You would need a heart of stone not to be stirred by Kevin Spacey, oozing pomp and circumstance, in the empty glitter of Trevor Nunn's modish, moderndress production of Richard II.
Video screens flash images of coronation flag-wavers and irrelevant poll-tax rioters. Intrusive television cameras relay extracts from John of Gaunt's death speech in a style recalling Nicholas Hytner's more convincingly updated Henry V.
So there a sly Spacey stands, decked out in regal purple, face set in a grand design of haughtiness. You would never guess from the authentic Anglo-Saxon sound of him that film-star American rather than English is his first language. He glances at his golden self in a mirror, with a faint smirk of satisfaction, like some performer poised to make his entrance.
The challenging and provocative stimulus for Spacey's Richard lies in the idea that Richard remains a man of parts, a temperamental actor-monarch lost in role-play, who never discovers his real self or how to reign.
The accusations of Julian Glover's wheel-chaired, vehement Gaunt leave him raging. He wafts airily through the ritual of his beautifully staged coronation, to the accompaniment of genuflecting, scarlet-robed peers and Handel's Zadoch The Priest, as if divinely blown to power and glory. He makes our own dear queen seem positively middle class in comparison.
Few modern Richards, though, have proved so irresistibly unsympathetic in power or downfall as Spacey. Sean Baker's outraged Mowbray and Ben Miles's unenergetic Bolingbroke, whose driving ambition never moves more dangerously than at a sedan chair's speed, are banished with a malicious nonchalance.
Moments later the king happily parties with flatterers, among whom his favourite, Oliver Kieran-Jones's blond Aumerle, pink shirt suggestively slit open to the waist, does not win anything more homoerotic than royal touches on the shoulder.
Despite the vitality of Spacey's conception I could only muster faint flickers of sympathy for this flippant, ice-cold monarch of Albion. When hubris should give way to heartbreak, when Richard loses power, throne and balance of the mind, Spacey's king cannot or refuses to become Shakespeare's raw, racked ruin.
The actor misses out on self-pity, that speciality of Richard's. He oscillates instead between rage and high-pitched, quavering shows of grief that ring hollow. The gorgeous crescendo of despair, in which he lays down the crown, peters out.
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It sounds as if the loss of kingship caused him no more than a small pang. Even the humiliation of imprisonment finds Spacey strangely unruffled, insistent still upon role playing.
Nunn's modernising gloss upon this distinctly medieval play, in which nobles rise up against a king, never strikes me as either justified or coherent.
Hildegard Bechtler's sets, with their silver and wooden panels, exude a timeless atmosphere of parliamentary ceremonial: intrusive cameramen who film Bolingbroke and Gaunt, slithers of their speeches later replayed on giant TV screens, do not help to make any interesting points about the way in which politics have now become a kind of celebrity performance with soundbites.
It is Peter Eyre's outstanding but old-style Duke of York, a melancholic dodderer torn between loyalty to king and peers, who best dramatises the play's sense of a country poised on civil war's verge.
The production finally sentimentalises Richard, the crown guiltily laid upon his coffin, but Spacey's unlovely, unstable monarch merits no such posthumous sympathy.
Richard II
