All Dragon and No St. George
Richard III: Reign of Terror
The Stratford Festival
The National Post
Tom McCamus as Richard III seems, mockingly and insinuatingly, to be delivering the opening speech about the winter of everybody's discontent from the wings of the blacked-out stage. Gradually, lighting appears, and we realize that though his voice was indeed miked, he himself had been present all the time, curled up in one of the recesses of a steely and very built-up set, all stairs and alcoves.
Richard, we know, enjoyed sending his enemies to the scaffold. This Richard likes nothing better than to hang around on scaffolding. He also likes to curl up in trees, and there are several provided, all bent and weathered, not to say withered, rather like Richard himself.
The cluttered design (by Allan Wilbee) has its uses, especially for the leading actor -- the "bottled spider" of mad Margaret's curses has been given his web -- but it forces his colleagues into a series of deferential semi-circular groupings. This gives Martha Henry's production an old-fashioned air that its general intelligence and inventiveness hardly deserve. It's a relief all round when most of the architecture disappears, as it does for the last section depicting the protagonist's downfall. The trees remain, and they look increasingly like gallows.
The note of mischievous malevolence struck by McCamus (as indeed by Shakespeare) at the beginning of the play is maintained and expanded. This Richard is graphically and painfully deformed, and though he has learned to cope with his disabilities they are always liable quite literally to trip him up. He falls from his perch during the opening speech, and it is not a happy landing. Much later, at his coronation -- the moment of triumph he has shed so much blood to achieve -- he stumbles and falls. Many in the audience laughed, so I suppose that statistically the moment may be said to misfire, but I found it chilling; the actor has by now established the character as a man for whom humiliation is only a spur to more revenge.
He is not an especially charming Richard, but charm in this role may be an overrated quality. Those who are duped by him want to be duped, and there is a sizeable contingent, led by his own mother, that mistrusts him from one end of the play to the other.
Some waver. One of the play's subtler achievements is its observation of the way in which court alliances form and dissolve, according to the dictates of the moment. Magnetism -- a teeth- baring insistence that fluctuates between grin and grimace -- he has buckets of. He also has a Mick Jagger swagger. He can play the indulgent uncle at generous length, taking the future Princes in the Tower for extended piggy-back rides on his hump at dangerous speeds. One of the boys even gets to play, prophetically, with a dagger that Uncle Dick keeps hidden in his shoe, for emergencies. Its existence seems to be common knowledge, since in the last battle Richmond pulls it out and kills him with it.
McCamus is good at depicting Richard's growing hysteria as his enemies close in on him, his mind audibly accelerating out of control. What he misses out on is stature, and I don't mean the physical kind. Laurence Olivier once said that at some point Shakespeare tells the actors of even his most wayward kings, "drop that -- you have to be St. George." He had the cornered Richard II especially in mind, and it never occurred me that the St. George rule would also apply to Richard III, who is all dragon.
But it does. At the close he is required to act like a king, first a guilty king, then a defiant one. McCamus' Richard doesn't have this in him (though McCamus himself probably does), and the last speeches, admittedly pretty stiff as written, go for nothing. They have, in fact, been heavily cut, and some of the play's power leaks away with them.
As it happens, Henry's editing of this long text is unconventional throughout. The execution at Pomfret of Rivers, Vaughan and Grey never seems to happen, though their ghosts turn up at the end, presented effectively as holograms (as are all the other ghosts). On the other hand, we do get to see scenes of backstairs intrigue and backstreet discontent that are generally excised and here prove worth the beholding.
The production moves fast but it never obliterates the actors. It's still fashionable -- probably it always will be -- to deride the general acting level at Stratford, but really we don't know what we have. This is a crack company, and everyone's a person.
Scott Wentworth dies two fine deaths in two successive scenes: First as a superbly spoken Clarence, then as a fulsome voiced Edward IV, whom the news of his brother's murder dispatches at a stroke. (He seems, as far as I could tell, to have a stroke.) Peter Hutt is a bluff, rather disreputable Buckingham who makes the fatal mistake of thinking he can match his master, sick joke for sick joke; Wayne Best gives an interestingly equivocal Hastings, loyal to his late king to the extent of inheriting his mistress; and John Dolan makes more than most of the time-serving Stanley, though less than is there for the making.
The weeping queens, with Lally Cadeau's Duchess as their Mother Superior, are first-rate. Diane D'Aquila's Margaret is less a character than an ambulant voice of doom, but she's a powerful and economical voice. It might have been helpful to have Seana McKenna, who plays Margaret in this season's Henry VI plays, bring that biography with her into this one. (The "Reign of Terror" subtitle is designed to bring Richard III into line with the Henries, which have been given similar handles, but with the lack of continuity in other respects, I doubt that anyone will notice.)
Still, if McKenna had played Margaret, we would have been deprived of her striking Elizabeth, who begins as a self-pitying tippler, wallowing in incipient widowhood and then, when she has lost everything, grows up. The scene in which Richard, desperate, begs for her daughter's hand in marriage and in which she fools him into thinking he's succeeded, is the high point of the play, as these days it often is. That's ironic, since it used to be denigrated, or even cut, as a mere reprise of Richard's celebrated coffin-side seduction of the Lady Anne (a scene that here lacks steam). In fact, it's far subtler and more satisfying, a duel instead of a walkover. It's the beginning of Richard's end.
The end of that end is here very graphic, and it rhymes with the opening of the play. Richard is hanging head- down from a tree, only this time he's the naked and the dead. This is not far from the way in which the historical Richard's body was treated after the Battle of Bosworth. It's triumphal from one point of view, disgusting from another.
Graham Abbey's Richmond has been a stocky and mercifully unstuffy saviour; most unhistorical, since the real Henry VII was an extremely devious piece of work, but it's what the play the needs: a St. George who doesn't insist on his status. He's likeable, Richard is fascinating. You take your choice.