An Unwinnable Game of Thrones?
Richard III
Stratford Festival
The National Post
Seana McKenna is formidable as Richard III
One of the abiding puzzles of Richard III is that, while few people in the play have any illusions about the hunchbacked schemer who's decimating them on his way to the throne, he still gets away with it. The other characters hardly cease insulting him ("bunchbacked toad" and so on) and they all know his murderous record, but they still go along with him, either for what they think they can get out of it or because they just don't take him seriously. Seana McKenna, striking a blow for gender-neutral casting by playing Richard at Stratford, shows why they should believe this and just how wrong they are.
There have been plenty of impish Richards played by men. McKenna goes further by playing him as an imp: a descendant of the personified Vice of the English morality plays to whom at one point he claims kinship. If McKenna's voice is higher than those of some Richards, her bodily stature is lower; she lops a few inches off her height by adopting a steep stoop to add to the character's other infirmities, and she may be setting new records in regard to size of hump and black lankness of hair. I don't know quite what the correct word is for the physical aura that McKenna brings to the role -neither "androgynous" nor "asexual" seem to fit the bill -but she does seem like a creature from another mode of being: someone whose contemporaries could quite easily accept as a combination court jester and court executioner, but whom they could never imagine wearing the crown. But then they don't know what we do.
Richard III is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, and its protagonist buttonholes the audience in a conversational, self-revealing manner without precedent in world drama. He is, in the words of a Broadway song, the man who invented chutzpah; and he uses it on us as, in different ways, he uses it on everybody else. In other roles -Medea, for example -McKenna's humour has sometimes threatened to overstep the tragic mark, but in this one she has wit and danger in razor-sharp balance, bound together by pain. When this Richard says he isn't "shaped for sportive tricks" (we'd noticed), it's both a joke at his own expense and an expression of bottomless bitterness. Ruthlessness logically follows. Richard knows exactly how far to go when playing politics. Some of McKenna's effects have been done before -for example, the instant transition from the insouciant brutality of "chop off his head, man" to the genial retreat of "something we will determine" -but they're traditional for good reason. McKenna coruscates all the way to the throne, and continues to fascinate and increasingly to frighten, through Richard's desperate improvising as the walls start to fall in on him.
The performance only runs out of steam in the last movement on Bosworth Field, a decline it shares with Miles Potter's production and, to be frank, with the play itself. Richard's eve-of-battle terrors, after being visited by the ghosts of his victims, furnish a soliloquy different in kind from all the preceding ones. Instead of talking to us, he's talking to himself, and he doesn't seem to have the vocabulary; exhilarating naturalism gives way to turgid pattern-making. Very few actors in my experience have managed to animate that speech, though it's presumably meant to be the climax. Cutting deprives McKenna of the chance to rally herself by rallying the troops, but she does bring off an awesome "my kingdom for a horse." Unfortunately, the battle she's attempting to rejoin is being fought in slow motion, a very tired device. So is the idea of having Richard laid low by the ghosts (i.e. by his conscience, which he doesn't have), rather than by his actual adversary Richmond (Gareth Potter), who's here played, rather simplistically, as a St. George who doesn't even get to engage the dragon.
The production in general looks starved, on a nearly bare set by Peter Hartwell that might better have gone all the way to full emptiness. Potter's direction is at its sharpest in the last stages of Richard's rise to the throne and in its immediate aftermath. The relationship of Richard and Buckingham (an excellent Wayne Best, selling his soul and then cavilling at the price) is a fine game of protracted cat-and-mouse, ending in a trap whose snap you can practically hear. Their hoodwinking of the disoriented Lord Mayor (Shane Carty) and citizens is very funny and thoroughly believable. Other good if stylistically scattered performances include Michael Spencer-Davis's Clarence blithely incredulous that a noble like himself should be sent to the Tower; Nigel Bennett's Hastings; David Ferry's Edward IV ranting himself to death; Cyrus Lane's one-scene, one-speech Scrivener sensing the beginnings of a police state; Oliver Becker's roughneck Ratcliffe; and Sean Arbuckle's courtly Catesby, the last two providing a helpful contrast between Richard's thugs-in-chief.
Them's the men. Even apart from McKenna, the production boasts a monstrous regiment of talented women. Martha Henry is resonantly oracular as Margaret, the prophetic fury from the “Wars of the Roses”. Roberta Maxwell's Duchess of York, denouncing and disowning her misshapen son, delivers him a powerful coup de grace. Yanna McIntosh is a supple and passionate Elizabeth, especially electric in her ultimate duel of wits with Richard, though it isn't made clear enough that she wins it, marking the beginning of his end just as his earlier seduction of the Lady Anne marked the beginning of his beginning. Bethany Jillard doesn't face up to Richard with the vocal virtuosity of her more experienced sisters, but she spits at him very eloquently and, once conquered, suffers with grace. She's hauntingly present onstage when Richard plots her death, the most chilling sequence of the evening. "Was ever woman in this humour won?" asks Richard; and humour, in the modern sense, is part of his magic. Strength of mind and of will are more. Richard's enemies never know what hit them. It's to McKenna's credit neither, after a whole evening in his/her fascinating company, do we.