richard

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Richard III: Reign of Terror

September 5th and 7th, 2002

Director: Martha Henry

Writer: William Shakespeare

Cast: Seana McKenna, Scott Wentworth, Diane D'Aquila, Peter Hutt

Character: Richard, Duke of Gloucester

Plot: Immediately following the Wars Of The Roses, Richard, youngest brother of the king, seeks to rise to the throne of England through plots, seduction, and murder.

Review: I spent a good thirty seconds wondering what the trees were made out of. It was the last time until a good couple of hours after the curtain that I considered anything so banal. Richard III at Stratford was also the first time that would have gladly paid for my ticket on the basis of the first 15 minutes of the play alone. This isn't to say that the remainder of the play was so bad that I would have been thankful of an early exit, just that the hearty round of applause Tom McCamus got at the first scene change was well worth the effort.

There's an unwritten law that when you do the opening monologue from Richard III, perhaps the most memorable speech from the play as a whole, if we forget about kingdoms and horses, you'd better do it with some oomph. Henry has stuck McCamus up a tree. Let's face it - it probably didn't look all that good on paper. But as McCamus' Richard suddenly moves, detached from the landscape and incarnated as a black leather clad spider crawling down to the ground, he certainly gets our attention... even more so when he slips, falls, and lands with a crash on the ground. We laugh, of course, until a hand emerges to grab onto the scaffolding which forms most of the set with a resounding clang. Richard picks himself up, and he smiles, but the set has forecast horror, and all future laughs must be a tad uneasy.

McCamus' Richard is a fascinating creature, and it is an extremely physical performance which emphasises Richard's position as a man who has been laughed at for his disabilities all his life, and who has learned to at least pretend to laugh at himself. But he is also able to respond with venom, at first only as the half-bitter jokes of a younger brother, and then with real blood and fury. The play offers puzzling contradictions in Richard's character, particularly the early seduction scene where Richard, who confesses to the audience that dogs bark at him as he passes, must win the love of a woman whose husband and father he has murdered. This is not an easy task, and McCamus' Richard appears to initially go about it the entirely wrong way, playing with knives and humour - two things distinctly out of place in a funeral procession. Fortunately Richard, although he cannot always express himself clearly, is a smarter man than anyone else in the play, and McCamus bestows on him such roguish charisma that the scene remains, if not entirely believable, then at least something the audience will readily believe if only to get in on Richard's gleeful bragging afterwards. By the time McCamus leaves the stage for the first time, we are his willing conspirators to the end.

The remainder of the play, whilst lacking this initial effect and some of Shakespeare's finest rhetoric, is nonetheless equal to the task of not being a letdown. Henry exploits the deepest black comedy in the text, and finds some fascinating dynamics in possibly one of the most dysfunctional families ever seen on stage. Richard, of course, is not only the youngest of three brothers - he is also the family dog. Scott Wentworth deserves commiserations on his two funerals, as his dual characters of Clarence and the King are killed off in quick succession but remain perhaps the strongest male opponents to the McCamus whirlwind - Graham Abbey is dashing enough, but the script does him no favours as the bold but terminally dull Richmond. Only the women of the play - Seana McKenna, Diane D'Aquila (who seems to have wandered in from Macbeth) and Lally Cadeau seriously threaten Richard, pointing up one of the serious flaws of hereditary male-line monarchy. But this is McCamus' show, from falling out of a tree to being strung up nearly naked and very dead from one, and he deserved every clap of his two standing ovations.

Trivia: Tom & Martha Henry also did Coriolanus at Stratford in 1997.