Lloyd Evans
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Eddie Redmayne’s delicate patrician face — square-jawed but ravaged — gives Richard a wonderful synthesis of cruelty, nobility and personal suffering. He has the lucky endowment of watchability. And he captures the ambivalences brilliantly as Richard falls, and rises, from distracted kingship into philosophical enslavement. In captivity he finds a mental release and even a contentment which his glib, swaggering kingship lacked. Each of these psychological developments is meticulously transcribed in Redmayne’s body language. This isn’t a camp performance by any means but Richard’s white full-length cape, tightly buttoned to the waist and falling open over his thighs, offers a sophisticated hint of louche self-regard.
Ron Cook’s Duke of York, often very funny, is a skilful blend of cautious loyalty and last-minute realpolitik. Andrew Buchan, as the rebel Bolingbroke, hasn’t Redmayne’s mystery and otherness but he brings exactly the right sort of blunt, can-do dourness to the role.
John of Gaunt (Michael Hadley) delivers the play’s best-known lines, ‘this scepter’d isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars’ like the town-crier announcing an extension of the curfew rather than as a lyrical exercise in patriotic nostalgia. Two minutes after the speech, he dies. More frailty might have helped. A grave danger with this play is that the action can stall in the dry entanglements of a thousand courtly intrigues but this production has an amazing clarity and the right brisk pace about it. A beginner with no previous knowledge of the Middle Ages would grasp every syllable. And like virtually every show Grandage has overseen at the Donmar it is exquisitely gorgeous to look at. He’ll be a hard act to follow. To surpass, perhaps impossible.
Hampstead has a new, or newish, studio theatre in its basement. The ‘Michael Frayn Space’ has been designed to evoke the charming visual world of the oil-rig loading bay. Inside this tangle of pipes and perforated steel, prototype plays are given a test-run.
Herding Cats, by Lucinda Coxon, is about two flatmates, Michael and Justine, who fall into exploitative love affairs. Justine is a spikily beautiful City girl who claims to find her trustafarian boss revolting. Inevitably she falls for him and he, equally inevitably, treats her like a used-up tea bag. Michael has a curious job selling erotic telephone chit-chat to incestuous Scottish paedophiles. Not, one imagines, a lucrative profession. And one would be wrong, however. The Scots, according to this play, enjoy nothing better than a bit of pervy underage make-believe over the phone. Michael’s business is booming. ‘Ooh, Daddy,’ he wheedles in a fake Morningside singsong. ‘Ooh, I’m touching myself.’ His best customer is a gruff Glaswegian businessman who forks out so much for his kiddie sex fantasies (occasionally involving genital mutilation) that he runs out of money. So Michael offers to keep up the fun for free. It’s all deeply strange and nasty.
Clearly Coxon’s point is that grubby romances can become addictive but it’s a pity she’s chosen two affairs, one a cliché, the other weirdly psychotic, that are unlikely to besprinkle the stalls with enchantment and magic. The play’s jerky, dislocated structure is supposed to mirror the wonkiness of the characters’ inner lives. And it does so but at a heavy cost. All aesthetic pleasure is removed. It’s like making Lear more gruelling by switching the seats for rows of spikes.
And the loos above the studio theatre may be better off elsewhere. The play was constantly interrupted, or complemented, perhaps, by the harsh pulsations of overhead bladder-emptyings.
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