The Fall of the House of Yes

Making Richard II the king of fabulousness has a different effect than the adapters intended

Stephen Jackman-Torkoff (centre) as King Richard II with members of the company in Richard II. Photo by David Hou.

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I’m writing this from Stratford, Ontario, home of the Stratford Festival which my wife and I have been attending annually for so many years. Once upon a time, I would have “written up” every show in the season, sometimes briefly and sometimes at great length. Last year, though we saw nearly the entire season, I only wrote up the shows I saw during the festival’s opening week (Hamlet, Chicago and Richard III) in anything like a timely fashion. That means that I never shared my thoughts about one of my two favorite shows from last year, All’s Well That Ends Well, until the spring of this year when my piece on the play came out in Modern Age. That was months after the show closed. My other favorite from last season, Death and the King’s Horseman, I never wrote up at all, a fact which I regret quite a bit.

This year, we didn’t come until late August, which means that we missed two shows—Casey and Diana and Women of the Fur Trade—entirely. I’m not going to write up everything else, but I’m going to try to say something at least about the shows about which I think I have something interesting to offer.

Today, that’s this year’s production of Richard II, which I saw late last week.

Richard II is a beautiful play to read and study but a very tricky play to stage. Almost nothing happens and the language is very poetical on the one hand and very political on the other, each of which can be alienating in its own way. It’s very easy for the play to devolve into a bunch of nobles in period costume conferring incomprehensibly with one another while trying to ignore the title character who is having a nervous breakdown.

I wish the play were done more often nonetheless. For one thing, the political aspect of the play is extremely topical. It’s about the extremely difficult problem of what to do when the legitimate ruler is corrupt and incompetent and a threat to the well-being of the commonwealth. This is not just a problem for monarchies, but manifestly one that afflicts democracies as well; much of the drama in the first Trump administration revolved around precisely this problem, and I don’t think we’ve fully reckoned yet with the unintended consequences of the strategies various parties in and out of government employed to deal with that problem.

Shakespeare takes seven more plays to fully work out (a subject I’ve written about at length elsewhere), of course. In Richard II, those consequences are still just beginning to make themselves felt, and while they would have caused Shakespeare’s contemporary audiences to shudder, we moderns understandably focus more on the personal drama of Richard the man and the pathos of his fall, like King Lear in miniature. How to make that drama compelling and avoid having all the political stuff feel like so much setup for plays we aren’t seeing is one way of describing the challenge.

The current Stratford production, adapted by playwright Brad Fraser, conceived and directed by Jillian Keiley, and choreographed by Cameron Carver, met that challenge better than most productions of the play I’ve seen, by turning Richard’s story into an allegory of a more recent social and political transformation. Ironically, I think they fail almost completely to achieve their intended dramaturgical aims—but, perhaps accidentally, they did a fine job of communicating the essential story of the play. I suspect there’s a lesson there both in why you have to trust the play rather than try to force it to be what you wish it were and, what is perhaps putting the same point another way, why a strong play will win out over a strong contrary intention.

In Fraser and Keiley’s play, Richard’s court has been turned into Studio 54, with Richard (played by Stephen Jackman-Torkoff) as the king of the disco. Jackman-Torkoff is perfectly cast for the part; his performance is intensely physical and unrestrained, and he fully inhabits his role as a kind of one-man non-stop party. He is pathetic in both senses of the word when he falls, like a child who has been slapped across the face and cannot fathom why. And when, having placed himself of necessity in Bolingbroke’s hands and at his mercy by handing him the crown, he is unceremoniously sent to the Tower, where he will spend the rest of his short life—well, if Jackman-Torkoff’s reaction in that moment, shocked without being at all surprised, doesn’t move you, you must be made of stone.

The gorgeous costumes by Bretta Gerecke—who garbed Richard in translucent white pants ringed with fringe, a tiny white stole and a flowing diaphanous white cape, and a deer-headed codpiece with protruding antlers—perfect the image of ultra-fabulousness. The set, designed by Michael Gianfrancesco, is a sleek black floor with moveable mirrored boxes to serve as furniture, and a disco ball that later turns into a prison; the lighting, by Leigh Ann Vardy, is mobile as well, whether glancing off the spinning disco ball or carried by a troupe of winged angels who populate Richard’s disco world.

It’s a fully realized vision—but what does it mean to turn Richard into, apparently, the king of Studio 54?

That’s the question that a lot of audience members have apparently been puzzled by, but it didn’t puzzle me. I didn’t think “oh, he must be king of the disco;” I thought, “oh, he must conceive of his court as a disco, of kingship as getting to be the life of the party forever.” That conception is not universal; most of Bolingbroke’s camp wear business suits, but Northumberland (a chillingly confident Sarah Orenstein) favors outfits with period overtones, as does York (a humorously indecisive Michael Spencer-Davis), and Bolingbroke himself (played with appropriate ambivalence by Jordin Hall) evolves over the course of the play from sensible suits to a gangster’s leather coat.

In other words, I took what I saw on stage to be an expression of the characters’ minds rather than an objective depiction of reality—Richard’s expression being more extreme because he is a more extreme character, and because he is the king. As such, the setting made perfect sense, because “guy who thinks being king is a life-long party” is pretty much exactly how Shakespeare portrays the Plantagenet monarch. He’s a shallow and juvenile narcissist who, as a consequence of those character flaws, makes for a terrible king, losing the support not only of the nobility, who are enraged by his intrusion on their rights, but of the commons, who groan under his oppressive taxation.

And there’s the rub. It’s quite clear, from other aspects of the production and from the program notes, that what the creators of this piece of theater wanted was revalue Richard, to portray his deposing not merely as a personal tragedy with which we should empathize, and a political tragedy because it undermined the legitimate basis of the government, but as a lost opportunity for a better world. Their Richard was queer, Black and fabulous, an avatar of the glorious ‘70s. His opponents were homophobic thugs and businessmen, avatars of the reactionary ‘80s aborning. They’re human too, with their own complexity and capacity for change. But their aim is simply evil. In a better world, fabulousness would have reigned forever.

Because that’s not really the play Shakespeare wrote, Fraser and Keiley make a number of adjustments to the text to tell their story. They make Aumerle (played with great feeling by Emilio Vieira) not only into Richard’s lover (a sex scene between them in a hot tub is the best of a number of wonderfully-realized bits of stage magic involving shiny stretchable swathes of fabric, in this case simulating water), but his true love who, at the end of the play, is compelled to be his executioner. Another addition: Lord Willoughby (a chiseled but smarmy Charlie Gallant), one of the denizens of Richard’s club world who joins forces with Bolingbroke to depose Richard, is played as a closeted man living a double life who winds up getting AIDS. (As an aside, these additions are created by adding text from other Shakespeare plays—Coriolanus, Much Ado About Nothing, A Winter’s Tale—and the sonnets, wrenching those lines sometimes wildly out of their original context; the result was rather distracting to me, since I recognized the lines and knew they didn’t belong here, and wound up unwillingly going down a mental rabbit hole to remember their source, which took me out of the moment.) While these story nuggets were added, the creators also cut John of Gaunt’s famous peroration on England’s glory and how it has been ruined by Richard’s misgovernment—probably the most famous speech in the entire play, and a highly effective indictment of Richard (though it is worth noting that Gaunt is not speaking on behalf of the playwright, and has his own interests in mind when he makes his indictment).

All of this, I think, is in part intended to shift the audience’s sympathies in Richard’s direction from the start, soft-pedaling the ruinous quality of his governance and giving his deposing a political context that is still meaningful to us today. But it is impossible to expunge Richard’s manifest character flaws as a king. You can cut John of Gaunt’s speech, but that still leaves Richard’s voiced desire for him to die speedily, still leaves Richard’s verbal abuse of Gaunt to his face as he is dying, and still leaves Richard’s decision to seize all of Gaunt’s lands and revenue to pursue a war in Ireland, thereby dispossessing Gaunt’s son Bolingbroke and triggering the revolt that ends Richard’s kingship. We still see, in other words, that Richard was a bad king.

So what does the political story mean, then? I spoke to a number of people who read Fraser and Keiley’s play as saying, in so many words, that gay men are bad kings and should be deposed—which is pretty much the opposite of what the adapter and director intended. But I think their play tracks better than either they or those unhappy audience members believe with what Shakespeare actually wrote. In Shakespeare’s play, deposing the true king, even if necessary to save the commonwealth, nonetheless destroys the foundation of legitimate government, leading ultimately to civil war and the rule of the tyrannical Richard III. In this play, too, deposing Richard—arguably justified and even necessary—unleashes powerful forces, particularly of overt homophobia, that have horrible consequences not only for Richard’s corrupt favorites (who are hanged) but for England more generally.

And this, too, is a contemporary problem. How does one get rid of a bad government when doing so looks like it will empower horrible forces that cannot be controlled? Anyone who hasn’t grappled with that question in recent years hasn’t been thinking very seriously about our ongoing political predicament. Shakespeare’s play doesn’t give a glib answer to that question, mind you; it doesn’t give an answer at all, but presents the problem in all its complexity, and the human consequences in all their pathos. That’s what makes it a great play, and it’s the reason why the play ultimately triumphs over Fraser and Keiley’s attempts to simplify its meaning. But it’s also a testament to the clarity of their vision that the result of that struggle isn’t just a muddle, but a play with its own considerable power, if not, perhaps, the precise message they intended.

Meanwhile, if you are in Stratford and want to see a play that does see the world as simply divided into the good-and-fabulous, who are allowed to steal with impunity, and the evil-and-propertied; where everyone is blithe to consequences and there is no day but today; where martyred queer angels can miraculously revive the dead—if that’s what you want, I have good news. Rent is playing on the main stage, only a few hundred meters away. I hope you enjoy it.