King and Country: The Second Henriad at BAM

Adhaar Desai (Bard College)

After one grows accustomed to the sufficiently epic proportions of the second tetralogy at BAM, the elegant sets, live musicians, and explosive pyrotechnics give way to the sequence’s more enduring pleasures. The intimate attention director Gregory Doran gives each character trains us to perceive how the little things—an image, a gesture, a laugh—reverberate across the cycle and figure in miniature the broad rhythms and clamorous repetitions of history.

Richard II, featuring a dynamic performance by a tidal David Tennant, ends with the ghost of Richard appearing on the balcony to haunt a gasping Bolingbroke. By the start of Henry IV pt. 1, Richard’s martyred form has become a hanging statue of Christ, before which a penitent Bolingbroke lies “shaken.” Such forms of indirect continuity allow the plays to work well in isolation (though perhaps 2H4 demands most of audiences), but the way Doran allows them to draw upon one another is often revelatory. Altogether, the sequence foregrounds how each of Shakespeare’s kings share the same impossible bind of being committed to “tradition, form, and ceremonious duty” while also being individuals who “live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends.”

As the deposed Richard warns while looking into a cracked mirror, a king’s “brittle glory” easily becomes “a hundred shivers,” each one reflecting a different “shadow.” Through this fractured lens, a small prank Bolingbroke plays upon Hotspur (a strikingly complex portrayal by Matthew Needham) in Richard II can seem to find reflection in…