In 2012, a theater company from Ramallah performed Richard II in the ruins of an eighth-century palace. It’s hard to imagine a better backdrop for Shakespeare’s gloomy play about broken power. George Mount, artistic director of Seattle Shakespeare Company, plays Richard as lyrical, delicate, arrogant, and totally out of touch with his noblemen, who are rumbling up from below him to seize his crown, led by the indignant Henry of Bolingbroke, soon to be Henry IV. “I wasted time,” the young king sighs in his prison cell, “and now time doth waste me.” (Center Theatre, Seattle Center Armory, seattleshakespeare.org, 2 and 7:30 pm, $29–$43, through Feb 2)