The truth of what we are: Richard II @ NTLive

A few weeks ago we took advantage of a lull in the snow to take in the NT Live of Simon Russell Beale's Richard II, in a very stripped down and streamlined version from the Almeida Theatre directed by Joe Hill-Gibbons. RII is a wordy play with a big cast and a lot of complicated ground to cover, so clocking in at two hours is quite a feat of editing.

And edit they did. The play is stripped of props, costumes, a lot of its text, and doors. Three walls and a floor of riveted industrial steel plates contain every scene, with a luminescent ceiling that provides most of the lighting. Nobody leaves or enters -- nobody can leave or enter, which is pretty much the point -- and the whole cast (in street clothes except for a gold paperboard crown) is on stage at all times. Everyone but Richard and Bolingbroke shuffle roles. Saskia Reeves, who starts the play as Bushey, plays all her other roles smeared in the blood of her first character's execution. There is something poetic, if uncomfortable, in that, nor is anyone spared: buckets line the walls marked Water, Soil, and Blood, and over the course of the play, used for various purposes, their contents mire this scepter'd isle and her people in an inescapably vile slough of ambition, betrayal, and murder. Nowhere is this better brought home than in the comedic yet horrifying lightning-round of internecine accusation and gratuitous gage-casting that Bolingbroke (Leo Bill), newly-crowned, realizes he is completely powerless to stop. He looks very tired by then.

Given the lack of frills and extras, blocking and choreography count for a great deal. Much is accomplished by various clusterings of the secondary characters, whose function is often chorus-like and underscores the precarious nature of allegiance under duress. You can't always tell who any of them are or where they're placing their bets, but in the end of course it doesn't matter.

Simon Russell Beale gets to start the play with Richard's ending soliloquy, a device that frames history as theater and makes everything flashback until the speech comes around again toward the end of the play. Certain other changes are deftly managed, like the garden scene where normally the Queen would be in conversation with her ladies - the ladies' lines are given to Richard here. So it becomes a dialogue in which Richard's sense of self as king is briskly torn down as each frivolous pastime he offers, each remnant of his days of safety, is rejected in favor of some grim alternative in this new reality.

SRB made his name as an actor on his keen sense of detail in a line, and he is no dogmatic follower of inherited interpretation or straitjacketing adherence to meter. So, in any text you think you know well, he can make a chasm open up suddenly at your feet. Here, in the Westminster scene, it was when he's asked leave to go "Whither you will, so I were from your sights", and Bolingbroke says "Go some of you and convey him to the Tower." There's a moment's hesitation as Richard processes what that means, and we feel some of that sudden vertigo - that palmer's walking staff would never be an option.