Introduction by John Wilders

The historical background to the play posted difficulties for both (director David) Giles and Derek Jacobi as Richard. Before the action of the play begins the Duke of Gloucester, the king's uncle, has been murdered. Mowbray and Bolingbroke each accuse the other, while John of Gaunt remains discreet in public but in private blames the king. The undercurrents of the first scene go at least ten years back, when the king and his first queen were humiliated, his friends destroyed, by an alliance of five lords opposing the king. Says Giles, "One he has executed, one is in the tower, Gloucester has just been murdered, and now of the five only Mowbray and Bolingbroke, the two youngest, are left. Derek and I both agreed that the key section for Richard is the opening section of the play---the first three scenes. He said, 'Why is he so angry in the first scene?' and I said, 'He isn't--it's just high tension because it is the moment he has been waiting for so long."

The opening posed special problems for the actor playing Richard. As Derek Jacobi explains: "Since the first three scenes all contain allusions to the death of Gloucester, which happened before the play started, it was very necessary to find out about that and to decide exactly who was responsible for his murder. Shakespeare hasn't really given any indication from Richard's point of view that he actually saw that the murder was done. If you're playing Richard you have to decide 'Did I do it or didn't I?' and inform the lines from there. The first scene is frightfully difficult--it's so sketchy for Richard. He doesn't say very much and what he ways is frightfully kingly and public, but the man's got a lot to hide and a lot to lose and a lot to gain from the situation, and it's completely understated by Shakespeare."

"In some ways it's easier on television," adds the director, "because by focusing on Richard in crucial moments and by using major actors,..the audience does gather something of what has happened and you do realise that Shakespeare is on about something. In that way television helps." Conspiracies open out to the voyeuristic camera with a clarity impossible in an auditorium, small scenes scurried over in the flow of the action benefit from being shot on separate sets, in more intimate detail than time or budget could allow in the theatre. "I did notice", says Sir John Gielgud (John of Gaunt), who is in a position to know, "that in the little scenes that can be rather ineffective on the stage, like the scene between the three men after the death of Gaunt, by just having the heads very close together, it can be played very fast and with a very intimate feeling. On stage it seems very anticlimactic and apt to go for nothing. The fact that you can suddenly close in the stage so tightly is very valuable."

Flint Castle also benefits enormously from being on television. In Act III (iii), Richard, in one of the most famous scenes of the play, appears on the walls of Flint Castle, first to parley with his mutinous cousin and soon-to-be-usurper Bolingbroke, later to come down from the walls and submit. Says Giles: "On stage Richard has got to be way up at the back of the stage, yet he has one of his most private speeches up there. It's just wonderful to be able to put the camera in close-up on him for 'A little little grave, an obscure grave'. I personally think the camera is very helpful in Richard's soliloquy at the end of the play as well: it's all about time passing and, by using mixes during the speech, I think we move it on in time. I don't think we've broken the rhythm: each section of the soliloquy has him in a slightly different place doing something else, so time passes and we just swing the mixes through. It pushes you through a long period of time. When we got that idea, Derek just immediately fell for it and so did I--it's just lovely to do."

Bur "Richard II" stands or falls by its Richard. It is not simply a historical play,..it is also a great lyric play, very ritualistic, very poetic. It is also, perhaps more importantly, in (producer) Cedric Messina's words "the tragedy of one man". To a modern audience the history fades in significance beside the complex, neurotic quality of this striking modern figure. "I wanted from the first to get Derek Jacobi," says Messina. "I believe he is one of the great Richards and it is a performance that is completely realised in television terms." Jacobi, then still in mid-triumph for his television Claudius and his stage Hamlet, may seem like an obvious choice now, seeing his performance. It is clearly a major piece of work. Yet he had never played the part on stage, though playing it on radio in 'Vivat Rex' had whetted his appetite for the role. With him cast, the next step was to woo Sir John Gielgud, himself one of the great Richards in his youth, to play John of Gaunt--a challenging colleague for Jacobi to work alongside. There are pitfalls in Richard, as Gielgud points out. The play is famous for its verse but, says this crowned head of verse-speaking, "the verse is very ornamented and there are too many speeches of the same kind. It can become monotonous." "Every line in it is amazingly beautiful," agrees Jacobi. "I think that's where the actor has to be careful playing it. Because you can't go through the entire play saying 'Oh gosh, this is beautiful, isn't it? Oh, this is wonderful stuff.' It is, but you've really got to avoid that and forget it."

Adding to that danger, he points out, are the extra problems of working on television: 'Down, down I come'--the speech at Flint Castle--was begun on one set, interrupted, then finished on another set. "The freedom that you get on stage when the juices are really flowing, you don't get on television. There are too many technical things to worry about--the sound, the camera." Moreover, the sequence of the scenes for shooting imposed strains: "In the theatre, Shakespeare gives you time off, little breaks before your crescendos. Here we were doing the big scenes one after another. The orchestration of an actor's tempo is thrown out of gear---but it always is with television."

On the other hand television makes it possible to take a scene in a much lower key than is feasible in an auditorium: the camera will catch it. And a performance can be improved by the director in the editing. As we talk, none of these parts looks as though it fully makes up to him for the reassurance of a live audience and I stress how much better than good I thought he was. He smiles: "Good! Well, that's David Giles for you."

"I didn't do a great deal of background research. I read history at university so I already knew quite a lot about the period and about Richard. I don't think it's absolutely necessary to do much research---what you're doing is the play and from the actor's point of view you don't need a great deal of background. It was necessary to know who the seven sons of Edward III were, who succeeded whom and the relationships---and of course you need to know about the death of Gloucester!" But he already knew the play quite well, not only from 'Vivat Rex' but even before. "I was lucky, it was part of my schooldays too. It was one of my set books, so I knew about the play very well, and I found a lot of the words came back. I found it quite easy to learn."

It was the theatricality, the play-acting of the part that Jacobi first concentrated on: "There's an almost Chekhovian self-diagnosis all the time, and play-acting. He cries wolf quite a bit and the problem comes in knowing when it's for real and where for effect, knowing where the actor in Richard stops and the man begins. The line is often very tenuous. In the deposition scene, for instance, the man is obviously at rock bottom but he gives a marvelous account of himself. The actor's instinct there is obviously: 'If I've got to go, I'm going to go in style.' That I found fascinating. At the same time all the emotions are absolutely real for him--but he can switch it on." He laughs admiringly. "It's one of the easiest of the histories to follow. It really is the classic tragedy of the great man falling, of riches to rags. He starts as the great sun, the godlike king, and he ends as this poor prisoner in Pomfret Castle, all alone. A man who had the world at his feet, a court of sycophants, and ultimately played his cards all wrong."

"There's a most wonderful line at the end of the play," adds Messina. "We have seen the fall of this king, seen the screw of fate turning, then in comes Exton, the man who has killed him, with his body, and says to Bolingbroke: 'Herein all breathless lies The mightiest of thy great enemies, Richard of Bordeaux, by me hither brought.' Throughout the play he has been address by every regal title. Here after his death he's called, quite simply, Richard of Bordeaux. That's a most wonderful moment!"