Shakespeare’s King Richard the Second, in common with the Cybermen of Tom Baker-era Doctor Who, has a skill – one might even call it a weapon – otherwise unknown in that fictive universe: sarcasm. The Bard wrote numerous penetrating studies of madness of one kind or another – Hamlet, Lear, Leontes – but only Richard responds to nemesis so corrosively. He even does it whilst claiming to be compliant, thus constituting possibly the first great portrait in world literature of passive-aggression.

What sets the seal on his mental decline is solitary imprisonment: “here is not a creature but myself”, he observes in his great “I have been studying how I may compare...” soliloquy from Act V, Scene 4. Director Joe Hill-Gibbins, to make sure we get the point, opens his otherwise lean-trimmed 100-minute version with part of this soliloquy (then reprises it in its proper place). Simon Russell Beale’s Richard is in a dimly lit iron box. Neither he nor the other seven members of the cast (all dressed modern-informal) leave the box throughout the play: the others may huddle apprehensively or spread themselves around the walls when not in action, Richard sits or lies immobile, sometimes covered in mud. For the only props as such are buckets of blood, water and soil which are one by one emptied about the stage or on to players.

The action is sometimes almost perfunctory, sometimes manically overdone, as when the entire court seems so busy challenging each other to duels that they are in effect performing a furious gauntlet-based morris dance, or the Duke of York, his wife and son, all simultaneously petitioning King Henry IV, play “who can beg longest on their knees”. These exaggerations may be meant to characterise Richard’s delusions, as in his isolation he mentally replays in travesty the events that have led him to this point... except that it includes many episodes of which he can have no knowledge. It may be a metaphor for the inherent solitude of kingship, affecting both Richard and his usurper Bolingbroke/Henry, but I’m not convinced. My best take on the matter is that Hill-Gibbins is practising a hyperbolical version of Declan Donnellan’s trademark directorial approach whereby characters’ physical positioning onstage enacts their emotional and power relationships. From whichever angle I look, though, it’s heavier on concept than clarity.

Russell Beale, as ever, seems effortlessly to delve to the very core of his character, and to articulate his insights perfectly in his delivery. That’s less of a help, however, when the character does not necessarily know himself from moment to moment (even less than the aforementioned other Shakespearean protagonists, all of whom SRB has played excellently). Leo Bill as Bolingbroke begins as an impassioned rebel but grows similarly discontinuous in personality once the crown is his. Perhaps it’s simply an illustration – and a timely one for our national politics – that John of Gaunt’s classic “this scept’red isle” speech, one of the colossi of English national mythology, actually goes on to excoriate how atrociously the country is being run at present.

Written for the Financial Times.