Why ever would a studio theatre as chic, political and up-to-the-minute as the Donmar, and for that matter a director such as Michael Grandage, want to stage Shakespeare's Richard II, which opens there on 1 December? (It's Grandage's final production as artistic director.) The most deliberately old-fashioned of all Shakespeare's histories, it is written in often rhymed verse, it repeatedly uses words that were already archaic in 1595, and it consists mainly of rhetorical set-pieces, without a single earthy pub scene to set them off. As a result, Richard II was for years avoided by producers, who were interested in anything but pageantry and fancy dress. A boom in spectacular son-et-lumière revivals across Europe in the immediate postwar years (one of which, with Jean Vilar as Richard, inaugurated the Avignon festival in 1947) seemed merely to underline the play's status as a lament for a social order that was forever lost. To those familiar only with its most quoted lines – John of Gaunt's evocation of England's past glories as "This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle …" – Richard II remains above all a document of conservatism, a nostalgic monument to ceremonious, divinely sanctioned hierarchy.

Even setting aside this reputation, some have objected to the design of the play. Its careful symmetry – by which a king with blood on his hands falls from power while a challenger, Bolingbroke, rises, until by the end Bolingbroke has simply become another king with blood on his hands – seems to some the last word in sterile formalism. An overdressed medieval head of state changes places with his cousin – so what? Kenneth Tynan, for example, particularly loathed John Barton's famous Stratford production in 1974, in which Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco swapped the roles of king and usurper from one performance to another. Their interchangeability was underlined during a silent tableau before the first scene, when an actor dressed as Shakespeare arbitrarily placed a crown on one actor rather than the other. For Tynan, both production and play seemed emptily cerebral, as unengaged and self-regarding as Shakespeare's narcissistic protagonist.

A play that seemed to be in a decorative, apolitical coma – typified by Barry Kyle's RSC production of 1986, which seemed to be all about allowing Jeremy Irons's drooping king to pose exquisitely in an exquisite blue cloak in front of an exquisitely beautiful set – abruptly woke up a decade ago. In 2000, the late Steven Pimlott staged Richard II without robes, without minutely researched medieval props, without even the potential escapism provided by a brightly lit stage watched from the comparative darkness of red-plush seating. In the bare, 200-seat Other Place studio theatre in Stratford (a sorry gap in the RSC's repertoire of performance spaces these last five years, during which it has been serving merely as the foyer to the Courtyard), Pimlott's show kept the house lights up throughout, and the cast, though their outfits were visibly expensive, wore modern dress.

Rather than inhabiting the pages of an old-world storybook, these power-brokers and opportunists were in the same time-zone and in the same room as we were. This was disconcertingly pointed out when Bolingbroke insisted on making the entire audience complicit in one of his most self-evidently propagandist gestures: as he declared his grief that his mortal political enemy Mowbray had (conveniently) died in exile, David Troughton's dogged but cunning king-in-waiting indicated by gestures that the spectators should all stand and remain silent for a moment in public mourning with him, and the scene hung suspended until we had done so. With Richard's favourites clad in mauve designer suits and looking exactly like the professional PR consultants with whom Tony Blair was at the time filling Downing Street, the whole experience of Pimlott's Richard II was more akin to being present at an unusually eloquent New Labour focus group meeting than it was to watching a piece of heritage theatre.

This was a show that was watching us as keenly as we were watching it, and at its centre was a king who was as observant as he was plangent, and as mischievous as he was self-destructive. Sam West's Richard eventually arrived before parliament at Bolingbroke's bidding to make his formal abdication, draped in an English flag and whistling "God Save the King". He kept peeping wryly out at the spectators to gauge how much they were enjoying Bolingbroke's embarrassment. Seeing through the mechanisms of state too late, this Richard made a sorrowful show of himself but also a puckishly dissident one.

There was a moral seriousness, furthermore, to the eagerness with which the dethroned Richard embraced the role of disloyal opposition to the new regime, a role he knew would prove fatal. In many productions this crucial scene is simply treated as the biggest hissy fit in world drama, and the Richard who calls for a mirror and then smashes it (apparently following the maxim "if you can't beat them, upstage them") has too often been played as Shakespeare's greatest tragedy queen.

Pimlott and West never muted the character's fatal penchant for choosing theatrical effect over political expediency; whoever the director and the actor, Richard remains a king whose instinctive response to every crisis is to make a drama out of it. He mobilises not troops but pathos, and in defeat compares himself without irony to the betrayed Christ. But West discovered Richard's subversive intelligence alongside his self-pity. For the first time in years it was obvious why the deposition scene had been omitted from all printed texts of Richard II until after the death of Elizabeth I: this is a scene that sees through the whole business of political icon-making.

The most successful revival since Pimlott's has been Trevor Nunn's at the Old Vic in 2005, significantly the one that followed it most closely in adopting modern dress and the trappings of current political life. On a set designed to suggest the panelled rooms of the present-day Palace of Westminster, Kevin Spacey (who wore a wig in an attempt to look younger, and adopted a passable Windsors-style English accent) played an ambivalent, affectionate Richard confronted by a conservative faction who might have been opposing the reform of the House of Lords in the 1990s rather than the banishment of Bolingbroke and the confiscation (or nationalisation?) of his father's estates. The production seemed claustrophobic and narrow in its focus on this titled elite, but in the Old Vic, just across the river from Westminster, it made its audiences feel that the present-day, real-life Houses of Parliament and their various insider dealings were nearby indeed.

Without such gestures towards immediate topicality to ground their performances, Mark Rylance's Richard (at the Globe in 2003) and Jonathan Slinger's (at the RSC in 2007) mainly fell back into the role's older, alternative tradition of high camp. Before the offstage execution of Richard's favourites Bushy and Green, they are darkly accused of having "made a divorce betwixt his queen and him". There's little doubt that in Richard II Shakespeare was consciously writing an equivalent to his rival Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, in which the deposed and murdered king's relationship with his favourite is explicitly sexual. In Shakespeare's play the childless Richard certainly takes little visible interest in his queen, until their meeting as he is being led towards the Tower provides the opportunity for a tearful public parting. (The queen is a sadly unrewarding part: in Stratford Imogen Stubbs once tried to get some attention by playing it with a French accent, but to little avail.) Equally, some of the greatest Richards in the theatre have been gay or bisexual: John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and, in Deborah Warner's 1995 National Theatre production, a cross-dressed Fiona Shaw. The fact that Grandage's Richard, Eddie Redmayne, made his Shakespearean debut as Viola in Twelfth Night may stand him in good stead.

The days when Richard II and its lyrically self-defeating central character could be allowed to speak only about themselves, however, are gone. The topical approach to the play is a more obvious route into its action than the apolitically aesthetic. This year, any number of elaborately uniformed heads of state have found themselves sitting on the ground and telling sad stories of the death of kings, and several of their popularity-courting replacements have been tempted to follow their predecessors' methods having inherited their power. All over the Middle East, dictators and their opponents are changing places, and people are asking: "So what?" In 2011, Richard II is exactly the sort of play the Donmar ought to be staging.