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Reviewed by:
  • Richard III
  • Katharine Goodland
Richard III Presented by The Bridge Project at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, New York. January 10–March 4, 2012. Directed by Sam Mendes. Scenery by Tom Piper. Costumes by Katherine Zuber. Lighting by Paul Pyant. Projection by Jon Driscoll. Music by Mark Bennett. Sound by Gareth Fry. With Kevin Spacey (King Richard III), Chandler Williams (Clarence), Howard W. Overshown (Brackenbury, Lord Mayor of London), Jack Ellis (Hastings), Annabel Scholey (Lady Anne), Hadyn Gwynne (Queen Elizabeth), Isaiah Johnson (Rivers, Scrivner), Nathan Darrow (Grey, Richmond), Gavin Stenhouse (Dorset), Chuk Iwuji (Buckingham), Michael Rudko (Stanley), Gemma Jones (Queen Margaret), Gary Powell (First Murderer, Lovel), Jeremy Bobb (Second Murderer, Catesby), Andrew Long (King Edward IV, Bishop of Ely), Maureen Anderman (Duchess of York), Katherine Manners (Young Duke of York), Hannah Stokely (Prince of Wales), Stephen Lee Anderson (Ratcliffe), and Simon Lee Phillips (Tyrrel, Norfolk).

Three moments suggested what this production might have been.

The first: as we took our seats we were greeted by a faded blue curtain strung across a bare stage. Projected on the curtain in large white contemporary script was the play’s first word, “NOW,” a stout Anglo-Saxon word that forces a frown and a growl in the utterance. Its isolation from the well-trod opening line invited us, in the minutes before the show, to meditate on the present, from the biting cold outside to the seemingly endless news of disasters around the world: the global financial meltdown, climate change, unemployment, foreclosures, protests, wars, bombings, and nuclear proliferation. This was a clever, if not-so-subtle means of evoking the play’s relevance four hundred odd years after it first premiered.

The second moment, which came after intermission, was also an appeal for the audience to consider the play’s enduring message across geographical and temporal boundaries. A phalanx of soldiers lined the set, which was shaped in a deep “V,” so that the bottom of the V created a vanishing point upstage. The soldiers thrummed rhythmically on an assortment of drums from seemingly every historical era and army—from ancient African [End Page 319]


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Fig. 1.

Kevin Spacey as Richard III in The Bridge Project’s 2012 production of Richard III, directed by Sam Mendes. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus.

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Fig. 2.

Kevin Spacey as Richard III in The Bridge Project’s 2012 production of Richard III, directed by Sam Mendes. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus.

tribes through Napoleon and the Prussians to the present. The melee of drums, set to the rhythm of the heart, was emotionally powerful and intellectually evocative, filling the theatre with the palpable, unrelenting echoes of war, tyranny, and slaughter across the halls of time.

The third moment, Kevin Spacey’s best as Gloucester, made clear both the potential and limitations of this production. Spacey’s villainous duke was not merely surprised and delighted at winning Lady Anne’s good will in the infamous courtship scene, he was disgusted, a disgust that overshadowed any pleasure he might have taken in the event, a disgust as nuanced as it was heroic in its moral embrace, for this was an intimate disgust with the self that was ultimately extended, by way of Lady Anne, to the whole human race. And on the evidence of the other characters in this particular play, the duke’s disgust is justified.

This moment, in which Spacey skillfully articulated villainous triumph and moral disgust in the same complexly contoured breath, is the key to the play. Unfortunately, however, rather than allowing this meaning to shape the production, Director Sam Mendes avoided its full ramifications, filling, instead, the unfolding action with jokes and gags rather than a profound exploration of a depraved society. The Duke of Gloucester is not the villain of the piece, he is merely the most extreme villain in a world [End Page 321] of pervasive moral failure. Richard III is therefore most successfully performed as an ensemble piece. Unfortunately, this production was played as a star-vehicle, doing justice neither to the play, nor the capacities of the many fine...

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