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Succession Complex

Richard II with Rocco Sisto

And so Shakespeare & Company has decided to present the history cycle, and Artistic Director Tony Simotes is jocund in announcing the decision. When a theater company chooses its season, Shakespeare's histories are sometimes treated as the plainer sister of the comedies and tragedies, but in asking her to the stage for a five- or six-year engagement (so many summers will be devoted to the cycle), Simotes betrays the twinkle of introducing friends to the particular beauty of an overlooked and treasured thing. Richard II, which begins the project, opened on the Shakespeare & Company campus, its late nineteenth century buildings dotting the green Berkshire landscape.

It is fitting, in a way, that the histories are the best-kept secret of Shakespeare aficionados. The world that they create is not cosmetically complex, but complex at the core, with the stuff of politics and ingenious secrets mingling form and subject. We get the feeling that whole worlds of intrigue are happening in the realm offstage where armies are assembled and espionage shakes the world, while we happen to be seated in the secure room where every important conversation and exchange of loyalties takes place. That we might feel baffled keeping straight the enormous casts of characters is almost the point: it is likely Shakespeare understood that the difficult navigation of myriad players and their shifting affections is one of the troubles of statecraft. Another is secrecy, and the talking-around truth that shifts affections and shapes political reality.

Director Timothy Douglas has done much to show us this world. He does not shy from theology, which is very good: if he did, the play would not be comprehensible. Richard II deals with regime change, with a focus on the ideological problem presented by reconciling violent shifts of power with the divine right of kings: if God has chosen the King, how can the King be deposed? "In an ideal existence," says Douglas, "the King brings together Christ's divine and earthly effects, and the expectation of this fusion has become essential for understanding—not only Shakespeare's play, but the whole political culture of early modern England."

 

As Shakespeare & Co. launches into the history cycle, its community of artists will engage part of this tradition: speaking truth speaks truth to power. And there could have been no better way to commence the project than with this Richard II

 

Yet the transposition of this specific scene onto contemporary sensibilities—always among a director's concerns—is articulate.  Costumes by Herin Kaputkin lend support to an elegant reserve in the production’s design, folding contemporary reference into visions of power hinged on religiosity with echoes of the twentieth century megachurch, creating a floating signifier for the weird nexus of power held by the new age minister and the neo-conservative politician.  And the gage, so often thrown down in indignation during this play, is here a holy book: a legible decision and constant reminder of the Word that plays on individual action and, more importantly, vice versa.

But this intellectual shell is not the stuff of what we see or hear in Richard II. Shakespeare & Company is a haven for fine actors with a passionate, tactile sense of language, and no dramaturgical apparatus is allowed to beat the humanity out of a performer. "While combing through the play and meditating on modern day parallels for what I believe to be its inherent seeds of fundamentalism," Douglas says, "I was determined to remain faithful to the script's original intent to expose each character's humanity and articulated need that drives them forward. . . We tend not the surface, but the driving forces inside."

So Rocco Sisto, a founder of Shakespeare & Company, plays Richard.

a man looking at the camera
Rocco Sisto as Richard II. Photo: Kevin Sprague.

"I'm drawn to the journey man makes; how grace is achieved," he says. The remark is a gloss on his performance. Achievement, of course, is a word of personal agency: in fact it is specifically related to a coming to power. Sharing a root with the word chief, its structure (the prefix A- for rise or increase, chever or chief for the head of a particular body) seems to describe a trajectory that is the opposite of Richard's. But grace is fundamentally given. The achievement of grace is thus a paradox, a kind of worded illustration of the theological problem of the play, and betrays a comprehension of tragedy that sings in Sisto's portrayal.

As is often the case with tragic heroes, Richard becomes most magnetic and powerful as a character in his fall from power. As a secure head of state, Richard is something of a stuffed shirt. In the dissociation of the crown and the body, he knows the worm at the root of personal identity, in what amounts to a sublime understanding of the will of God. He becomes unassailable in all but the most basely physical sense and, in Sisto's performance at least, our senses cleave to him.

What this vision of the play requires, from the director and from the excellent supporting cast, is an ability to dwell in the complexity of politics without allowing the audience recourse to any oversimplified narrative. This is not a Richard II that colors the King bumbling: we are never given the impression that he has simply missed the possibility of Henry of Hereford's revolt in a queer, greed-blind fog. Instead, the tone of the early scenes is like the tone of some Orson Welles movies, where each of the actors seems to simultaneously glimpse and restrain the recognition of ruin hinging upon the next utterance. Douglas reminds us that Richard II was the first English king to practice diplomacy before war: his court is fastidiously diplomatic. The circumlocution of meaning becomes dizzying, while the poise of the players is absolute. And Richard's action is not bumbling: it is subtle to a fault that bursts from the most strained seams. That even life and death must be treated with austerity, that this culture of diplomacy forces the highest officials to act against their own interests: these are the unsustainable faults of Richard's reign, and with Mr. Douglas' treatment the play's ironies shine. As the plot reaches its crisis, the rising wills of God, the earth, and monstrous death march in parallel, opposing ranks to the ornate brutality of obfuscating speech.

Many of the games that Shakespeare & Company uses for the training of young actors turn on the play of status: in its most elementary form, three actors are given a hierarchy, where "1" gives orders to "2", and "2" gives orders to "3": a revelation of this game is how interesting it is to watch the "3"s.  Studies in court manners, and how to behave in the presence of the King, follow from here. Absolute power, it becomes clear, need not suppress individual will so long as you play by the rules: it is a game of psychology. Even from a position of lower status, it is possible to take power over the King by accurately predicting the ways he might respond to situations, and creating double binds while appearing to be a puppet. Whether this is what Harry of Hereford (Tom O'Keefe) has done is invisible even to the audience, and if this snubs our accustomed omniscience, it makes the play. History is sometimes mysterious, and some important kinds of action are more like passivity than scheming. If something has happened, it is up to each of us to determine what it is, for we will not be told.

At least, we will not be told as a statement of fact, where the telling is most dead. Richard several times urges storytelling, once in his famous speech, "For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings," and again to his Queen when he bids her goodbye:

In winter's tedious nights sit by the fire
With good old folks and let them tell thee tales
Of woeful ages long ago betid;
And ere thou bid good night, to quit their griefs,
Tell thou the lamentable tale of me
And send the hearers weeping to their beds:
For why, the senseless brands will sympathize
The heavy accent of thy moving tongue
And in compassion weep the fire out;
And some will mourn in ashes, some coal-black,
For the deposing of a rightful king.

The question, as ever, is how the story of change is told, even in small communities, even on tedious nights. As Shakespeare & Co. launches into the history cycle, its community of artists will engage part of this tradition: speaking truth speaks truth to power. And there could have been no better way to commence the project than with this Richard II. No outright reference to current events is needed; no indication of how we ought to draw parallels. Fine theater exposes systems of complexity that need not be decoded if they are performed. The parallels are constant, and unshakeable.

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