antithesis of Bailey's heavy, hysterical and self indulgent king. He was so grounded, he was so principled, so resolute, but more and more with this real grudge and this sense of bloody purpose, but perhaps most interestingly, a real palpable regret whenever blood is spilled in his name, particularly in the final moments of the play. I thought he was fantastic. I think he's going to be a very exciting actor to watch. A few more words on this production then directed by Nicholas Heitner. Like I said, masterfully done in terms of the tone and finding these moments of wit and comedy amongst all of this historical angst and drama. It's staged in the round on a long platform. The thing has been designed by Bob Crowley. It's not as immersive as some previous Shakespearean productions at the Bridge, like their Miss Summer Night's Dream, like their Julius Caesar, but we still have characters popping up in various different places, walking down through the aisles. We have a hydraulic section in the middle of the stage which lowers and raises back up with different, different set pieces on it. We have chandeliers descending from above. We have these two doors at the back of the set that are initially very traditional, very regal, very historic. They get replaced with these two glass doors as Bolingbroke brings in a new administration and commences his rule. They then get replaced later by prison bars that are lit from behind, casting a shadow onto the stage where Jonathan Bailey sits. Sits with just a lone bed in his cell. I will say it was a little surprising, especially post Guys and Dolls and how slickly that was managed, that some of the set changes were conspicuously a little bit loud and a little bit noticeable and a little bit clunky. But, you know, even though it is opening, they've had their previews. This is still, I assume, only going to get stronger and slicker. Jeanette Nelson was the voice and text coach. I've spoken a few times on here recently about Shakespearean productions where the delivery has been inconsistent and it wasn't here. Everyone truly understood what they were saying and because of that we understood what they were saying as well. And, you know, Richard II is a very poetic Shakespeare in many places, with a host of different characters referred to by their royal titles with shifting allegiances and ulterior motives. The fact that there was such clarity brought to all of that was just brilliant. I also, like I mentioned, really enjoyed Kate Waters fight direction, especially in the play's final moments. Grant Alding composed some incidental music throughout as well that was brilliantly atmospheric. The production ultimately really typifies what I've come to associate with Nicholas Heitner's Shakespeare. It is modern, it is gripping, it is filled with intensity, but also a wit. There is a real love and an understanding of the language and a playful use of the space and of the audience. I think neither this particular play nor this particular role for Jonathan Bailey allow either Jonathan or Nicholas as the director to be quite as creative and quite as joyous as we've seen them both be previously. But if it's Shakespeare he wanted to do in returning to the stage, then I get why he would choose this over something like a Richard III or a Macbeth, which, you know, even more intense. In any case, those have been my thoughts about Richard II at the Bridge Theatre in London. If you are curious about this production, go and check it out for yourselves. And if you've already seen it, as always, let us know what you thought about it in the comments section down below. I hope that you've enjoyed today's review. Make sure that you are following me or subscribed. Do whatever you have to do so you don't miss any of my upcoming reviews, including very shortly, my coverage of the next big show, Shakespearean Opening here in London, Jamie Lloyd's Much Ado About Nothing starring Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell. I am in fact going to see it in a few hours time and I am very excited to share all of my thoughts with you right here. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For ten more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a Stagey day. Subscribe.