The Tragedy of Richard II by Lord Denney’s Players (review)

The Lord Denney’s Players is a new undergraduate theater company founded in 2014 by the Department of English at Ohio State University. For its first show, the LDP chose something that, according to their director, Sarah Neville (Assistant Professor of English at OSU), had never been done in the recorded history of Shakespearean performance. They staged, over successive weekends, two productions of Richard II: the first based on the early quarto editions, which lack the famous deposition scene, and the second based on the Folio edition, which includes it. Their innovative production was an eloquent argument not only for the theatrical power of the deposition scene, but also, and perhaps more surprisingly, for the theatrical power of its absence. LDP was looking to start with a bang, and they succeeded.

The first weekend of performances featured the Quarto-based text. I arrived with the hypothesis that cutting the long and powerful deposition scene would diminish the role of the court in the play and thereby increase the impact of the Gardener. I imagined that such a change would decrease the play’s investment in aristocratic politics, rendering the play’s politics of popularity, recently explored by Jeffrey Doty in Shakespeare Quarterly(61.2 [2010]: 183-205), more readily apparent. To my surprise, however, this proved not to be the case. In fact, cutting the deposition scene produced a King Richard II who was just as central to the play’s emotional and political core as the King in more traditional productions. Without the deposition scene, the play’s other scenes of Richard’s fall—including the descent from the castle in 3.3 and the prison soliloquy in 5.5—took center stage. Rather than his vanity (most conspicuous in Richard’s request for a mirror while being deposed), the production without the deposition emphasized Richard’s combination of valor and victimhood. The play as a whole also felt more fluid and organic, since both Richard’s parting from his Queen and his valiant self-defense before his murder played as tragic culmination rather than superfluous aftermath, as they sometimes do in the wake of the deposition.

This more sympathetic Richard may also have been influenced by another non-traditional aspect of the production: the cross-gender casting of both Richard and Bolingbroke. In talkback, Neville and the actors playing the leads, Ellie Rogers and Annie McAlpine, argued that this casting, in which victor and vanquished are played by female actors with non-traditional gender presentations, allowed them to defy the common portrayal of Richard as effeminate. At times McAlpine’s choice to portray Bolingbroke as blustering, aggressive, and glowering threatened to make Richard seem effeminate by comparison, thus undermining the production’s stated goal. Yet ultimately Rogers avoided this fate by playing Richard with a restraint and gravitasthat helped represent the King’s fall as an effect of political malice rather than any supposed feminine weakness (Fig.3).

When LDP returned the deposition scene to the play the following weekend, I now expected that the production would seem longer and clumsier in comparison to the sprightly Quarto performance, but once again my expectations were confounded. When Richard strode onstage in the middle of 4.1, at the very point where the scene had ended in the previous performance, there was a thrilling frisson of seeing something forbidden, similar to...