Review: Richard II (directed by Annie McKenzie for Quandary Collective) at The Vaults Theatre, London, April 2022
Quandary Collective have been touring their production of Richard II — set in a post-apocalyptic Britain and punctuated by neon-lit dance breaks to a thumping electronic soundtrack — since August 2021, with past performance spaces including a former outdoor swimming pool in Bristol and St. Luke’s Bombed Out Church in Liverpool. Since the beginning of April this year, the production has found its latest home in The Vaults Theatre, located within disused railway arches underneath London Waterloo station — and by taking Richard II underground into this dark and atmospheric location, Quandary Collective may have found their production’s most natural setting. The venue has become known for immersive theatre, and, whilst director Annie McKenzie doesn’t transform Richard II into an immersive show, the very experience of entering the The Vaults feels akin to stepping into the world of her production in a way that it might not in a more traditional proscenium arch theatre space.
Tantalisingly billed as existing ‘somewhere between Mad Max: Fury Road, an episode of Game of Thrones and what it might have been like to stand in the pit at The Globe in 1595’,¹ McKenzie’s Richard II impressively lives up to all three of these cultural reference points — although the Vaults’ moodily lit enclosed setting arguably brings the experience closer to the claustrophobic intimacy of a Jacobean playhouse than Shakespeare’s ‘wooden O’. The links between Shakespeare’s histories and the HBO series — and indeed the George R. R. Martin books it’s based upon — are now fairly well-established, but McKenzie’s unflinchingly brutal adaptation of a play where much of the violence usually takes place offstage gives the factionalism and power struggles in her Richard II a stark (pun somewhat intended) edge that sets it apart from past productions of the play. Whilst the crown passed from Richard (Coco Maertens) to Bolingbroke (George Alexander), it was accompanied by a bullet belt draped across each ruler’s torso — an accessory most often associated with stereotypical movie commandos — the king’s power coming from to their abilities in warfare just as much as their regal status. The play’s conflicts were similarly transformed to emphasise the barbaric Britain McKenzie envisioned for her production: the duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray (Troy Richards) in the first act, for example, became a no-holds-barred trial by combat, during which the two men were tethered to each other by a length of rope — forcing them to fight rather than flee.
This bleak dog-eat-dog setting was further enhanced by Valentine Gigadet’s set: a wasteland littered with the detritus of former civilisation, which brought to mind Lord of the Flies just as much as Mad Max through its primal, makeshift aesthetic. The throne that Richard, and then Bolingbroke, inhabited was a folding garden chair with a circular metal grill adorning the seatback, the play’s ‘royal throne of kings’ not quite so royal but contested just as fervently. With no set changes throughout the production, this DIY seat of power was present during every moment — a constant reminder of both the reality and artificiality of the sovereignty being fought over. Gigadet’s costumes furthered the make-do aesthetic, resembling a lost property box of scrappy garments roughly daubed with white paint. The unchanging, rudimentary set and childlike, dress-up nature of the costumes were reminiscent of Jane Howell’s ‘adventure playground’ productions of the first tetralogy broadcast by the BBC in the early 1980s. The impact here was similar: McKenzie and her cast brought out the immaturity and ridiculousness behind the pomp and ceremony of Richard II, the production’s aesthetic satirising the constant oneupmanship and changes of allegiance as schoolyard politics or, perhaps more accurately, a constantly bickering family — after all, most of the people vying for power in the play are in some way related.
The idea of casting a woman actor to play Richard is not a new one — Fiona Shaw famously took on the role in Deborah Warner’s 1995 National Theatre production, and Adjoa Andoh portrayed the monarch in her production co-directed with Lynette Linton for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2018/19. However, the casting of Maertens as Richard in Quandary Collective’s production ultimately led to a twist by McKenzie in the fourth act: during Richard’s resignation of the crown to Bolingbroke, she revealed her true identity as a woman posing as a man. It was a choice which set McKenzie’s Richard II apart in its boldness to deviate from Shakespeare’s story, maintaining the play’s language and characterisation of Richard whilst allowing both to take on fresh meaning. Staged as a literal revelation, with Maertens stripping naked to the horror of the men surrounding her, Richard was subject to male oppression moments after making her identity as a woman known — Bolingbroke immediately ordered the unruly Richard to be seized and covered using his long fur coat. Her treatment only worsened: the toxically masculine Northumberland (Danann McAleer) noticeably enjoyed manhandling and mistreating Richard more than he had before knowing she was a woman; and Aumerle’s (Ashley Hodgson) murder of the imprisoned Richard was startlingly preceded by attempts at extreme sexual violence.
Rather than a dramaturgically incomplete choice by Quandary Collective, the rewriting of Richard as a woman in disguise made sense within the production’s brutal post-apocalyptic Britain. Maertens’s strong central performance too meant the production benefited from a complex, enigmatic presence at its centre, anchoring the high concept throughout. Quandary Collective’s cutting of the play’s few women characters for their stripped-back cast of eight further emphasised the sense of a male-dominated society where violence and brute force had been prioritised over reason and balance. The cuts were less successful at a few points in the final act, however — anyone unfamiliar with the play prior to seeing Quandary Collective’s adaptation will likely struggle to follow the rapidly staged political shifts in the production’s last few scenes. With Exton absent from this production, for example, having Aumerle murder Richard due to the cutting of Exton didn’t quite make sense, with little explanation of how Aumerle had quickly gone from plotting Bolingbroke’s assassination to killing the former king he had spent much of the play supporting. Overall, however, this was a daring production that was unafraid to take risks and, far more often than not, succeeded in doing so. Based on what Quandary Collective have managed to do with Richard II, I’m looking forward to seeing what they do next with Shakespeare.
Quandary Collective’s production of Richard II is running at The Vaults Theatre, London, until Sunday 8 May. Tickets and more information are available here. Look out for future dates on Quandary Collective’s Twitter account here.
Richard II
Presented by Quandary Collective at The Vaults Theatre, London. 6 April–8 May 2022. Directed by Annie McKenzie. Set and costume design by Valentine Gigadet. With George Alexander (Henry Bolingbroke), Edwin Flay (The Duke of York), Ashley Hodgson (Aumerle), Coco Maertens (Richard II), Danann McAleer (Northumberland), Joshua Picton (Bushy/Sir Stephen Scroop), Joseph Quartson (John of Gaunt/The Bishop of Carlisle), and Troy Richards (Sir Thomas Mowbray/Lord Ross).
