REVIEW: Richard III feels like Trump I
If ever a play was written for our times it is Shakespeare’s Richard III – even if it was penned in 1593.
Now is a time when global politics seems to be sliding deeper into cynicism and gaslighting. “Don’t believe what you’re seeing and hearing – just believe ME!”
This production is another in a long list of plays at the U of A’s Studio Theatre helmed by emerging young directors – in this case Max Rubin, who is an MFA directing candidate. Not all of the productions have worked but they have shown, as this one does, a fresh and youthful concept. The staging features the work of students from the Acting, Design, Technical Theatre and Directing programs of the Department of Drama. Richard III runs in the Timms Centre of the Arts through Oct. 19.
The first thing you note is Jeremy Gordaneer’s striking, expertly-detailed construction site set. Girders and beams spill over from the flies, across the stage and across the pit. Rubin’s startling high concept-heavy metal staging is ingenious throughout; his vision never falters and is serviced by the production. The costumes (designer Feng Yi Jiang) are punk-grunge with accents of modern street English.
The production makes lavish and impressive use of huge projections controlled by the performers through tablets using cameras and lights. It gives the director the opportunity to follow actors into the wings and shoot dramatic scenes in close-up on the big screen. As each character dies, the cameras come out, spot lights come on and their shades return from the grave to sing pops songs (like I Did It My Way) in what sounds like an Eastern European language. It’s the sort of thing that could be a mess – but it’s handled well here, and underlines and illuminates the production’s creative genius.
“I have neither pity, love nor fear,” grits out Richard Plantagenet in his famous “Now is the winter of our discontent” soliloquy. The bloodthirsty tyrant, twisted in mind and body, ascends to power using thuggery, lies and dirty tricks – binding his sycophants to him by sheer force of will. He’s a force of nature and a spellbinder exulting in chaos, destruction and pain, making little attempt to hide his misdeeds.
As he seduces the shallow, muddled Lady Anne (Emily Anne Corcoran) at the foot of her husband’s corpse (whom he has just murdered) Richard, feigning vulnerability and with a smarmy self-congratulatory smirk on his face, asks us, “Was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won?”
It’s as if he shot somebody on 5th Avenue and walked away with the widow.
Richard III is one of Shakespeare’s longest plays, and is generally cut down for modern audiences – as it is here. Rubin sees it as primarily a ripping good yarn and his show clips along. With murder after murder, the result whips us through Richard’s bloody rise to the English throne, and his precipitous fall from it, favouring pacing over psychological insight. Its very breathlessness makes for exciting theatre as the director enfolds us into a convulsive world of dark passions.
This Richard III features a talented ensemble of students and seasoned professionals, but the entire cast is so good that there is no line between the newbies and the pros. Rubin has made the daring choice of casting a woman in the title role: Caitlin Kelly. It takes a moment but it’s not long before the actor, with her buzz cut and black-clad warped body, inhabits the monster. Part soldier, part rock star, Kelly establishes a certain reptilian charm – making her Richard perversely entertaining. Wily, reveling in the pain and destruction he is causing (in the Trumpian sense) this Richard knows what you want – and promises it to you. The only element missed in Kelly’s performance was any hint of the madness: the malevolent diabolical spirits that surely drive his tormented soul. It is an element only hinted at in a remarkable, roiling full stage shadow theatre nightmare that places Richard in Hell the night before his death.
U of A alumnus Nikki Hulowski returns as the embittered and ravaged Queen Margaret, who prowls the castle pushing a homeless person’s shopping cart, hurling curses at Richard and reminding everyone of the King’s duplicity. Chantal Perron plays the Duchess of York as a determined, tough, uncompromising woman with no illusions about her third son, whom she openly detests. Beverley Rockwell’s Queen Elizabeth shows us a vain, cynical reigning royal who has seen it all, but can still be horrified at the misdeeds of Richard.
Buckingham (Braden Butler), Richard’s dispassionate fixer and executioner, is a truly discomforting creation – quaffing beer and enthusiastically vaping. He’s ready to follow his master down the twisty pathway all the way to Hell. Later, when Richard peevishly turns on his most loyal ally, it’s a great illustration of how the megalomania of the corrupt is ultimately self-defeating. Who will get whacked next?
Sheldon Stockdale plays Hastings with gravity and humour, and it is he that sums up the evening, and the guilt of those who have been seduced by the proximity to power: “I could have prevented this.”
There is not an ounce of fat on this two-and-a-half hour intermission-less examination of dysfunction and uncontrolled sociopathy. At the end you know you have been through a unique theatrical experience – yet maddeningly familiar in 2019.
Photos by Ed Ellis
