Richard II & Henry V: Lessons in Leadership

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- Richard II and Henry V are the bookends of the four Shakespeare history plays that include Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. Richard is deposed by his cousin Bolingbroke, who thus becomes Henry IV and is succeeded by his son as Henry V. It's a family affair.

But Richard and Henry V, despite being related, are polar opposites as kings. This has inspired Michael Kahn, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington to stage the two plays in what is being called the "Leadership Repertory," a fitting conceit for the nation's capital.

The two plays show how to lead well (Henry V) and how to lead badly (Richard II). Actually, it is a bit of a stretch to find a leadership lesson in Richard -- unless it be "try to avoid a leader with multi-polar disorder."

Both kings are men of words -- despite Henry's coy and disingenuous avowal that he is a simple soldier with no eloquence as he woos the French Princess Katharine in the play's final scenes. But they use their words for radically different purposes.

A Self-Absorbed Ruler

Richard inhabits a world of words. He is pathologically narcissistic and subject to violent mood swings. His life is a performance in which he is both the lead actor and primary audience. The STC production captures this very well with a golden throne under a spotlight in the center of the otherwise bare thrust-stage. Richard himself is clad in gold with a swirling gold cape in which he poses and preens.

Richard is a terrible king. His self-absorption leads him to act with no sense of consequences. He has one uncle -- Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester -- killed, and seizes the lands of another -- John of Gaunt -- the moment he dies. He farms out the right to raise taxes to fawning coterie of sycophants with whom he surrounds himself to bolster his self-delusions.

At the same time he lacks the authority of command as when he tries to settle a deadly quarrel between Bolingbroke, his cousin and the son of John of Gaunt who will prove to be Richard's nemesis, and Thomas Mowbray. His actions are both callous and impolitic and undermine his own royal power as he turns more and more people against him.

Retreat into Rhetoric

As reality starts to snap at Richard's heels, he retreats into his rhetoric. The play is often seen as an examination of the nature of kingship and it is true that there are characters who consider the crown to be bestowed by God. The Duke of York, early in the play, says that only God can judge the king, though he later shifts his position and offers support to the usurper Bolingbroke. The Bishop of Carlisle delivers a heartfelt warning of the troubles that will befall a land that overthrows its divinely anointed king.

For Richard though the divine character of kingship is rather a conceit into which he retreats to hide himself from the reality that he created unwittingly and is now undermining his kingship.

As theater it is both fascinating and exasperating. Whatever Bolingbroke's ultimate goal -- the crown or simply to recover his father's lands -- he plays his cards close to his chest and never speaks of seeking the crown. Richard, in effect, talks himself out of his own crown.

It is he who puts his deposition on the table in a situation where a political king would be angling to maintain some vestige of power. And perhaps after all there is a "how not to negotiate" leadership lesson in that.

Michael Kahn as director and Michael Hayden who plays Richard handle the scenes surrounding Richard's deposition most effectively. Richard's rhetoric throws the rest of the cast into an almost hypnotic trance while he is speaking, with Charles Borland as Bolingbroke managing to suggest just enough puzzlement -- "what on Earth is he talking about" -- and irritation -- "will he never stop" -- to modify the spell.

Once Richard does stop speaking, the spell is broken and a reality unmodified by Richard's words reasserts itself. The effect, enormously heightened, is rather like South Carolina's Gov. Mark Sanford going on and on to reporters about the soul mate he had found in his Argentinian mistress.

Stripped of his crown and his court, alone in prison before his murder, Richard faces life without the trappings of kingship, through which he has defined himself. Some critics see Richard finding a measure of self-realization through his fall. I am not convinced.

Seeds of Hamlet and Lear

It seems to me that, alone, Richard simply changes his performance. Now he is better able to address his primary audience, himself, and does so as poet. But he is not Lear undergoing a profound transformation. Rather he comes up with different reflections to comfort himself and still keep reality at bay. It is a fascinating process though because one can see in Richard's prison speech the seeds of something in Shakespeare that would grow into both the soliloquies of Hamlet and the incandescent experience of Lear.

Hayden, who has taken on the daunting task of playing the lead in both plays, does much with a difficult part. My one criticism is that, in trying to convey the mental disorientation of Richard in prison and his grasping for his new story, he breaks up his lines into staccato pieces that make it hard to follow the sense of the whole -- and what Richard says does make sense.

The staging is masterful as one has come to expect from the STC. Watching the pace of the performance so perfectly judged on the thrust-stage with audience on three sides it is odd to recall that once not so long ago this seemed hugely experimental. The STC makes it seem the most natural way to do Shakespeare.

There are strong performances from the cast supporting Hayden. Charles Borland is intriguing as Bolingbroke appearing at first as a bluff soldier pursuing a quarrel of honor and gradually revealing that he is an astute political animal who, in contrast with Richard, knows when to keep his mouth shut.

Philip Goodwin as Gaunt and Ted van Griethuysen as York, older actors representing the older generation in the play, give powerful performances. This is not a women's play but the three women in the play leave a lasting impression: Robynn Rodriguez as the widow of the murdered Gloucester; Rachael Holmes, a moving Queen Isabel who doubles as an absolutely delightful Princess Katharine in Henry V; and Naomi Jacobson who, as Duchess of York, is a lioness in defending her son Aumerle from the consequences of his plotting against Bolingbroke, newly crowned as Henry IV.

Henry V: Words into Action

Henry V is a man of action and has the authority of command that Richard lacks. Plenty of leadership lessons to be learned from him.

But he is also a man of words, so much so that two of his speeches -- "once more unto the breach, dear friends," and the St. Crispin's day speech -- have taken on a life of their own, often being recited outside the context of the play.

Where Richard constructs an alternate reality for himself out of his words, Henry uses words to change the reality that he is faced with. This is what happens with all his major speeches.

At the siege of Harfleur the English are beating themselves to exhaustion against the city's defenses and their resolve is flagging. Left to themselves they might want to call it a day. But here is Henry urging, "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead." [An English officer on D-Day 1944 urged on his men who were pinned down by German fire with the cry, "Do you all want to live forever?"]

And he changes their minds, putting new spirit into them. And in changing their minds he changes how they will act.

Harfleur eventually surrenders as a result of a verbal act of terrorism by Henry -- a speech that Laurence Olivier cut from his 1944 patriotic film version. Henry offers mercy if the town surrenders but promises that if they resist further their wives and daughters will be raped and their children spitted on spears when the town does eventually fall. It is a terrible threat and Henry delivers it with such conviction that the resolve of the defenders crumbles where their walls had not.

"We Band of Brothers"

The height of Henry's achievement in making things happen through words comes with the St. Crispin's day speech -- "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers." It's a great speech, a great patriotic set piece and that makes it a problem for actor and director. It is so well known that, like the "To be or not be" soliloquy, it can be hard to fit back into the play of which it is supposed to be part.

Kenneth Branagh, in his film version -- and the STC production owes much but not all to Branagh -- gives us a wonderfully inspiring delivery of the speech that yet seems out of rhythm with the rest of the film.

Director David Muse and Hayden as Henry succeed magnificently in getting the speech back into the play. It begins with Westmoreland's remark that he wished 10,000 of the men doing nothing in England that day were there with them.

Muse and the cast have done an excellent job in conveying how desperate the English situation is. Tired, sick, hungry, they are trapped and faced with a vastly superior force. Men know they face death and are resigned rather than resolved to do so. They are apprehensive. They wish they were somewhere else. They wish there were more of them.

Henry tackles these fears head on and turns the lack of English numbers into a strength. He does not want one additional man since that will dilute the share of honor each will have. In fact, he orders "that he which hath no stomach for this fight, let him depart." Henry does not want to fight beside someone who does not want to be there. Gradually, their situation is transformed from desperately undesirable to one that men will regret not sharing.

It is all done with smoke and mirrors, an appeal to honor and to comradeship. Nothing has changed about their situation objectively. But how Henry's army views that situation has changed and because of that they will fight differently.

Hayden delivers the last part of the speech on one knee, his men gathered around him in a circle, arms over each other's shoulders. It helps rescue the speech from set piece declamation and reflects the bond between fighting men that has become understood through works like Stephen Ambrose's oral history made into a TV series and aptly called "Band of Brothers."

Costs of Leadership

There are many more good things in this STC production. Hayden's Henry is a warts-and-all portrayal. We see the costs and pressures of leadership -- the decision to execute Bardolph, one of his old drinking companions from his riotous youth as Prince Hal, for plundering a church, which Henry has forbidden; the order to kill the French prisoners in the heat and confusion of battle when the issue is still undecided.

Hayden shows too the personal cost of leadership. His Henry kneels for a moment reflectively, alone, over the corpse of Bardolph, whom he has just condemned. His anger flares up at Lord Scrope, one of the three traitors who took French money to kill him, and who had been a trusted friend.

Muse's production is crisp and creative. The chorus that has an important role in setting the scene for the audience throughout the play is split into three characters. It could have been a gimmick but here it works remarkably well, even down to a professorial character showing the progress of the English army by ship to Harfleur with a laser pointer on a wall map.

Battles are always a challenge on the stage, as Shakespeare himself recognized, when he had his chorus appeal to the audience to use their imaginations creatively. Muse takes a new approach here. Instead of a few representative actors chasing and bashing each other around the stage, he turns off the lights and gives us the sounds of battle in darkness.

If I were introducing someone to Shakespeare for the first time I might avoid Richard II till they knew the Bard's work better. It is a difficult play. But I can think of no finer introduction to Shakespeare than this magnificent, accessible and compelling STC production of Henry V.

Both plays will run at the Sidney Harman Hall in Washington until April 10.