KINGDOM COME.

After spending time with Shakespeare's tragedies, some people may find themselves peering at their once familiar world through the Bard's lush, bleak lens, which makes every word or gesture heavy with meaning and premonition. When one is in such a state, biting into a plum tomato can portend bloody vengeance. Children playing in the sun can seem like bright souls hurtling toward extinction. And cancelling plans with a lover in order to fulfill an obligation to a less-valued friend can engender the feeling that the Duke of York expresses so exquisitely in the vexing and profound "Richard II" (now at the Classic Stage Company): "As in a theatre, the eyes of men, / After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, / Are idly bent on him that enters next, / Thinking his prattle to be tedious." Certainly the majority of Richard II's once loyal subjects have grown tired of their childish monarch's prattle by the time the Duke of York (George Morfogen) delineates his loss of power this way, toward the beginning of Act V. Still, we find by the end of this act that Richard (Michael Cumpsty) has managed to move us, despite all the confusing emotion and poor judgment exercised by this "plaster saint," as John Gielgud, who directed the play in 1937, described him.

"Richard II" was written in 1595, two centuries after the King's rule ended, and the same year that Shakespeare produced such finely constructed plays as "Romeo and Juliet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Yet "Richard" reads at times like the unfinished work of an overextended author. The first half of the play, especially, feels unrealized; it's as if the text had been sewn together from two separate plays entirely--a somewhat dull court drama and an early take on the existential themes that Shakespeare parlayed with unquestionable brilliance, four or five years later, in "Hamlet." Still, wily, intelligent actors, such as Derek Jacobi and Jeremy Irons, have been drawn to the part, perhaps less for the play itself than for what they hope to do with it: bring cohesion to a role that Shakespeare himself couldn't quite pull into focus. Cumpsty won an Obie last spring for his portrayal of Hamlet (also at the C.S.C.), and his Richard is a similarly divided character--an overgrown boy, living in a feckless man's body.

As the play opens, Richard's court is rife with suspicion: the beloved Duke of Gloucester--one of Richard's uncles--has been murdered. While it is generally understood that Richard commanded his subject Thomas Mowbray (the captivating Craig Baldwin) to arrange Gloucester's execution, in order to consolidate his own political power, no one--especially not the remaining members of Richard's royal family--dares, at first, to confront the King; by this time in England's long and troubled history, monarchs were considered nothing less than messengers of God's will. Richard's more mature and traditional cousin Henry Bolingbroke (the powerfully built Graham Winton) copes with his rage by projecting it onto Mowbray instead, challenging him to a duel. But, before the two men can fight, Richard exiles them both. For Richard, one of the best things about being king is his sovereign right to reduce the most complicated problems to the size of little annoyances.

In Brian Kulick's imaginative staging, Richard, after sending his adversaries off to whatever fate awaits them across the sea, is seen living it up with his wife, the French-born Queen Isabel (the lovely Doan Ly), and some of his favorite courtiers. Grooving to music in the Rudy Vallee vein--Kulick has set the production sometime in the twentieth century--Richard snorts line after line of cocaine with no apparent awareness that the party will someday have to end. (The group seem like refugees from Noel Coward's 1924 play about coke addiction and indolence, "The Vortex.") Cumpsty's Richard is not even sure how to wear his crown. He likes the look of it, but wonders whether it will go with this or that outfit. Is there nothing more to this man than his impulses? Like a number of Shakespeare's other fractured protagonists, Richard is a creature of fashion; he places great store in ...