Chicago Shakespeare Theater's press materials report that director Barbara Gaines sees "Richard II" as a personal play, concerned primarily with the individual transformations of Richard and his usurper Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV). Her production clearly reflects this perspective, focused as it is on Richard's personal weaknesses-his mercurial temperament, his limited attention span, his trivial concerns-and on Bolingbroke's personal strengths. Gaines' view of the latter is quite subtle, though, showing the man who will be king as a virtual prisoner of his own strength, like an ox chained to a building who can't help but bring it crashing down around his ears.
But Richard II is, first and foremost, a political play: it describes a battle between the nation's lords and the monarch's favorites that was replaying itself at the time of its first production, during a shaky moment in Queen Elizabeth's reign. Though he was writing a cautionary tale about the consequences of "the death of kings," Shakespeare found himself censored for the scene in which Richard II is deposed: it was too inflammatory to be published. This melancholy, almost wistful, production certainly makes a change from the usual blood-and-thunder versions of the histories, but at the price of stripping the play of its urgency and much of its coherence.
If the play is about Richard's personal quest, then the people running on and off stage talking about faction and plot seem like so much static. Gaines reflects this by staging the two scenes of challenge for combat as comedies of impotence, an absurd rash of glove-tossing, rather than as a foreshadowing of the disastrous wars to come. Similarly, she has Richard, though dependent on the approval of others, unable to grasp what they say or have much meaningful to say in return, because their concerns are political and his personal. His indifference in the glove-tossing scenes almost suggests that he believes them to be presented for his amusement.
The production takes place in a sort of suspended-period generic modern, permitting a brief disco scene evoking the 70s and visual images suggesting the Watergate hearings, a brief nod to the play's political content. Perhaps Gaines views Richard as Richard Nixon, a leader who had to be called to account but whose forced resignation paved the way for 25 years' worth of political disruption. But no one who seriously wanted suggest Richard Nixon would cast wispy Scott Parkinson.
Parkinson is a superb actor, whose Fool was the highlight of Chicago Shakespeare's production of King Lear. But he's been directed here to be indifferent to the things that matter in the play-the rise and fall of kings-and concerned with things that don't, and so his performance simply doesn't make sense. Parkinson captures the king's petulance perfectly, but gives no hint of any underlying nobility, making the witty, rueful king of the second half seem like a different man. Yes, of course, Richard's transformation is the point-but we need to see him get from here to there. Parkinson's "here" is incomprehensible, rendering his "there" unbelievable, though individual scenes-his encounter with the mirror, particularly-have the power to move.
Scott Jaeck is outstanding as the stolid Bolingbroke, presenting him as a man whose fate is thrust upon him. Like Richard his circumstances change, but unlike Richard he does not. Even the final image, of his being surprised by a spatter of blood, suggests a man who is acted upon rather than a man who acts.
The strong work of the supporting cast feels irrelevant. Mike Nussbaum is a passionate John of Gaunt praising "This sceptred isle, this England . . .", Steve Pickering a canny Duke of York and Fredric Stone an implacable Northumberland; but they seem to be in a different play from Richard and Bolingbroke, who float in self-contained bubbles of their own preoccupations.
Kevin Adams has lit the play brilliantly, in every sense: periodically he shines a bank of spotlights directly in the audience's eyes so that we share Richard's experience of being blinded and hunted. Other aspects of the production, though, feel stale: the white Miami Vice suits and Panama hats of Richard's hangers-on appear lifted directly from Gaines' extraordinary production of Corialanus, while the blood of mysterious origin and the Nixon analogy come from Robert Falls' seminal Hamlet in 1985. Perhaps a break for Gaines, and some fresh ideas, are in order at Chicago Shakespeare.