Richard III (review)

The triumph of Richard III, rather like that of William Shakespeare's eponymous tyrant, turns on Richard's talent for wooing and winning audiences. The bantering asides inherited from the Vice-figure of morality plays, generally speaking, forms an intimacy with theatre-goers: we come to feel pity as well as fear toward the monstrous Duke of Gloucester. But what does it suggest to laugh at—or worse, laugh with—Richard's jokes while he orders and orchestrates the deaths of any and all who could have impeded his progress to the throne? What responsibility do onlookers have when tyranny unfolds before them? Questions like these resounded during Intiman Theatre's revival of The Tragedy of Richard III, the final play in Shakespeare's tetralogy about the Wars of the Roses. Director Bartlett Sher, in fact, located "the fascinating tension of the play" in what it demands from those surrounding Richard: "How long will they stand aside while terrible things are happening, before they feel the moral strength to challenge the prevailing authorities and speak up?" Stephen Pelinski's Richard, played with humor and humility during the initial acts and with murderous will during the final acts, extended Sher's question beyond the stage and toward audiences. Intiman's Richard III became a parable, in the tradition of morality plays and epic theatre, about the dangers of silence in the face of tyranny.

The production opened with a prologue derived from the idiom of horror films: Pelinski standing before the glaring footlights with his shadow—huge and menacing—projected against the curtain behind him. Played in silence, the scene went on long enough for Pelinski to notice his shadow and begin posing impishly for audiences. He raised his dagger so that its shadow loomed above the stage, but then flashed a deceptively playful grin. The nervous laughter from audiences during this scene—a scene as much a parody of menace as menacing—disguised the prologue's ambition: we were invited to consider the tragedy of England through Richard's eyes. The first half of the production built brilliantly on this epistemological metaphor in order to foster intimacy with Shakespeare's tyrant-king. When Pelinski delighted in double-entendres and wordplay during his seduction of Anne, he made audiences laugh openly and often and thereby downplayed his announced villainy in his "winter of discontent" soliloquy. When Christopher Akerlind (stage and lighting design) brought the houselights up during Richard's soliloquies—so that Richard and audiences were "alone" in the theatre, while the remaining characters were in darkness—it further aligned theatre-goers with Richard despite the portents of what was to come. Audiences slowly became part of those who surround Richard without speaking against him and therefore became complicit in his malevolence and machinations.

Returning from intermission we understood, like Anne, that having won our sympathy during the opening acts, Richard would not keep it—or us—long. The play's second half began with the onstage stabbing of Mistress Shore (played without lines by Tammy Taecker) and then moved relentlessly from one brutality to another. When Hastings was condemned by Richard and abandoned by his fellow nobles, audience-members cringed uncomfortably. When Tyrell led Richard's nephews across the stage and toward their deaths—a remarkably effective bit of added stage business—audience-members squirmed noticeably. Having laughed and watched one another laugh at Richard's joking in the first

Figure 1.

Stephen Pelinski as Richard in the Intiman Theatre production of Richard III. Photographer Chris Bennion.

half, they found themselves uncomfortable and uncertain with nothing to laugh...