Richard III (review)

When President Obama announced the killing of Osama Bin Laden on the night of May 1, 2011, large crowds spontaneously gathered for celebrations in places like Times Square, Boston's Public Gardens, and the front of the White House. The raucous and nationalistic nature of the celebrations might not have been unexpected, and many commentators also quickly denounced the tone of the celebrations. But something quite unusual occurred, at least in the Boston area: university students took the lead in initiating the celebrations, joining the euphoric chorus of public commentators like Rush Limbaugh, who uncharacteristically intoned, "Thank God for President Obama." Central to that euphoria was the idea, partly articulated by President Obama himself, that just punishment had been meted out to a murderous enemy of America, God, and freedom. What complicated this picture of a simplistically zealous response, however, was the backdrop of the Arab Spring; as numerous commentators suggested, Arab revolts against autocratic regimes unleashed a revolutionary aspiration for freedom which also had the effect of (further) marginalizing the jihadist zeal of bin Laden and Al Qaeda. That is to say, some Americans who exulted at the death of bin Laden believed their passions to be continuous with the passions of Arab Spring and the rejection of bin Ladenism.

It was in this context that the British company Propeller brought its touring production of Richard III to the Huntington Theatre in Boston. Though the production was conceived and rehearsed well before even the first events of Arab Spring, it resonated powerfully in performance with current world events. This effect was in no small part due to the fact that the production eschewed topical references or any overtly discernible political message. If the production was driven by any concept, it was to unearth what the director Edward Hall clearly saw as the brutality at the heart of Richard III. Indeed, there was an element of the slasher film in this production, as it highlighted the violence by staging killings and executions (some of which are only alluded to in the text) as brutal acts of torture that involved rather ramshackle and crude instruments like rusty sickles, iron clippers, a power drill, and even a banged-up chainsaw. Such graphic violence could have appeared both gratuitous and contrived, but it ultimately felt organic to the production's vision. For, in this Richard III, the central truth about power was that it was achieved and sustained by violence—whether in the hands of Richard or Richmond. To be sure, such a leveling of distinctions between Richard and Richmond has become somewhat customary in the theatre (and in criticism), but in the case of the Propeller production, this leveling came across as a mere effect of the force with which it depicted the struggle for power. Put another way, the production's "message" was simply its powerful capacity not only to provoke the kind of triumphalism that bin Laden's killing released, but also to send the audience away unsettled and grappling with this response.

I should remind readers that Propeller is an all-male company. But the theatrical disparity produced by the cross-gender casting served simply as one element in the kind of presentational illusionism that has become quite pervasive in Shakespearean theatre and that serves ultimately to create a world of greater intensity and unexpected possibility. Certainly the opening sequence of the production embodied this aesthetic while setting a tone fraught with dissonant tensions which was crucial to the production's vision. Well before the play proper began, members of the cast slowly wandered the stage dressed in lab coats made of sleeveless

Fig 5.

John Dougall as George, Duke of Clarence...