A desire to “do something different with Shakespeare” is one which preoccupies many companies. Anyone who's seen more than a handful of Shakespeare plays knows the experience of sitting through two and a half hours of people masticating the Bard and spitting him back out again in the hopeful expectation of applause. The strength of the RSC’s Richard II lies in the sense that the text has been allowed to take the lead rather than the will or whim of any director or cast member. There is no sense of dour obligation in this. Instead of po-faced reverence leading to stiff performances, there is a palpably excited "digging into" the language.

As befits a play so concerned with performance, at times Richard II positively revels in its own artificiality; chiming and rhyming its rhythmic iambic pentameter and marking its division into scenes with a soprano choir. This attention to the text’s formal features enables a clash between the knowingly affected deliveries of set piece speeches from Richard (Tennant) and the meaty, earthy exclamations of Bollingbroke (Lindsay).

Where it would be so easy to allow the softness and self-indulgence in Richard to become lazily and hysterically camp, Tennant plays him with remarkable restraint. The Titian blonde flounces around the stage like a demented rockstar but with the authority of a leader. He may wear a silver robe rather than silver plate but his lack of military masculinity does not leave him as anything less than a dominant presence. He can banish the thundering Mowbray and Bollingbroke with a word, however softly spoken it is. The development of the play can be traced in the change in his body language from a strutting, prominent figure to his stiff-backed exit as a self-styled martyr. Tennant’s performance is by turns acutely artificial and at others bruised and human: the scene in which he is deposed, a masterclass in becoming gently unhinged.

The staging too is a particular triumph. The projection techniques, which send hazy echoes of Westminster Abbey into the black in the opening scene, change with the flicking of a switch into something else, perhaps in a nod to Richard’s own fragile position. The projections grew less effective in other scenes but lighting director Tim Mitchell managed to turn the backdrop’s unusual gold fringe curtains from the ornate walls of the throne room to biting frost and then make them all but disappear. The effect was beautifully simple, but beautifully executed.

The other major coup of the staging is the descending and ascending throne, which touches the ground only when Bollingbroke comes to claim it. Richard often sits above the fray, slightly out of it and his fall from kingship begins with a fluid, ecclesiastical descent from heaven and ends with him clambering down the stairs. This exploration of physical hierarchy culminates in the dungeon scene. I won't spoil it by giving away its secret, but be assured that it is as breath-taking in its desolation as Richard’s final descent is in its majesty. 

All the excitement of this production is in the text and the staging. There is no gimmick. Doran trusts the text to do its own work in engaging its audience and gives it strong actors, good staging and enough time to do so.