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The Reviews.  The Good
"Samuel West as Richard and David Troughton are magnificent. For everybody who ever had to endure those dreary, insignificant and endlessly boring Shakespeare productions - this will turn you into a fan again."  "Both are quite obviously so low that they could parachute out of a snake's arse" Living Abroad Magazine "David Troughton's Bolingbroke, by contrast to Richard, is a blunt populist, a political brute who's relentless in his quest for power. Reinforcing his rough and ready direct appeal, Troughton turns repeatedly to the audience, at one point beseeching all to rise in prayer - it's easy to see how this charmer persuades the rest of the nobility to join him against an anointed king. Backing up the two outstanding lead performances are some exceptionally strong supporting players." 8th January 2001 - What's on Stage Review "I have seldom heard Gaunt's famous speech about England delivered with more love and pain than by a wheelchair-bound Alfred Burke or Bolingbroke's voracious energy and passing self-doubts better embodied than by David Troughton." The Times "Even less should he tamper with David Troughton, whose Bolingbroke exudes ambition so voracious and energy so intense that you leave the theatre knowing two things: here is a man born to rule — and here is an actor with the talent to give the RSC's Millennium Project the hard, reliable centre it needs and deserves." "David Troughton brings both gallows humour and a real edge of thuggery to the role of the usurper, Bolingbroke. He has a commanding stage presence that suggests furious violence within, and there's something dead behind his eyes. Yet in the final scene Troughton also memorably anticipates the awakening conscience and the oppressive care of kingship that will burden Henry IV in the subsequent plays." Charles Spencer "But David Troughton skilfully reminds us the play is just as much about Bolingbroke as Richard. Where the two men differ is in their attitude to power. If Richard relies on divine right, Troughton's Bolingbroke is a political fixer who is always working the crowd or appealing directly to the audience. But Troughton also highlights the parallels between the two men - not just their kingly solitude but their eye for symbolic gesture, so that Bolingbroke returns from banishment clutching a handful of the earth he once reluctantly left. "Tell thou the lamentable tale of me," cries Bolingbroke at one point, echoing Richard's own line." Michael Billington Guardian, Saturday December 23, 2000 "David Troughton's Bolingbroke is also brilliantly effective: an overweening politician who cloaks driving ambition under a sense of wrong - "I am a subject and I challenge law" - and who swiftly dispatches Richard's followers with a bullet through the brain. But, having staged his takeover, Troughton also captures the hermetic isolation of power, making redundant the decision to end the play with the opening lines of Henry IV Part One." Guardian, Saturday April 1, 2000 "As the usurper himself, David Troughton gave a performance whose insistent politics initially seemed to neglect complexity altogether. Troughton is an actor of huge physical, technical and emotional power who sometimes overpowered the tiny arena of The Other Place. A barrel-chested career soldier, his Bolingbroke hectored the court and the theatrical audience as he might have hectored a line of unsatisfactory troupes on parade. He trumpeted the unassailable rightness of his cause in the early scenes with the same chilling assurance that later marked his summary execution of Bagot and Green. At one remarkable moment in the deposition scene, his steely gaze forced the theatrical audience to rise to their feet in a disconcerting demonstration of the theatrical mechanisms of fascism. Yet Troughton and Pimlott also granted Bolingbroke some subtler modes of appeal. The quietly eloquent motion with which he slipped a handful of English earth into his pocket on his banishment, the wry humour with which he greeted Northumberland's flattery and the growing sense of guilt and anxiety under the commanding exterior all worked to create some sympathy for him. Threatening to sway the audience in his favour, such touches made his totalitarianism even more disturbing." Barker, Roberta. "Well-Graced Actors and Their Doubles." Early Modern Literary Studies 6.2 (September, 2000): 25.1-28 "Jeez, he's good!" Me. Henry IV Parts I & II "The main link with Pimlott's Richard II lies in David Troughton's dazzlingly pivotal performance. A dominant Bolingbroke, he now turns into a guilt-wracked Henry IV, ever-conscious that he seized the throne by force. Yet, although first seen at prayer in penitent's gown, Troughton's king is still a brutal pragmatist who seeks to pre-empt rebellion by squashing his fractious nobles. Troughton also gives us the anxious father aware that he is in danger of losing his son to the taverns and the fat knight: there's a great moment when his path crosses that of Falstaff in battle and he shoots him a wounded look. But it is Troughton's magnificent verse-speaking that makes this the key performance so far of the Stratford Histories." Michael Billington, Guardian Unlimited, Friday April 21, 2000 "David Troughton is superb as the haunted Henry IV, racked with guilt for his own usurpation, bitterly upset by the behaviour of his son Hal. In the second part, when he's ill and overcome with care, his performance casts a dark shadow of mortality over these life-filled plays. And what a pleasure it is to hear an actor deliver Shakespearean verse with such lucid authority." Charles Spencer "Those who saw him as Caliban or Richard III will know that Troughton is one of the RSC's rising or (indeed) risen stars. He is a big, burly fellow, who seems to have borrowed his face as well as his body from Stonehenge, but he is capable of subtlety, even delicacy, as well as power and energy. Here, his emotions embrace insecurity, the need for reassurance, bitterness at his fickle son, yearning for tranquility, remorse, near-despair and, finally, a terrible exhaustion. From the moment we meet him, on his knees and earnestly praying, to the moment we leave him, broken and on his deathbed, we do not doubt that Shakespeare gave his duo of plays the right name: Henry IV." Benedict Nightingale's choice "The presentation of these plays as part of an unfolding cycle also lends extra richness to David Troughton's massive Henry IV. As Bolingbroke in Richard II, he emerged as a shrewd political opportunist. What comes across here is his ability to re-write history and to persuade himself that it was his "humility" that won popular allegiance. Troughton's Henry remains a crafty politician to the end: when he urges Hal "to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels" it might be George Bush senior talking to Dubya about Iraq. But Troughton also beautifully highlights the emotional constriction of a father who, at one point, yearns to embrace his son but who instead gives him a wary pat on the shoulder." Michael Billington Guardian, Saturday February 24, 2001 The Ventian Twins: "David Troughton is both the linchpin of these divers frolics and the primary source of the energy which sustains the play's central premise through the performance; he plays the twins Zanetto and Tonino, sundered years back and both coincidentally arriving in Verona to wed their respective beloveds." The Bad
And The Ugly?
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