by Long before Bridgerton there was a theater for Jonathan Bailey, from roles at the RSC as a children’s actor. His lightness and talent on stage is obvious here, but he is still a revelation and illuminates this piece through the wrong regulation and the fall of a king. As the less carried out opening of Shakespeare’s history quartet of “Henriads”, it is a research into power, the concept of a king’s superanny concept and its aversion to a rebellion of the concept in exile cousin Henry Bulllingbrook.
Nicholas Hytner as a director smoothes most of the piece of the piece with a crazy production that has the pace and intrigue of a thriller. It is muscular in its appearance and Bailey seems unique, his luminosity is slightly in the shade.
He is a bizarre monarch that is inflated and explosively inflated in his minds, snorts cocaine and signed wealth with a shrug about John of Gaunts on the deathbed of his uncle. Nevertheless, when he speaks of his absolute, divine claim, they also feel his artillery weapon on him as a Bulllingbrook. In its panicked, delineated state, he is a self-mytholog jesus to Bulllingbrooks Judas.
A piece with plenty of beauty in his verse (“this blessed action, this earth, this kingdom, this England”, sighs the sick, which Martin Carroll played efficiently), his poetry is slightly steamed, although never by Bailey, His words glitter with feeling. Royce Pierresons Bulllingbrook is a man of action, but they don’t get under his skin. Phoenix di Sebastiani, supposedly treacherous Mowbray, is spirited, while Christopher Osikanlu Colquhoun wears Gravitas as Earl of Northumberland.
Men in suits see modern production and look like bankers or accountants who supervise a company styranny in Richard’s court, wear paperwork and strategies in the bar.
In the beginning there is a strong physicality in the middle of the soulless bureaucracy. Richard Quadrates to others, nose to nose (you wonder whether Bailey 2013 will go into a kiss like David Tennants Richard), but there is only boast.
Bob Crowley’s Set design has a gestious opulence with dangling chandeliers, but remains minimal, with a single element like a bed or a table arrangement increases from below. The scene in which Richard is forced to do without the throne becomes a legal examination that the accused in a modern courtroom. The lighting of the Bruno poet creates a large part of the effects, such as the explosions of the fight and the shadow of Richard’s prison rods in Pomfret Castle.
If the grip of the first half of production easily solves in second place, it remains appealing. The background music, which leads to an increase in moments, has the generic sound of a film score, and the almost empty stage now leaves the drama a bit more unmanly.
The last picture of Richard in a corpse bag is strong and powerful and increases the scene for the upcoming violence with the crowned Henry Swearing. A kind of Shakespeare cliffhanger.
• In the Bridge Theater, London, until May 10th
