ONSTAGE at the Old Vic last night was an exalted personage who had squandered time and money on trivial and/or unworthy things, had been savagely attacked by the solemn and severe for doing so, and . . . but let’s not dwell on Kevin Spacey’s first season as the theatre’s artistic director.

Instead, let’s consider Spacey’s Richard II, a character whose rather similar flaw is, as he admits just before his murder, that “I wasted time and now doth time waste me”. Indeed, let’s celebrate a performance that is the very opposite of a waste of his or our time. Thanks to his skills and Trevor Nunn’s direction, it is strong enough for us at last to feel confident about the future of Spacey’s regime and of our most venerable classical theatre.

The evening begins, strikingly, with Spacey’s Richard watched by lords in ermine as he is accoutred with crown, sceptre and orb. A moment later, he and his nobles divest to reveal suits beneath, for this is a modern-dress production; but by then the gravity and the ceremonial have achieved their end. Spacey’s Richard firmly believes, as Shakespeare’s original did, that he is God’s lieutenant on Earth, ruling by divine right.

Here is the key to Spacey’s reading. Even when he is warned of danger to come, he simply cannot conceive of the possibility of being opposed, let alone overthrown. He comes across as pretty smug, but also more justified in complacency than most Richards, for he has genuine charisma, majesty and even strength of will. Although he enjoys off-duty cavorting in nightclubs with Oliver Kieran-Jones’s pretty-boy Aumerle and his other chums, he is not the weak, petulant, spoiled, effeminate figure of tradition — but, well, a king.

Nunn cuts the opening tournament, but gives us mobile phones and men in SAS gear, a photoshoot for Richard’s queen and newsmen with cameras, whose work is projected on to screens beside the stage. This allows us to hear Julian Glover deliver Gaunt’s “This England” speech four times and to see motorcades, riots and, twice, Richard’s abdication. With characters sometimes changing tone and tune before the cameras, it also emphasises one of the play’s points: that there is a big difference between public statement and private feeling.

For all the pomp, circumstance and diagonal parades, Nunn’s production is never merely picturesque. Moreover, he gets strong performances from everybody, especially Oliver Cotton as ruthless Northumberland and Ben Miles as a Bolingbroke so cool and menacing that he might be a company smoothie engineering the boardroom putsch that will make him the chairman of England plc. He visibly toughens as Spacey’s Richard discovers his vulnerability.

Moreover, Spacey gives us the disbelief, the pain and sometimes the rage of that discovery; but he never loses the dignity he had from the start. Last night a power surge in SE1 upset the stage lighting and caused a delay: it did nothing to detract from the power source called Spacey.

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SPACEY'S HITS AND MISSES

The Philadelphia Story (May 2005)
*** “[The] production is fluent enough, but can’t hide the fact that [the writer] Barry makes too little of his most promising comic situation, the pretence to the intrusive journo that Tracy’s bottom-pinching uncle is her father”