A SENSITIVE soul with a weakness for a verbal flourish, Richard II is one of Shakespeare’s great drama queens, and it allows Mark Rylance to deliver a bravura performance in the opening production of the new season at Shakespeare’s Globe. To come is an all-female company giving us Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew. For now, we have Tim Carroll’s doublet-and-hose, trumpets-and-sackbuts, all-male staging of Richard II.

As the incompetent, self-centred, increasingly unpopular tax-and-spend king who is usurped by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, Rylance delivers a masterclass in mercurial manners. He can be petulant and cruel, covering his face with a silk handkerchief as he visits the dying John of Gaunt. He can also be tender as he says farewell to his exiled wife.

This dandyish Richard in puffed-out doublet, as if aware that he’s not cut out to be a ruler, childishly tries to upstage his ritual-bound nobles with a defiantly unregal air. He wipes a seat before sitting down, smirks at his sycophantic followers, thrusts his hands in his pockets and walks with an almost Chaplinesque gait.

This Richard also has a sense of the absurd, turning the deposition scene into a momentarily farcical tug-of-war as he uses his crown to toy with Bolingbroke. Richard’s mocking wit even seems to extend to the text at times as Rylance’s quavery voice pauses unexpectedly to turn such speeches as “my large kingdom for a little grave” into nervously humorous reflections. It’s always more a sign of vulnerability and self-doubt than chutzpah.

It’s only towards the end that Richard, as he matures through some soulful prison soliloquies with which Rylance builds a touching intimacy with the audience, really asserts his authority by killing two warders with a pike before being murdered himself. By then, of course, it’s too late. All of the actorly flourishes that have gone before have merely been hollow point-scoring.

Rylance takes an ineffectual character and dominates the stage with it. Unfortunately he eclipses the rest of the play. Liam Brennan is a stolid Bolingbroke, torn between honour and realpolitik, and John McEnery as John of Gaunt anatomises Richard’s ignoble reign with authoritative passion. But most of the gauntlet-tossing noblemen are blandly played or, like Gerald Kyd’s Harry Percy, have a Black-adder swagger.

Bill Stewart’s side-straddling Duke of York bustles around like an Elizabethan Captain Mainwaring. And having men in the female roles adds little in a play dominated by lords (Gloucester, Norfolk, Hereford, etc) who can make the play sound like a geography lesson; the pleading of Peter Shorey’s Duchess of York for her treacherous son becomes a knockabout rather than darkly comic interlude.

What’s missing from Carroll’s production is any tangible sense of the divine right of kings, the violation of a natural order of things and the fate of a nation at stake. In turning Richard into a self-absorbed actor who writes his own script, Rylance gives us a dazzling turn. But by the end we are left thinking more about the player than the king.

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