Richard II
William Shakespeare
“A theatrical Powerhouse”
Frantastic View
Scena Mundi is a London-based ensemble theatre company founded in 2013 by Cecilia Dorland to produce elaborate, uncompromising classical theatre in unusual spaces (mainly churches). Their stagings are known for the quality of the actors’ performances and the excellent period text work.
Our main productions were: Love’s Metamorphosis (2013), Everyman (2014), The Sad Stories of the Death of Kings: Edward II & Richard II (2015), Twelfth Night, Volpone (2016), The Duchess of Malfi (2017). Our latest play, Murder in the Cathedral, staged in Southwark Cathedral (London) in November 2019, was a great public and critical success.
The Richard II company
8 & 9 April 2022, 7.30 pm
Réfectoire des Cordeliers, Paris
- The show is in English without surtitles -
Our scene: the kingdom of England at the end of the XIVth century.
Our action: the usurpation of legitimate Plantagenet king Richard II by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Lancaster and future king Henry IV.
Richard II is an aesthetic and political reflection about the power of kings and its dramatisation. It is a dance, a "pas de deux" choreographed by Shakespeare and showing the confrontation of Richard and Bolingbroke over the most-desired crown - a crown so heavy and yet paradoxically so "hollow" that only the grimacing face of death remains at its heart.
A dance of death, really, or "danse macabre" in which Shakespeare tells two kinds of stories: "sad stories on the death of kings", yes, but also the story of the death of the divine right of kings in early-modern Europe. Theatrical illusion is at the heart of our production.
The audience sit "in the round", very close to the actors, as witnesses to Richard's court, yet they are invited never to forget that all is but theatre - "a breath, a little scene".
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Scena Mundi were invited to performed Shakespeare’s Richard II as part of the symposium “The King’s Body on Stage : The Theatre of Kingship in Early Modern Europe”.
The show is supported by:
