Richard II

Richard II

All men die in solitude; all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me, Ionesco once described his very own Shakespeare experience. On Saturday 7th February 1601, when the aging Queen Elizabeth was just two years from her death, the bard‘s company was asked to perform Richard II — of all plays — at the Globe Theatre. Richard II is one of William Shakespeare’s history plays, written and published around 1595, about the last two years of Richard II’s reign and how he was deposed by Henry IV, imprisoned and murdered. It vividly depicts the dramatic struggle between Richard II and his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, shows a kingdom between worlds. Richard is the legitimate king, a monarch ordained by God to lead his people. But he is also a man of very human weakness, seen by many as a player, a gambler, a wasteful tyrant. A hollow king. He toys with his subjects, exiling Bolingbroke for six years. A man whose vanity threatens to divide the people of England and drag his country into a dynastic civil war that will last 100 years. Director Anne Simon is going to tell this story of power, plotting, and abuse, a drama about the cynical destruction of basic human values and principles for selfish purposes, with a radically reduced cast of only two actors, stripping the tragedy down to the core of the plot. Director: Anne SimonCast in progress