Shakespeare’s Richard III at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival: Summer of Our Discontent

David Begelman 

            The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, in Garrison, New York, has taken on the challenge of staging Richard III. Authored in 1591 or 1592, it is the longest and most performed of the bard’s histories. The production runs from June 12 to August 18 of this year.

The central character of the play is a royal villain a cut apart from other scoundrels in the Shakespearean canon. He fashions his own self-serving roles, and, in asides to the audience, tops them off with rave reviews about how polished a performer he is. Richard’s villainy, even as it becomes obvious to his victims and enemies across five acts, is a triumph of insouciance. Victims are dispatched breezily, and include former accomplices in deceit and treachery, wives, family members like his brother Clarence, even two innocent children he contrives to murder in the Tower of London.

Richard’s bloodthirsty career unfolds in installments that often seem to verge on the farcical: he is resolutely  “determined to prove a villain,” as if no other dramatic role would be suitable for one who feels he was sent “into this breathing world, scarce half made up.” It is only on the eve of his final battle at Bosworth Field that Richard belatedly reproaches himself for his past deeds. Unlike Hamlet, who is galvanized into action by one ghost, Richard is hounded by eleven and beset by nightmares to boot. Talk about being haunted.  

            Some historians are unhappy with Shakespeare’s portrayal of the last of the Plantagenet kings. There is, after all, little hard evidence that the real Richard III was actually physically deformed or murdered two children in the Tower of London (contrary to Shakespeare, built by the Normans, not the Romans), and he is on record as innovating improvements in his kingdom’s legal system. One proclamation of 1484 provided remedy for any citizen wronged by a royal official. In addition, unlike many modern leaders, he displayed personal valor on the battlefield, and was the last English king to die on it. After a mere two years on the throne, he was deposed by Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, whose family line later included Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare’s sovereign. The play may therefore be tinctured with the popular biases of an age in which even the greatest of playwrights was not above playing politics by rewriting history. He was only one in a line of like-minded revisionists, including a principal source for his histories, Raphael Holinshed. All the same, Richard III is well crafted, and its central character is one generations of leading actors from David Garrick and John Phillip Kemble to Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellan, and Al Pacino have aspired to portray.

            The action at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival takes place under a capacious tent, an advantage over Elizabethan open-air theaters in better sheltering audiences from occasional downpours. The theater itself is situated in a gorgeous setting with a sprawling lawn and a view of the Hudson River and neighboring mountains that provides a breathtaking vista for attending audiences. The sweeping arc of the tent just above the upstage area is reminiscent of the framing of London city scenes in paintings by Cannaletto.

If only the current production of Richard III matched the attractiveness of the setting in which it was staged! Unfortunately, it has problems that tend to disappoint expectations for something more substantive and nuanced than what Director Terrence O’Brien has delivered. The cast is a repertory company, composed chiefly of Actors’ Equity members, many of whom are not only featured in the second of the bard’s plays this summer, As You Like It, but who have been mainstays at Boscobel from year to year. Needless to say, there can be a down side to the repertory concept, especially when it sacrifices opportunities to import fresh ideas and talent from the outside. The result may be an inbred atmosphere oblivious to its own shortcomings. This reviewer had the nagging feeling that something akin to this process was well under way at Boscobel.

            Richard III over the years has occasioned opportunities for leading actors to see who can better predecessors in portraying extremes of physical deformity in its central character. Chris Edwards’ Richard is no exception. He is by far the most skilled and watchable actor in the cast, in part due to the rubbery, agile way he manages his character: a bald and lumpish hemiplegic who, with a crutch that seems to be a part of his very anatomy, can traverse the stage like lightening. All the same, the conceit can become overwrought; for Shakespeare’s Richard is a tiger on the battlefield, and it is hard to see how the disability Mr. Edwards portrays enables Richard to dispatch so many enemies on Bosworth Field. “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” exclaims Richard, while we ponder how Mr. Edwards’ king is capable of mounting a horse, even after recruiting one.    

Terrance O’Brien’s direction often confuses heightened emotional meaning with shouting at the top of an actor’s lungs, a sometime handicap of other American productions of Shakespeare’s plays. Few in his large cast seem to appreciate the virtue of underplaying. He has his actors enter and exit scenes uncomfortably, and their speeches and interactions are often wooden and unconvincing. Performers doubling in roles lead more to confusion than cost efficiency, and wackiness is a hallmark of much of this production.

Joey Parsons doubles as Lady Anne and Queen Margaret, widow of Henry VI. In the latter role she becomes a raving virago who hurls imprecations at Richard while limping on two crutches. Her graying hair is so long and disheveled, it covers her entire face, like a weird sister right out of Macbeth.

On Bosworth Field, Noel Vélez, who plays Richmond, Richard’s adversary leading an insurrection against him, is determined to be anachronistic: he uses karate in battle, while several extras are seen brandishing samurai swords.

At the opening of the second act, Richard mysteriously sheds his deformity to sing a soft rock number while Lady Anne slinks seductively around him as extras slither, grind, and bump upstage to the same rhythms. It is Shakespeare with a dash of Britney Spears. There is nothing wrong in modernizing themes—as long as these are intelligently handled and consistently developed to make an artistic point. But Mr. O’Brien’s directorial ventures like his rock interlude are sore thumbs that protrude uncomfortably for little discernable reason. Otherwise, Bo Bell’s sound is used sparingly and well.

            The zaniest visual aspect of the production is Sara Jean Tosetti’s costumes. During opening scenes of the play, royal ensembles advance to the stage from afield on the lawn in what appears to be oriental regalia inspired by a Diaghilev production of Scheherazade, designed by Leon Bakst. The corpse of King Henry is carted onstage in the second scene in something resembling an enormous cocoon, rather than a coffin. Some featured players wear togas, while others go garbed like Dark Age Visigoths, all leathered up. The entire effect is less like a fifteenth century English court (or even an updated Edwardian or modern one, as in Ian McKellan’s impressive film) than it is a barbarian invasion inspired by fashion designers who lack a common language.

            Audiences who want their Richard III to be a rewarding, if not uplifting, theatrical experience will have to wait a bit longer for the right equation. This production doesn’t make the grade.

 

Published in Citizen News, New Fairfield, CT on 07/25/07