Richard III
In his play notes for Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s (CST) production of Richard III, Stuart Sherman writes, "Shakespeare’s greatest achievement (some would say his first great achievement, the one that made him Shakespeare) is to make the killing sound like fun." Director Barbara Gaines voices a similar sentiment: "There are murderers in the canon whose language and thought are more profound than Richard’s, but none who entertain us with such beguiling, charming horror."
Emphasis on the titular character is hardly surprising: Shakespeare’s libelous portrait of Richard was far from the first, but it’s certainly the most delicious. Under Gaines’ direction, Wallace Acton’s Richard well and truly tests the limits of charisma in his CST debut. From the well-worn opening line, Acton is relentlessly arch, surprisingly antic, and totally shameless.
Although I was enjoying the ride, I’d at first mentally characterized Acton’s performance as "over the top." I was quite wrong. Certainly Acton has free rein and no fear, but his Richard works beautifully in the meticulous dramatic framework assembled by Gaines and her cast.
Amoral. Sociopathic. Narcissistic. Soulless. Absolute adjectives abound in everything written about Shakespeare’s first great villain. Having read the play half a dozen times and seen a handful of interpretations, I had never before seen so clearly that every moment in the play-the culmination of Shakespeare’s first historical cycle and a recounting of the defining events in recent British history for the Elizabethan audience-hinges not on Richard’s evil, but on the failings of everyone else. He is not the bad apple spoiling the bunch, but he blowfly simply surviving on the rot just there for the taking.
Acton’s Richard has undeniable charm, but he is also quite clearly a charlatan. He directs his asides to the audience, but delivers them full voice, daring the other players to hear. His schemes are so transparent and his maneuvers so openly made that the audience ends up not only inclined to excuse Richard, but to conclude that, really, his victims have no one to blame but themselves.
This isn’t to say that the other characters are sacrificed at the feet of a compelling villain. They are sincere, embittered, ambitious, cruel, loving, determined, bereft, and principled by turns, but they are unwaveringly short-sighted and fatally single-minded in their last moments.
Although the production’s unique approach takes a few murders to fully resolve, in retrospect, it is evident from Richard’s interplay with his first on-stage victim. Having not read the text in a while, I must confess that my knowledge of the War of the Roses playbook was a bit rusty. So rusty in fact that Phillip James Brannon’s winning portrayal of Richard’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence had me doubting my memory.
Brannon is electrifying in his terror as he wakes from his prophetic dream. He is so noble and sympathetic that the comic scenes with his jailer and assassins are genuinely suspenseful. Every note in his performance so clearly communicates that Clarence is the best and wisest of the brothers York. And yet he believes in wholeheartedly in Richard-that same capering, mugging Richard whose diabolical plans are written all over his face. Even as Clarence’s corpse is dragged from the stage, the audience is wondering not at the tragic stupidity of so good a man, but about the unworthy motives that blinded him to the obvious.
In Kevin Gudahl’s Buckingham, we see those unworthy motives manifest. In his naked ambition, as Buckingham matches Richard step for ruthless step, Gudahl creates a character that seems to be just the brother Richard might have chosen for himself. But Buckingham, too, is blinkered: He can’t see past the ambition of his own arrangement upon Richard’s taking the crown, and he can’t imagine the kind of plot to which he’s just been party ensnaring him. Gudahl works so seamlessly with Acton that I actually wrote in my notes, "Hasn’t Buckingham read any Shakespeare?"
Gaines builds the case for her vision steadily throughout the first half of the play. Her staging of the coronation scene, with Buckingham’s baton-fondling agitators scattered throughout the audience, is breathtaking. Even more to the credit of her and the cast, not an iota of this momentum is lost during the intermission, and the second half of the play is even more compelling.
Admittedly the unusual take is not executed without hiccups. Despite a skillful and impassioned performance by Angela Ingersoll, for example, Anne Neville’s engagement to Richard-roughly six seconds after she’s hocked an impressive, well-deserved lugey in his face-is a hard sell. Later, Gaines puts a flask her hand by way of belated explanation for this unbelievable development. This follows in the footsteps of Richard Loncraine, who similarly put a syringe in the thigh of Kristin Scott Thomas’s Lady Anne, but I think Gaines could have trusted her own instincts and Ingersoll, as she seems to have been inclined to do: "Anne is unbearably fragile. . . . She is alone in this male world, and brutalized by life."
Shakespeare’s histories are often apt to turn into sausage fests, even when the text provides substantial female characters. Here, Gaines does well by the play’s women. I’ve already mentioned Ingersoll’s performance in a somewhat thankless scene, and she shines even brighter in her interactions with the play’s other women. In entirely different ways, Jennifer Harmon as the banished prophetess, Queen Margaret, and Mary Ann Thebus as the mother of this villain among villains wrestle their staggeringly difficult monologues to back up Gaines’ claim that these women are the soul of the play.
As Elizabeth, Edward IV’s commoner queen, I was at first unsure how to take Wendy Robie. Other than arguably Acton’s, Robie’s is the only performance that seemed self-consciously Shakespearean. This was at once heightened by her androgynous physical appearance (in the promotional stills, I thought at first that the production had gone so old school as to cast men in the women’s parts) and at odds with the contemporary feel of her costume, which evoked Princess Diana. Perhaps the greatest compliment that I can pay to Robie is to admit that it took me until intermission to recognize her as Nadine from Twin Peaks, and I assure you that I have highly developed Peaks sensors. In the end, I think Robie’s performance, which is undeniably effective, is yet more evidence of Gaines’ commitment to flexibility in the production.
That fluidity could easily been sunk by bad visual design. Fortunately Neil Patel’s scenic design and Susan E. Mickey’s costumes work with Gaines’ concept, rather than against it.
Patel’s design seems simple enough, consisting of sleek platforms on multiple levels plus some sparingly used mobile set pieces. Its very simplicity, though, is crucial to the play’s relentless pace, and Patel is to be congratulated on pulling off the set for Richard’s nightmare. As the clear-topped platform first began to rise up, billowing stage smoke, I feared for a moment that we were about to be subjected to some Pink Floyd-inspired stagecraft like that plaguing Lyric’s Ring Cycle a few years ago. Instead, the ritualized blocking of the ghosts paired with Patel’s claustrophobic cage made the scene genuinely harrowing.
During the performance I’d classified Mickey’s costumes as "Suggestive Elizabethan" and counted myself grateful for the absence of anything that hinted of Nazi Germany. Further in, I appreciated the Jackie-O-like touches to Lady Anne’s costume and the aforementioned nod to Princess Diana in Elizabeth’s dress and crown. Gaines summarizes the costume design more eloquently "I didn’t want the bulk of Elizabethan dress, but wanted its silhouette for the costumes. . . .We’ll be looking at the medieval characters in this Elizabethan play through a modern lens."
The directorial shorthand for the costume design is not misapplied to the whole production. It is somewhat visually freeform, yet watertight in its dramatic vision. The one element of the production that did not work, at least for me and my companion, was the harsh, heavily distorted electric guitar linking scenes together. At the particular performance I attended this jarring sound design by Lindsay Jones was complicated by some jerky, mistimed work on the lights.
But these are minor exceptions that hardly detract from the production. Richard III is a strong opening to CST’s 10th season. It is at once a faithful rendition of what many consider to be Shakespeare’s first great play and a wholly original telling of it.
Richard III runs through November 22, Tuesday through Sunday. Most performances begin at 7:30 PM, see www.chicagoshakes.com for the matinee schedule, special curtain times, and ticket prices.
