'Compare and contrast" was a frequent exhortation in the days when Richard II was a regular school exam text, writes Jeannine Alton.

There was a great deal to compare and contrast: loyalty - its steadfastness and waverings; authority - its source and fragility; religion - its spiritual and temporal sway; political opposition - its legitimacy and fragmentation; fathers and sons - their alliance and disharmony.

This is, in fact, a richly rewarding play, provoking ideas far beyond its chronological date and 'relevant' in often unexpected ways. Now we can compare and contrast two highly polished versions, from the Almeida, in London, and the RSC - one a starry period production, the other a searching team-based update.

Even the Almeida's most loyal fans (and aren't we all?) might find Gainsborough Studios a venue too far. Memories of Hitchcock, Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, and, if your memory stretches, Will Hay and Ivor Novello are all very well. Now it's empty acres of concrete floor, makeshift facilities, a temporary auditorium and being decanted into Shoreditch where public transport isn't exactly rife. The stark acting area, shallow, very wide and immensely high, with an upper stage framed in a symbolic fissured wall, is decked with turf and trees, the one vacuumed, the other transplanted by an army of sceneshifters during the interval. Director Jonathan Kent would seem to hold all the aces; hints of medieval liturgy and holy sanction in Jonathan Dove's score, a large company, Ralph Fiennes and Linus Roach at its head. Yet his period production seems oddly old-fashioned and lacking in overview. Frivolous though it may sound, the costumes don't help. Richard (Fiennes) is gorgeous in flowered white silk and his flatterers "caterpillars of the commonwealth" are also in (less gorgeous) white. The rest are well-nigh identical in dark gowns and one struggles to distinguish bishops from nobles, rebels from friends.

Aumerle and Hotspur make little impression, nor do the 'caterpillars' in their brief scenes. As York, that excellent actor Oliver Ford Davies rather overdoes his helplessness as the kingdom collapses round him, and the episode of his son's conspiracy, which should be a final testing of the old man's loyalty, drifts into near farce with Barbara Jefford as a termagant Duchess. And the central pair? Fiennes is all febrile petulance, neurotic fingers, twitching, quivering with rage in ineffectual tantrums, spiteful with Gaunt, facetious in council; in contrast his prison soliloquy is taken very slowly as he "hammers out" his fate. Roach's Bolingbroke, pale, nervy, very much Richard's cousin, is too young to have a wayward son though his headstrong barons are furrowing his brow at the end. The crown seems his by accident more than design.

Not so at Stratford's small stage, The Other Place. Here too director Steven Pimlott gives us a simple bare rectangle confronting tiered seating, with bright white light and a job lot of white-painted office chairs. History has been studied - the murder of Thomas Gloucester and Richard's guilt rumble below the dialogue. The text has been imaginatively used - the play opens, and is interspersed, with lines from that last soliloquy. The poetry is splendidly clear and so are its speakers, while the 'caterpillars' are gum-chewing, hands in pockets dealers, quick to inventory Gaunt's property. Alfred Burke's Gaunt's fiercely outspoken, even using the dread word "deposed", prompting Sam West's Richard to his only outbreak of violence. West wins his acting spurs here, clear, cool, both thoughtful and unthinking, he enchants even in defeat. David Killick's York, unhappily garbed in a plum frockcoat like a head porter (which he is, in a way) is a good man overridden by schemers like Northumberland (Christopher Saul) and weirdos like the SAS Hotspur of Adam Levy, something of a specialist in freaks, as he showed in the Almeida's Jew of Malta at the Playhouse last year.

And, of course, David Troughton's Bolingbroke, an intimidating, purposeful politico, rebellious from scene 1, wary as he literally clambers over Richard's coffin to ascend the throne at the last. It's a double cheat really. This is no 30-year-old cousin of Richard; and how come this glowering crook was so popular with the people whom we hear cheering him? A mystery, but a terrific performance in a quite splendid production. It just must be seen more widely.

*Taken from The Oxford Times Weekend section, May 5