Richard III meets Saw VII.

Earlier this week I applauded the comedy, but dissected the errors, of the Propeller Theatre Company's Comedy of Errors, now in rep at the Huntington with Richard III. Today I'll look longer at Richard, the less successful of the two productions.

Many print critics have expressed happy surprise at the unity of style that the Propellants have (supposedly) brought successfully to these Shakespearean scripts, as both are explicitly structured around extreme violence (Comedy plays like outtakes from Tom and Jerry, while Richard's mayhem is straight out of Saw, rusty hacks and all).  But alas, they couldn't be more wrong about that success.  Although I'll give Propeller's director, Edward-son-of-Peter Hall, at least these props: he savvily realized there were enough structural parallels between Comedy and Richard - both are essentially serial plots (one about a serial killer!), and both are organized around cruelty (onstage in one, offstage in the other) - that Propeller's propulsive fratboy physicality could, with opposing twists, serve approximately for both.  So I'll give him points for strategy.

But the violence is offstage in Richard III for a reason - it pulls focus relentlessly from Shakespeare's main concern: the creation of his first great dramatic character. Indeed, his Richard has cast such a cultural shadow that he has all but replaced the historical record (the Bard drew his distorted story from sources sympathetic to the Tudors, who offed Dick to take over from the Plantagenets).

But in the silver-tongued Richard Clothier (above), we have what amounts to an anti-Richard; he's far too attractive for the character's explicitly envious psychology to make sense, and while he speaks Shakespeare's language superbly (the diction problems of Comedy were largely banished here), his eloquence seems utterly unpossessed by any burning drive for power. Clothier comes off as a distinguished under-minister of finance who may be hiding a decidedly nasty streak (he may like to attack helpless women in hotel rooms, for instance) but who could never organize a take-over of the IMF.

Admittedly, director Hall is clearly aware of this gap in the performance; thus he has deployed a chorus of killers (similar to the "Mexican" chorines of Comedy, but dressed in costumes lifted from Patrick Stewart's Macbeth) to drive the murderous action (which includes blinding by acid, dismemberment by chainsaw, a double beheading, the chewing off of fingers, and a ritual disembowelment). Indeed, at one point, when Richard attempts to off one of his own assassins, he finds it impossible to do so; the killer just rises again, apparently indestructible, leaving Richard looking more like the puppet than the puppetmaster. This was actually the most intriguing moment in the production - but it cried out for greater explication (as we suddenly realized Hall's theme was just different from the Bard's). And while I admit that all the torture was diverting, in its way, it just didn't have that much to do with Shakespeare's play; indeed, it was kind of a replacement for the play, because Hall could never figure out how to actually hook up the hip, sadistic energies of Hostel to the chassis of Richard III.

So let's talk, just for a second, about Richard III. I've already described it as a landmark in the canon because of the titanic profile of Richard; wedged between the intermittent brilliance of Henry VI and Titus Andronicus and the stunning structural breakthrough of Midsummer, its unforgettable central characterization constitutes one of the clear steps in "Shakespeare becoming Shakespeare." Behind the sheer forcefulness of Richard as character, however, there are subtler ontological themes at work: the scheming killer exists as something of a Shakespearean factotum, a kind of meta-playwright who all but announces the scene he is about to conjure; his own persona encapsulates, and even stage-manages, the history he's relating. Indeed, he "can add colors to the chameleon, and change shape with Proteus for advantages" (to quote Henry VI, in which he makes his first appearance); Richard is here, there and everywhere (the opposite, really, of Hall's approach). Thus, tellingly, when he is left alone on Bosworth field prior to his defeat, his multitudes of personalities all collapse into a single, guilty one. "I am I," he at last states (compare with Iago's "I am not what I am") - and he admits that "I" is a murderer; so we know immediately his own death cannot be far off.

It's the Duke of Clarence against not just Richard III, but the entire cast.

But Hall's vision has little to do with Shakespeare's progression for the character - indeed, its only progression is a steady escalation in its gross-out effects.  Thus it's no surprise his whole resistance-is-futile-before-my-killer-chorus approach undermines most of the action. The famous assassination of Clarence in the Tower, for instance, though spiked with clever sadism (above), nevertheless falls flat because it's clear Clarence (an unfortunately weak John Dougall, who was also a weak link in Comedy) has no hope of ever appealing to the consciences of his killers (at least as conceptualized here); his death feels pre-determined, and thus dramatically inert. Scene after scene plays out much the same way, because all of Richard's antagonists (particularly Lady Anne) likewise seem trapped in the amber of Hall's concept.  Even Elizabeth, whose escape from Crookback's clutches constitutes the structural climax of the script, seems to have little (if any) will of her own (though the talented Dominic Tighe makes one of the company's few stabs at a genuinely feminine character; most of the other "women" are just guys in dresses).  Even the triumph of Richmond (a.k.a. Henry Tudor) on Bosworth Field hardly registers as an event.  All it means is that we won't be seeing any more intestines onstage.

Of course if you're persuaded that there should be no difference between what you see at the Huntington and what you see at the multiplex (and there are many like you if you are), then this Richard III is definitely for you.  Certainly to many folks - even to many critics - the hoary old idea that art should be about something more than the jolt of a horror movie is - well, precisely that: a hoary old idea.  And so I breathlessly await Henry-IV-meets-Saw-VII!

Welcome to the frathouse: Propeller's Comedy of Errors.

First the good news: the Propeller Theatre Company's touring productions of Comedy of Errors and Richard III (currently playing in rep at the Huntington) are the most brazenly inventive productions of the Bard I've seen in some time (and maybe ever).  Propeller, under the direction of Edward (son of Peter) Hall, boasts a huge ensemble with talent and energy to burn; and if the actors don't always have the most precise diction around, they compensate with musical chops and a refreshingly gonzo attitude.  With the Propellants (sorry) you never feel - as you do far too often today in productions of the Bard - that you're watching a stretched acting corps, or that political correctness, or any other stripe of high-mindedness, has crimped or curtailed the action; indeed, the Propellants openly revel in aiming their Shakespeare at the kind of Gen-Y groundlings who might otherwise be hanging at The Hangover II.

But before you pop those champagne corks over a post-modern masterpiece, ponder that neither of these pop editions of Comedy and Richard actually do their sources justice. (Comedy is by far the stronger of the two, although Richard has its fascinations.) No doubt the print reviewers will sing the praises of both  - and not without some cause; they're probably the strongest "big" Shakespeare we've seen in these parts in months, if not years (overall they're more impressive than the recent F. Murray Abraham Merchant of Venice).  Still, the success of Propeller's clever "updates" of the Bard via multiplex tropes and attitudes only deepens the critical paradox these productions present, and represent.

But let's back up a bit.  A major twentieth-century critical project - from the first "modern dress" Shakespeare productions through Peter Brook's "theatre of cruelty" to the early conceptual seasons of the A.R.T. - was rescuing the Bard from the distortions of earlier ages.  In previous centuries, sentimentalism had bent Shakespeare to its will, and adaptations and interventions were often the order of the day (even King Lear was re-written with a happy ending, by the notorious Nahum Tate).  But modern reformists hoped to scrape the saccharine detritus of some three centuries away from the Shakespearean tradition, and start fresh with a more authentic version of the Bard, one we could recognize, as Jan Kott famously put it, as "our contemporary."

But making Shakespeare our contemporary often has the downside of down-sizing him; because, face it, he's bigger than we are (although that's not what millennial narcissists like to hear).  Indeed, the greatest Shakespearean interpretations, I'd argue, should surprise our own society with fresh insights about itself.  But few of our critics or academics are interested in holding up an unflattering mirror to their customers; instead, our cultural consensus is happy to pound a contemporary template onto the Bard.  Which is exactly what Nahum Tate used to do.

Dugal Bryce-Lockhart locks lips with Robert Hands.

Thus while Propeller seems to spin a brilliant web of transgression in its knockabout aesthetic, you also get the feeling that all the edgy shenanigans are very comfortably mainstream - and somehow reductive.  The company leans on violence as almost the be-all (if not the end-all) of its aesthetic - the brutality is relentless in Comedy of Errors, which at least is sourced in physical farce; but even when Shakespeare leaves the rough stuff off-stage (as he does throughout Richard III), the Propellants drag it on anyway, with escalating scenes of torture-porn that might have been lifted from Saw or Hostel (the first act closes with a dismemberment by chainsaw - and we're only halfway through).  Of course you could make the critical pitch that in Comedy (at least), the Propellants are simply shining a harsh light on Shakespeare's own theatre of cruelty; but by the time old Crookback literally chews off Lady Anne's finger in Richard III, we realize that all the mayhem is really due to Propeller's monomania rather than any predilection of the Bard's.

And then there's the question of the troupe's famous same-sex casting - which I hoped might throw some welcome light on the Elizabethan practice of casting boys in women's roles. But no such luck, really - the Propellants color within the comfortable lines of drag queenery for the most part, at least in Comedy (above); the issue of verisimilitude - which we sense must have figured in Elizabethan practice (otherwise why cast boys?) - never raises its head (be-wigged or otherwise). Thus the question of how, exactly, a boy ever played Rosalind (or Cleopatra!) remains as mysterious after a double dose of  Propeller as it did before.  (Indeed, after watching Comedy, I realized just how shocking a cast of men and boys in a Shakespeare play would be today - talk about shaking up modern sensibilities!)  And as the "straighter" playing of the women in Richard III yielded fewer dramatic dividends than the drag schtick in Comedy, I'm wondering how far the Propeller aesthetic can really go when it comes to the canon; without some serious twists in their approach, I'd say they're limited to the histories and the early comedies.

But what's oddest about their same-sex casting, at least in Comedy of Errors, is how it re-inforces, rather than subverts, issues of gender and identity.  In fact I don't think I've ever seen quite as butch a production of Comedy as the Propellants offer here. Not only is violence the lingua franca of the piece (even the nuns brandish riding crops!), but all the "women" are costumed in uniform mini-skirts and hooker heels (see abbess at top) that hint at porn-derived gender roles. By the time someone has run across the stage naked with a sparkler up his bum (at right), and the local cop has been anally violated with his night stick, you realize we're deep in the frathouse (the whole thing even takes place in some frat-style south-of-the-border luau) where everyone is bound to the rigid codes of masculine dominance, desire and disgust that you often find there, but which have little to do with Shakespeare.

Of course all this only makes the Propellants seem up-to-the-minute, doesn't it. We live in an age of feminists who are suspicious of the feminine, so it's no surprise they're suspicious of Shakespeare, too, who is always suggesting that men should act more like women, but rarely that women should act more like men. Thus, weirdly enough, Hall manages to sell the Propellants' sexism as a critique of Shakespeare rather than a reflection of contemporary attitudes.

Still, you have to admit - fratboys are funny in short bursts, and there's no denying much of Comedy is cruelly hilarious. And there was some great drag acting on hand from Robert Hands (above left) as the piece's put-upon wife, Adriana (Quick grad-student thesis topic: Adriana as Shakespeare's only portrait of Anne Hathaway, with himself as an internally-doubled model for Antipholus: discuss!). I also got a kick out of the wittily self-conscious turn from David Newman (before he started with the num-chucks) as Adriana's more conventional sister. Whenever these two were onstage, Comedy played as a smarter version of the Gold Dust Orphans. Alas, as the identical twins in their lives, Dugald Bruce-Lockhart and Sam Swainsbury seemed more superficial (if no less theatrically savvy), and their slick, disco-dud sleaziness grew old before the show was over. Meanwhile director Hall never really differentiated their personalities, or their differing relationships with their twin servants (features which are quite clear in the text).

Indeed, not much that intrigues us today about The Comedy of Errors seems to have been top-of-mind for Hall. For if, as I argued recently, Cymbeline recapitulates the canon, then Comedy all but predicts it. Twins, shipwrecks, double identities, threatened executions, fears of adultery, flights of love poetry, even a last-minute family re-union - they're all there in embryo in The Comedy of Errors, which is studded with hard little thematic buds that would later flower in plays as disparate as The Taming of the Shrew and Pericles.

It would be difficult to suggest those later dramatic riches, I admit, in a production that also aimed for the funnybone - but still, that litany of plays (and modes) suggests there's far more tonal modulation to be found in Comedy than Edward Hall seems to have sought. So even as I laughed (and I often did), I sensed that something essential was always missing from the mix - much as I did in Richard III; but those are thoughts I'll explore more fully in the second part of this double review.

Hump play

This hump is hot! What - you wanted more?

The raves have rolled in this summer for Shakespeare and Company's Richard III - even the Times's Ben Brantley seemed to give it a thumbs-up (although, in a classic case of Brantley-speak, Ben slyly avoided ever ratifying the rave he seemed to be penning). So l thought, in my kindly, optimistic way, that maybe this time the Berkshire institution, so beloved of a certain boomer demographic, might have broken through to some new level.

But they haven't; last weekend Richard III seemed largely like business as usual to me, even though I haven't been to Shakespeare & Co. for several years: emphatic text (so emphatic the cast was sometimes hoarse), some broad, intrusive audience participation, several ideas that didn't quite cohere, some good acting here and there, and a whole lotta gonzo energy. Yes, lead John Douglas Thompson made a surprisingly sexy Richard. He's hot. But as a thought-through performance, Thompson's Richard didn't really exist; one of Shakespeare's greatest characters was here a propulsive blank. I'd be hard put, in fact, to name any clear decisions Thompson has made about the role at all, besides, in classic Shakespeare & Co. style, to play things faster and louder. A few other actors (particularly the women) made headway against his bad example, but they couldn't quite put the production over - although they did make the show intermittently entertaining.


Thus it probably counts as better than the weird "director's cut" at Trinity a year or two ago (which was rarely even entertaining). That production was chock-a-block with concept; this one is relatively free of it, although there were moments when Thompson adopted a servile persona with his victims that were weirdly interesting - even if they didn't "go" with the medieval costuming and headgear (which were lovely but oddly pointless). There was also a hint of symbolic arc at the beginning and end of the show (we first saw Richard sleeping as the curtain rose; from then on, he didn't stop moving until his last sleep on Bosworth Field). But this gambit (if it was one) didn't connect to much else in the production, either.

There's a sad reason for this lack of coherence; the production's original director, Tony Simotes (also artistic director of Shakespeare & Co. itself) had to step down due to illness (Jonathan Croy replaced him, with the help of Malcolm Ingram). Whether or not Simotes - may he be well - had a throughline in mind for the production is something I suppose we'll never know. What's likely is that these two old Shakespeare & Co. hands layered over an inherited concept a mishmash of the troupe's standard tropes; hence so much of it understandably feels like the same old thing.

I do wish somebody in the area could pull off Richard III, though, not merely because it features one of the greatest roles in the canon, but also because it sheds a fascinating light on Shakespeare's development. Scholars usually place the play at the beginning of the Bard's career - generally just after the three parts of Henry VI, probably his first efforts. These lead both historically and artistically into Richard III, of course, but there's an unmistakable gap between them. The Henry VI plays are wonderfully energetic, and kind of scramble all over the map - they're even ornamented with a few great speeches (Gloucester - later Richard III - gets one in Part III). But they don't feel structurally much like "Shakespeare;" they have a "this happened, then that happened, then THIS happened" cable-series quality to them that Richard III, despite its length, marks a noticeable advance from.

For modern viewers untutored in British history, of course, Richard III can still be hard to follow, but it's organized thematically around curses and choruses in an almost operatic fashion (Mad Margaret, for instance, who was actually dead during the period in question, is resuscitated by the Bard purely for thematic - or perhaps musical - reasons). And for the first time (I'd argue) we can feel Shakespeare threading a subtle philosophical idea (about the nature of the political self) through his convoluted action. In short, in Richard III, we can feel Shakespeare learning, after sensing his own virtuosity in Henry VI, how to really organize a complex plot and theme before moving on to the far "thicker" double and triple plots he would favor later.


Hi, I'm completely miscast. Hey - so am I!

And, of course, the play features several stunning set-pieces - not just Richard's soliloquies, but his wooing of Lady Anne (above), and then the political seduction of Queen Elizabeth, the murder of Clarence in the tower, and the finale on Bosworth Field are all among the Bard's most memorable achievements. Indeed, we can tell from the text that the young Shakespeare thought he was hot stuff himself - these scenes often begin with the Bard telegraphing "Don't think I can pull this one off? Watch me!" But alas, only a few of these barnstorming scenes actually came off at Shakespeare & Co. Lady Anne was completely miscast, for instance, so her big scene with Richard went nowhere (and as the scene depends on Richard's psychological acuity, Thompson's attack mode had little chance of making it work, anyhow). As Queen Elizabeth, Tod Randolph likewise at first seemed at sea, and Rocco Sisto gave a surprisingly flat reading of Clarence's famous dream of drowning (although he was beautifully eloquent with his would-be murderers - too bad they were played entirely for laughs!). Meanwhile company stalwart Nigel Gore phoned in his performance as Buckingham - only Elizabeth Ingram impressed as the mad Queen Margaret (although she wasn't nearly as dishabille as we normally see Margaret these days).

To be fair, the production did move uphill. Ingram continued to impress in the second act, while Randolph found a surprising strength in her final sparring with Richard. Meanwhile Andy Talen made a solid, if not quite inspiring, Richmond. And as the murders ground on, the victims (such as Jason Asprey's Hastings) did find touching moments in their rear-view-mirror epiphanies.

Still, I left bored, and puzzled by the many critical huzzahs Thompson and this elaborate misfire had received. Admittedly, I'd just come back from Stratford, where I'd nitpicked over Christopher Plummer's reading of Prospero, so I felt a bit like Dorothy waking up in Kansas. What was most depressing was the thought that, minus the star, and with more coherent direction, the rest of the cast might have pulled this Richard together. But could they have sold tickets without Thompson's presence, and his sexy, "rising actor of his generation" hype (thank you again, New York Times)? Probably not. And therein may lie something like the essential problem of American Shakespeare (call it, perhaps, "the Papp effect"): we want to see, and even revel in, the Bard, but we also want to force him into a pop template which can't contain him, much less do him justice.

Rewritten Richard

Brian McEleny cries his false heart out in Richard III.

The Boston critics raved over Trinity Rep's Richard III (which closed last weekend), so I schlepped down to Providence to see what all the fuss was about. I returned slightly nonplussed. I'm a fan of Trinity - because of its longevity, rapport with its audience, and general air of humanity - but I try not to let that prevailing attitude seep into my assessments of individual productions. Other Hub critics, I think, are not so persnickety - at least it was hard to see what so many saw in this Richard.

Director Kevin Moriarty, many pointed out, had aggressively cut and shaped the text - most notably he opened the show with a preamble of scenes from Henry VI, Part III in a kind of "Last Week on Wars of the Roses" montage. So far, I supposed, so good - although I didn't really buy that these snippets made the action of Richard any clearer. I grew disturbed, however, when lines from the Duke of Gloucester's famous soliloquy from Henry cropped up in the more-famous opening speech of Richard - which then capped with the Moriarty-penned line, "The plot begins!"

Uh-huh. And my indulgence ended. Where, exactly, does one say "hold, enough"? Where does "cutting and shaping" turn into "rewriting"? I think Moriarty's Richard III was right on that line - no, sorry, it was over that line. Don't get me wrong - Richard III is ripe for cuts - it's perhaps the longest of Shakespeare's plays (depending on how you configure Hamlet), with one of the Bard's most rambling "plots," based on personages who are neither easy to distinguish nor rendered with historical accuracy. A critic expects, with every production, a new "edition" of Richard.

But said critic shouldn't expect the wholesale butchery done at Trinity, in which director Moriarty took roughly the same attitude toward Shakespeare's characters that Richard took toward human life. Not that Moriarty only cut - he also invented whole scenes (in this version, Richard offs Lady Anne with his own hands, and a prince gets clubbed into oblivion), put famous lines into different characters' mouths (the Duchess of York refers to her own womb as "a kennel"!), and sometimes plunked characters at will into scenes where Will would never have put them.

Even this much tampering, of course, isn't necessarily wrong, if it works (Trevor Nunn, for example, pulled Twelfth Night apart and re-assembled it in his film version, which is often brilliant). But at Trinity, Moriarty's monster never really came to life. And it was obvious why - perversely, he'd cut most of the best stuff in the play. Gone (as in nowhere to be found, ixnay, poof!) were Mad Margaret and her curses, Clarence's debate with his killers, the Bishop of Ely's strawberries, the cool ruthlessness of the murderous Tyrrel, the little prince taunting Richard, the ghosts of Bosworth blessing Richmond - basically all the highlights (some purple, others blacker than black) you look forward to in the play.

As for the motive behind this madness, Moriarty was on record saying that "only Shakespeare scholars" would miss these details, and that his cuts were required by modern attention spans (the production clocked in at just over 2 1/2 hours - that's including fifteen minutes from Henry VI). To which I say, "Bullshit." The cuts and rewrites were clearly artistic decisions, designed to trim away both the motivation as well as the melodrama from Richard (he's lost his hump in this version, and his limp is from a war wound, so sayonara any psychosexual envy) in what played as an attempt to model the play as a vision of bureaucracy gone bonkers. The set looked like a bombed-out pavilion from Zaha Hadid (with one arm of Louise Bourgeois's Spider apparently having crawled over from the ICA), thus hinting at a fun "Murder at MOMA" interpretation, but instead Moriarty seemed to be half-heartedly offering half an allegory to the Bush administration. This, of course, is rather a tired trope, and shrinks Dick Crookback to the puny dimensions of Dick Cheney; what's more, Moriarty seemed to lack the courage of his convictions - I hoped in vain for Clarence to be waterboarded rather than drowned in malmsey, but for reasons unknown, he was garroted instead.

One soon forgot the particulars of each murder, however, as the body count mounted. Moriarty and his Richard all but dashed from one execution to the next - and did anyone but the director care who these people were? I've seen the show many times, and even designed the set for one production, but I've never been able to keep all these heads straight before they're lopped off, and I don't see why I should. What's important is to capture the rising sense of the charnel-house the state has become - which despite all the bloodletting, Moriarty utterly failed to do. At any rate, the sheer speed of the killings made nonsense of the opening gambit from Henry VI - why set up the cast of characters if you're going to mow them down so quickly? Indeed, the actors only barely individualized each victim as they rushed hither and yon (and as usual for Trinity, few had the vocal resources to project appropriately in the large upstairs theatre).

To be fair, Phyllis Kay made an interestingly mature and rueful Queen Elizabeth - her scenes with McEleney's Richard (at left) proved far more powerful than Lady Anne's. And McEleney himself, though lacking the killer charisma to make his rise to power credible, brought a compelling force to the sudden self-awareness that comes with the crown once it's on his head. But this was perhaps a case of too little, too late, particularly given the flat work done by much of the cast - who no doubt were often distracted, to be honest, by having to run around shooting cap guns at each other. Given that they were trapped in a production that was neither apt political metaphor, nor compelling character study, nor Grand Guignol melodrama, nor killer black comedy, nor fish, nor fowl, it was hard to blame them for phoning their performances in.