[ad_1]
Bridgerton Jonathan Bailey will play Richard II in a new production of Shakespeare’s historical play directed by Nicholas Hytner at the Bridge theater in London.
It will reunite the star with Huettner, whose version of Othello at the National Theatre in 2013 it featured Bailey as Cassio. Bailey also plays Edgar opposite Ian McKellen King Lear at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2017. But playing the Plantagenet monarch will be the most popular Shakespeare role to date for the actor, who is best known for his role as Lord Anthony Bridgerton in the hit Netflix period drama. Performances will begin on the Bridge on February 10.
The question posed by Shakespeare’s Richard II, Hyttner said, is: “What do you do when the ruler is totally inadequate? How do you get rid of the legitimate leader?” “On the one hand, the play supports Richard’s right to rule, and on the other, it seems to [his adversary] Bolingbroke’s greater ability to rule. The production will reveal “a feudal world on the threshold of modernity,” he said.
It will be designed by Bob Crowley and will be laid out in what Hytner described as “a cross between an in-the-round and a traverse,” rather than Hytner’s sweeping, coastal style Julius Caesar and Dream in a summer night, which brought the audience closer to the actors from Mosta. “Richard II has a delicacy and an interiority that will not respond to that kind of treatment,” he said, adding that the theater – which opened on Tower Bridge in 2017 – was a very flexible space.
Richard II would follow Guys and Dolls which has been running at the hall since March 2023 and will have its final performance on January 4. “We didn’t think it would last as long as it did,” said Hytner, who explained that the long run of the widely acclaimed musical gave the theater “a little bit of financial stability.” He wanted to stage a musical in the same vein as he had made Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Guys and Dolls was the right choice for that kind of treatment because it has a big, strong heart and it has a direct appeal to the audience, a connection that you allows you to dive right into it.”
The Bridge is the flagship venue of the London Theater Company, which was founded by Hytner and Nick Starr. His other space is Lightroom in King’s Cross, where an an immersive David Hockney exhibition is back for another run, along with a multimedia experience about the Apollo moon landings. It will eventually be hosted live as well. “The very long-term plan is for it to be a theatre, but it’s working so well and we have so much in the pipeline [multimedia] form I can’t say when,” Hittner said.
[ad_2]
