Long before Richard II ran afoul of mutinous nobles, and almost two centuries before Shakespeare wrote Richard’s portrait in majestic verse, the King took refuge in the Tower. Near the beginning of his reign, when he was only fourteen years old, he retreated there during the Peasants’ Revolt, as enraged farmers beheaded his advisers down below. Now the tragedy “Richard II,” directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring the “Wicked” heartthrob Jonathan Bailey, is at London’s Bridge Theatre, right across the Thames from young Richard’s bolt-hole. If his boy self had stood at one of the Tower’s high windows long enough—say, for around six hundred and fifty years—he would have looked out at another teeming mob, lining up, still eager to see him die.
Hytner’s version of Plantagenet England seems less overtly medieval and rather more like the New York of the HBO series “Succession.” The play’s piano-and-strings compositions, by Grant Olding, closely recall Nicholas Britell’s discordant TV soundtrack; Richard wears sumptuous suits and velvet loafers without socks, then goes to prison in comfy gray sweats, sporting quiet luxury to the end. Bailey, who flounces magnificently—“We shall descend,” he drawls, hopping into a pit—certainly plays Richard more as a media mogul’s son than as an anointed monarch: coke-sniffing, sulky, louche. “Within the hollow crown,” Richard says, “keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits, / Scoffing his state.” Bailey, deft and playful, chooses to be his own antic, a droll and often hostile jester. This entertaining portrayal, though, can threaten the play’s sense of spiritual loneliness. Richard’s power is undone by his cousin Henry, but in his cell Richard finds wisdom, and the still, true call of his soul. By making his milieu familiar to a modern audience, Hytner and Bailey ignore the profound strangeness of Richard, who gains dominion over himself only by letting a nation slip through his fingers.
This spring, the London theatre shimmers with this kind of ambiguity—real king, false king, portrait, mirror. It’s a season awash in memory plays and history plays that reflect upon themselves, and then reflect again. The finest example of this dizzying mise en abyme is “The Years,” a staggering adaptation of the Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s 2008 memoir, at the Harold Pinter, in the West End. Ernaux structures her account of six decades of her life by describing, in the third person, images of herself at different ages: “In the photo, a tall girl blinks against the sun.” As each chapter begins, we therefore see her first in our mind’s eye, already contained in a lens, at a careful focal distance.
Ernaux’s celebrated écriture plate (her soi-disant “flat writing,” stripped of metaphor and flourish) requires a concordantly plain performance style. Eline Arbo, who wrote the adaptation and directs, casts the largely unadorned production with five women, each of whom matter-of-factly plays one of Ernaux’s ages, from pinafore-wearing child to grandmother, and speaks directly to us about sex, family, divorce, cancer, and sex again. Sometimes they do a bit of stage business, like pin a tablecloth (splashed with wine or afterbirth) onto a clothesline, but these acts, too, enhance a feeling of clinical distance. The play’s centerpiece is a brutal, clear-eyed recounting of an illegal abortion, spoken by Tuppence Middleton, which has been causing audience members to faint. When this happens, Middleton pauses, and she and the other actors wait at the rear of the stage, murmuring to one another, like a row of specialists at a medical consultation.
Ernaux’s great subject is youth, the way it pains us at different ages, and how quickly its lessons can be absorbed or lost. “We who had undergone kitchen-table abortions, who had married and divorced, no longer knew if the women’s revolution had really happened,” the excellent Gina McKee tells us, wryly. Year follows year follows year, but it’s impossible to forget the long silent moment when Middleton stands stone-faced as the other women carefully wash blood from her legs. Arbo and Ernaux’s patient masterpiece makes time palpable; you feel it flickering through a woman’s life, like a projector’s light moving through film. I felt another flicker, too, when someone fainted behind me. I wasn’t going to pass out, but I did find myself mentally reaching to steady something—it might have been my own consciousness, moving backward out of reach.
I was less bowled over by “Kyoto,” Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s well-meaning epic about the decade of negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocol, issued in 1997 (if not implemented until 2005). The directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin arrange the @sohoplace theatre like a huge meeting room, and the audience wears delegate badges, creating a Model U.N. atmosphere. Our narrator is the insinuating Don Pearlman (Stephen Kunken), an American oil lobbyist who does everything he can to sabotage the international process. Our horror at the damage he has done swims slowly through the long procedural drama, like a duck through crude. The play fumbles, though, when it tries to interest us in Pearlman as a man and a husband. Creating character is not among Murphy and Robertson’s strengths, and their pivot to awkward sentimentality throws the whole negotiation into disarray.
Robert Icke’s troubling “Manhunt,” at the Royal Court, is a wilder, more fractured account of a different set of real crimes—namely, Raoul Moat’s homicidal attacks on police, his brutal assaults on the mother of his daughter, and his murder of her boyfriend. Samuel Edward-Cook plays a jacked-up, roided-out Moat, shouting and cajoling his way through a kind of inquest, arguing fluently to his judges, and the audience, that he has been slandered. Reality shifts around him, and we come to understand that certain scenes he has conjured never actually took place. Though Icke has a weakness for clichéd references to a man’s “story,” his ear for Moat’s northern dialect is superb, and his use of real evidence—Moat’s social-media posts, for instance—illustrates the fugitive’s hectic delusion. In the play’s finest scene, a sympathetic drunk (Trevor Fox) tries to reel Moat back from his horrors. By this point in the show, however, we know that there could not have been any such rescue. Moat did attract a sick fandom, but that sort of ugly love does not stay a killer’s hand.
All these plays which chart the secret, internal practice of making a self—the bad king becoming good, youth becoming age, men becoming villains—hark back (or forward) to Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” the first true memory play. I felt lucky, then, to find myself at a warehouse space called the Yard, where Jay Miller has directed a gorgeously atmospheric version of the 1944 classic. Miller’s blue-lit, abstract netherworld set (designed by Cécile Trémolières) contains a sand dune, where props lie half buried and half remembered. A young man named Tom (Tom Varey) is both explicator and abandoner of his vulnerable, mentally fragile sister, Laura (Eva Morgan). We know from the beginning that he will someday leave her to the rough treatment of their garrulous, agitated mother, Amanda (Sharon Small), which is the same as leaving her to die.
In this production, Miller erodes nearly every “real” thing around Laura, so people emerge magically from her wardrobe, startling her (and us), or songs from other eras begin to play, penetrating her private bubble. She clings to her record player and, of course, to her little glass animals. It had never struck me until seeing Morgan’s nervous, colt-like Laura that she is similar to Richard II, happiest when far from human company, capable of mysterious insights as long as her eyes are turning inward. Morgan gives a weightless performance here, one that tugs like a restless balloon at this Tom, who clearly knows that she will eventually float away. Laura seems impatient to get to whatever comes next. “Mount, mount my soul,” Richard says, “Thy seat is up on high.” ♦
