Richard III
Shakespeare in the Ruff
The National Post

This is the summer of our discontent. At least, I seem to have spent much of it watching a prize assortment of Shakespearean grievance-huggers: Shylock and Iago at Stratford, Macbeth in High Park, and now Richard III, currently holding economical but extremely rewarding court in the more modest Toronto parkland known as Withrow.

The villainous company I've been keeping has prompted me to make some distinctions. Shakespeare's plotters and murderers divide into two categories: those with human ties and those without. Shylock, with his wounded love for his daughter and his more grudgingly expressed regard for the servant who also deserts him, clearly belongs in the first camp. So does Claudius in Hamlet, whose murder of his brother is partly caused by love for the brother's wife. So, really, does Macbeth, whose wife made him do it the first time, and whose descent into further crime coincides with her unravelling.

Then there are the loners, some of whom have a disconcerting habit of changing their spots at the last minute. Edmund in King Lear, who starts out cheerfully amoral, develops a conscience towards the play's close when it is, grimly, too late. His fellow bastard Don John, in Much Ado About Nothing, gets closer to the model of unredeemed malevolence, but he's a shadowy figure in a predominantly cheerful play. Then there's Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus; he could be the villain's villain - he goes to his death regretting any day on which he may have passed up the chance of doing somebody harm, presumably by sleeping late - but even he spoils his record by displaying great tenderness for his newborn son. And so we reach Iago, the only one who admits no positive connection with anyone else at all and also, as Graham Abbey is chillingly demonstrating at Stratford, the only one who, for that very reason, gets no fun out of life. Edmund and Aaron revel in their misdeeds; Iago achieves only a cold self-satisfaction. It's commonly and, I think, accurately believed that Shakespeare, when writing Shylock or indeed Falstaff, surprised himself with the depths of humanity he found in them. With Iago the reverse must have happened; he astonished himself by discovering previously uncharted levels of inhumanity. you keep waiting for Iago to crack. He never does.

Richard III does, though only near the last minute and only in a rather artificial speech prompted by artificial means. (He thinks he's had a bad dream. The play says that he's been visited by the ghosts of his victims.) He then pulls himself together and goes unrepentant to his death in battle. Alex McCooeye, the young actor who plays Richard in Withrow Park, deals splendidly with the last self-immolating defiance and better than most with the chop-logic nightmare. But his finest moments have already happened, the most surprising of all being his first appearance. Most Richards hug the floor; the late Michael Redgrave once declared that he could never play the role because he was too tall. McCooeye, though, has him all beat in the height department; he looks to be about seven feet. This gives him a lot of limp to carry around, and to complain about.

The complaining, though, is less pervasive than we tend to remember. In Diane D'Aquila's production, which is crammed with smart and helpful ideas, he makes his first entrance, shyly and slyly, from behind a tree. He then launches into the familiar lines about peacetime decadence, all that courting and dancing, delivered in high- pitched tones of delectable mockery. Then, suddenly, on the part about not being shaped for sportive tricks, a storm breaks, one of tormented and full throated bitterness; it's electric. The cloud passes, and he gets cheerfully down to the business of outlining his homicidal, including fratricidal, path to the throne. And those are the parameters of the performance.

Richard, until the moment he achieves his ambition, belongs with the good-time villains. Once he's there, killing becomes a strategy of survival, still efficient, but increasingly frantic. The pace, of both performance and production, quickens; and it's been going at a good lick to start with. Shakespeare's second-longest play here comes in at less than two hours, and it isn't all down to cutting (though that's extensive and, for the most part, not to be regretted).

Richard doesn't dwell much on his deformity after that first speech. He mocks it, after his successful wooing of Lady Anne, a scene that in this production carries an exceptional erotic charge; he practically has her up against a tree (not the same one). He's mocked for it by his young nephew, the Duke of York, one of the Princes not yet in the Tower, who more or less calls him a monkey's organ grinder; in this production the hurt is, for once, more physical than mental, and obviously very deeply felt. Here I must commend Charlie Gould, the very promising young actress who plays both Anne and York; you feel that in the former role she might kill Richard as easily as submit to him; later she gets the further benefit of practically hearing her own death-sentence. Vocally, McCooeye's Richard doesn't have much middle ground between a high whistle and a low snarl, but he uses those extremes to capture Richard's menace, his charm, and the terrifying alternation of the two. Visually, he's such an extreme figure that you understand his contemporaries' bewilderment; they never know whether to laugh or to tremble.

With a cast of 10 and no other scenery than nature's, D'Aquila's direction makes a superb virtue of economy. This is a modern-dress production, though you hardly notice except when Marc Bondy's Buckingham, an operator's operative, is wielding his cellphone. There's no manpower for a funeral procession, so Anne carries her father-in-law's remains about in an urn (the text does helpfully mention his "ashes") that she's unwise enough to entrust to Richard's custody. We know that Richard, when about to secure the execution of Hastings, jocularly sends a bishop for some strawberries; this is the first time I've known him to be eating them when the severed head is delivered. It's about this time, too, that night helpfully descends, as if to signal the beginning of Richard's reign of terror. I had thought that the ghosts might have to be cut, or reduced to offstage voices, but they're there, in gripping torchlight procession. Notable supporting in performances include Jesse Griffiths' Clarence and Jacklyn Francis' Elizabeth, the second more ambiguous recipient of Richard's treeside advances. The director herself adds authority as Richard's mother, the only person present who can cow him with a curse. Brendan McMurtry-Howlett is a Richmond who actually gets to kill Richard in person, though you could hardly call it traditional single combat; his snipers already have his opponent in their red-dotted sights, He closes the play in the authentic accents of St. George, somewhat compromised by his brandishing a gun over his head while he does it. This actor is also the artistic director of Shakespeare in the Ruff, not to be confused with its predecessor in the park, Shakespeare the rough. They made their debut last summer with a promising but uneven Two Gentlemen of Verona. This year, they really deliver.