Richard II performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RST) (review)

Last November I did something unusual, at least for me: I saw the same Shakespeare production on two days back-to-back, going to a Tuesday matinee and then a Wednesday evening performance. But this was repetition with a difference. While I attended the matinee performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Richard IIlive and in person in Stratford-upon-Avon, I went to the Wednesday night show at a packed-out cinema in London, where they were live broadcasting a video transmission of David Tennant and Gregory Doran’s take on Shakespeare’s historical tragedy.

The RSC has taken several years to get involved in live broadcasting, but when it finally did so, it did it well. I’ve enjoyed all the theater broadcasts I’ve seen through the thriving NT Live series, but for me this RSC broadcast presentation of Richard II, produced by John Wyver, mixed camera angles and perspectives in a more varied, measured, and satisfying way than any other production I’ve seen. Crucially, wide shots of not only the full stage space but also fringes of audience appeared frequently throughout the filming, and almost always at the start and close of every scene. This meant that as cinema audiences we had knowledge of the layout and use of the stage in each scene before we moved into more closely framed shots. In many live broadcasts, continuous close-ups seem to be the norm, a tendency I can understand given how accustomed we as audiences have become to this intimate perspective in television and film. But in live performance recording I often find this approach awkward and even boring, especially when the shot is tightened to just the head and shoulders. While these shots give us unprecedented access to actors’ facial expressions, offering a proximity not available even to live audience members seated in the front row, they also trap the actors’ bodies within the confines of the camera frame, imposing stasis on a moment that in the theater is unbounded and alive with possibility. While the actors may not end up running across the stage at a moment’s notice, or falling suddenly and dramatically to the ground, there is still a sense in the theater that they could. Very tight camera shots foreclose this possibility, imposing the stable mise-en-scèneof the camera onto the wider and potentially wilder stage-scape. In such shots the face reigns supreme, and while I like faces, I like other things too.

Though the Richard IIrecording had its fair share of close-ups, frequently moving to this mode when the dialogue focused in on two characters (for instance, the goodbyes Gaunt and Bolingbroke exchanged in 1.3 after Richard banished his cousin), the directors weren’t afraid to leave it and offer what I would describe as a more open, contingent, unpredictable—in a word, theatrical—point of view. Wide and mid-shots of the stage and characters were sensitively mixed with tighter close-ups, creating a roving and fluid perspective that loosened its grip on the viewer...