ABSTRACT
The set for the RSC’s 2000 Richard II is self-consciously sparse. It consists of a long, low, wooden box centre stage, with a gold chair on it; not a golden chair, an ornate chair, but a distinctly ordinary-looking chair, sprayed gold. The chair has a crimson jacket hung on its back and a gold circlet on its seat. Centre right is a grave-shaped mound of earth. The box, the chair and the mound are placed in a white room, the RSC’s Other Place studio theatre, which players and audience share. We are all dimly lit in fluorescent purple. Large, white double-doors centre stage, with white alcoves either side, provide upstage entrances. There are three more doors in the side walls of the playing space, seemingly not part of the mise en scène. One of them has a Fire Exit sign on it. More chairs—plain white versions of the gold one—stand around the walls. A peal of hand-bells sounds. Actors enter through the double doors, wearing, for the most part, jackets and trousers in deep purples and reds; they smack of luxury, of haute couture. 5 The actors stand in frozen tableau, looking at the chair on the wooden box. Samuel West, who is to play Richard, enters from the raked seating where he has been sitting with the audience. He has been reading a copy of Richard II. He walks up stage right and bolts a door, one of the ‘real’ doors in the wall of the studio, a door that leads to another part of the building. He sits down on the end of the wooden box and speaks a Prologue, constructed from the first lines from Act 5 Scene 5 of the play—Richard’s ‘prison’ soliloquy: I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world, And for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer’t it out. (5.5.1–5) …Sometimes am I a king, Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar (5.5.32–3) Then am I kinged again, and by and by Think that I am unkinged… And straight am nothing…(5.5.36–8) Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented. (5.5.31–2) …But whate’er I be Nor I nor any man that but man is With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased With being nothing. (5.5.38–41)
