Richard III, and: The Winter's Tale (review)

Despite financial trouble, changes in leadership, and a 2009 season full of remounted productions, Shakespeare & Company is surging. After a stunning 2008 Othello sent John Douglas Thompson to reprise the Moor in Manhattan—and into the first rank of classical actors—the company capitalized on its success with Richard III, a play that leans upon its star actor like no other in Shakespeare. The tantalizing prospect of Thompson's Richard was not lost on ticket-holders, who bustled into the Founders' Theatre more like a crowd at a Broadway opening than the staid versions of themselves that had formerly filled the stalls. Moments before an organ piped them into silence and the lavishly costumed cast entered en masse, there was a palpable sense among the playgoers that something important was about to happen.

It did. The initial tableaux dispersed to leave Thompson alone, supine and silhouetted on a dark stage, howling his discontent at the heavens. By the time he rose to all the height his humpback allowed ("But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks") Thompson had assured everyone that the relentlessly sincere, emphatically present acting that served his Othello so well would likewise distinguish his Richard.

It's common to overrate the actor playing Richard, since the play offers him up like a birthday cupcake in a sea of oatmeal cookies—by wide margins its most repulsive and most attractive figure. However, it would be a feat to praise Thompson too much. His Richard was worthy of trans-oceanic travel. Some of what made it good would do as well for other roles: a booming and still pleasant voice that seemed always to be luxuriating over some syllable without stalling over any; a delivery relentless in pace and intensity, without ever sounding hurried; an ability to speak in great swaths without throwing things away; a mind that never lapsed in its readiness to pick out difficult syntax with intonation; and verse lines more than usually intact, though without the breaks or breaths seeming scripted, so that the words hit the air as if for the first time. Toss in charm, a confidence that sanctioned each step or stillness, and the fact that Thompson listens hard—rather than acting as though he is listening—and you have someone well worth casting, in this role and perhaps in any other.

But however well the actor suited the role, the Richard produced outstripped the sum of...