THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By William Shakespeare
Bridge Theatre, 3 Potters Fields Park, London SE1 2SG until May 10, 2025
Guys and Dolls ran so long we’d nearly forgotten The Bridge exists, but it’s back with a bang with a high-profile Shakespeare starring a marquee-name.
Jonathan Bailey has safely crossed over the threshold of mega stardom and no doubt hordes of young Bridgerton and Wicked fans will cross continents to sit in the front rows and bathe in his reflected glory. Haven’t seen such mania since Cumberbatch’s Hamlet.
Nicholas Hytner’s production is solid but Bailey, although a great talent, is the wrong man for this job. Prince Hal, Henry V or Hamlet would have been a much better fit, for he’s a star and this part requires a character actor, of whatever age or gender. Fiona Shaw did it brilliantly 30 years ago before such casting was fashionable.
Let’s face it, Richard is an oddball – eccentric, vain, vindictive bordering on tyrannical and in Shakespeare’s reading presented negatively as ‘feminine’ by which he meant fickle, erratic, dishonest and indulged by flatterers. This was unkind to the real Richard, to put it mildly, but it has informed many flamboyant interpretations since. The idea was that the ‘adults’ had to take over and no one is more paternal than the hardheaded pragmatist Henry Bullingbrook (sic). Royce Pierreson is really fine as the quietly commanding usurper who of course goes on to spend Henry IV Parts I and II wracked with guilt at his act of regicide.
Ben Whishaw, who won a BAFTA for the great BBC version, played Richard as a flamboyant oddball with a Messiah complex and was utterly riveting, such that when they turned on him he really had our sympathy. Bailey could have run with that, camped him up a bit, but instead he plays it way too safe. Perhaps a director’s decision. What we’re left with is rather hollow. When he’s being extreme or cruel the audience nervously titters in scenes that are meant to be somber. He’s a buff, gay young blade whose main sin is coke-fuelled bitchiness. After a while it has no purchase on our emotions and you don’t really care which cousin might top him.
For this is all about cousins – it could be a soap – and unless you have the family tree in front of you (great programme by the way) you will struggle to distinguish the shouty geezers in business suits. Amazingly Bob Crowley has done the design and apart from a few chandeliers at the outset it is relentlessly spartan and monotone. An off day? Grant Olding’s insistent score echoes, to put it mildly, the theme from Succession and helps plunge us into the corporate HQ world. But, there is nothing remotely modern about these characters, their actions or sensibilities, to justify making it contemporary.
Take the symbol of the crown itself. The key theme here is the mystical hold that the Divine Right of Kings has on these characters, culminating in the great set piece when Richard has been summoned by Bullingbrook to the Commons to hand over the crown and Richard, mid tears, playfully jostles with him. Here the scene is flat, and the crown object is like something from a lucky bag that would the tossed around an office Christmas party.
Hytner has assembled an efficient and experienced ensemble, and he does give it great dynamism with quick scene changes using trapdoors in this in-the-round staging. Martin Carroll and Michael Simkins humanize the normally grumpy and staid uncles, John of Gaunt and the Duke of York, and Amanda Root’s Duchess of York is a barnstormer, as she pleads with Henry for the life of her traitorous son, Aumerle (Vinnie Heaven). Wittily the Yorks are dressed in country casuals straight out of a Sunday Telegraph color supplement.
This is a piece where ritual and reverence should hold sway, and it contains some of Shakespeare’s most exquisite poetry. A Succession-like sequence of board room squabbles doesn’t get near it.