The voice of Shakespeare, the heart of a nihilist

JULIA TIERNAN/YH This ain't you daddy's Shakespeare.

Locked in the Tower of London, dispossessed of his crown, Richard II murmurs into the darkness, "Thus play I in one person many people/ And none contented." Even moments before his death, Richard remains an actor, preparing his lines and toying with possible interpretations. He can never do what he says that he intends because he is a pure solipsist, with no ally but himself. The realm of rhetoric is where this verbose ruler is most at home, but any promises for action are always imprisoned within the words which declare them; Richard is at once a singularly decorous and ineffectual king.

Richard II is, then, both alluring and perilous ground for the Shakespeare dramatist. The play's metatheatrical trappings beg endless reinterpretation, and its lush oratory is any actor's dream. Still, Richard himself--an inert and hapless figure whose declarations amount to mere vacant ceremony--makes for a potentially static, uncompelling protagonist. His final soliloquy, a conflation of his ever-shifting public persona with the real sorrow and rage he feels upon his usurpation, is perhaps the first and finest example of metaphysical poetry in the English canon. Yet the audience takes in emotions that seem stated more comprehensively than they are felt, and this distance between feeling and its expression is not overcome even by Richard's self-damning, self-elegizing final speech.

The current undergraduate production of this difficult play, however, has a trump card against all these conflicting concerns, and her name is Christina Paraskevopoulos,
SM '99. She has collected her fearless physicality and magnificently expressive voice, showcased in last semester's Desire Under the Elms, into the guise of a King, and all but solves Richard's inherent weaknesses as a play subject.

In the early scenes, while an amused and condescending Richard arbitrates the mortally serious quarrel between accused traitors Bollingbroke and Mowbray, Paras-kevopoulos wears a look of anticipatory glee that reveals Richard's perverse adoration for ceremony, regardless of its hollowness or its human costs. Later, when Bollingbroke has put the plan of his revenge into motion, the actress captures the frustration of a regent with no capacity for decisive action. We recognize Richard's emptiness and futility and find ourselves scornful and sympathetic.

Such a contradictory response is just what one would demand from a production of a play that traffics in paradox to the extent that Richard II does. Bardolators might take issue with the way Paraskevopoulos cuts a quick, decisive swath through many of Richard's speeches, which even in the depths of his despair are outbursts of opulent, even exuberant verbosity. I would counter that her deliberate speed reveals the tremulous anxiety and growing desperation of a king whose very rhetorical genius has helped undo her.

I hesitate over "her"--director Chipo Chung, TC '00, has cast her players with disregard for sex or ethnicity, and assigning a gender to Richard is tough going. As ruler, he's a he; as deposed private citizen, she's a she. This treatment of the king, pleasingly, is more gender-ending than gender-bending: Richard is an essentially sexless character, more in love with himself than man or woman, and Paraskevopoulos's command of the role leaves the whole matter a non-issue. Not so for the other players. Annabelle Steinhacker's,
ES '00, Bagot is the king's lewd, sinewy sycophant who, as it turns out, has an acute mind of her own. Julia Kots, TC '00, plays the Queen as screaming maenad, reaching dizzy heights of querulous feminine helplessness. And Ryan Karels, BR '00, inhabits Bollingbroke as testosterone personified, an agent of canny brute force. With readings that fluctuate between sarcasm and rage, he pinpoints the conflicting pulls of righteousness and shame that guide Bolling-broke's actions.

Despite Karels' magnetic presence, the play belongs to Paraskevopoulos. The last soliloquy, which she delivers on her knees, is a haunting study of the depths of human self-abjection. Richard is stunned to find that, despite all her shows of pomp and oratory, she has no meaning. A shade of nihilism casts itself over this realization, and over much of this play in which anything seems possible: the divine right of kingship can be perverted by a bad ruler, or overthrown by a bad subject. There are several moments when Chung's cast stares unblinkingly into this void, within which they are utterly, terribly free. One hears it in York's small gasp of grief after Bollingbroke kills two of Richard's men, and sees it in a surreal, frightening scene in which Northumberland (Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum, JE '00) literally takes the Queen's breath away. Northumberland is the portent
of doom throughout this production of Richard II, a ghoulish onlooker bemused by the death and destruction trans-piring around him. He embodies the play's essential inevitability; rarely has the inevitable been so startling, or so revelatory.

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