Last night I went there to see Shakespeare's Richard III. Not surprisingly, another success. No doubt it helped that I had a front row seat in the smaller theatre, Barter II, and the action was "in the round," so that I was immersed in the action (indeed, at one point in the play the hunchback soon-to-be-king with the wild boar tattoo on his right tricep shook my hand).
But that was really just a small part of it. The production itself was a miracle of economy. The play's cast is large, but Barter pulled it off with a grand total of eight actors, each of whom enacted multiple roles, in some cases five or six, counting minor characters. One, for example, played Margaret of Anjou (widow of Henry VI), one of the nephews in the Tower, Elizabeth of York, a contract assassin, an executioner, a soldier, and I'm sure I'm leaving something out, which I can't feel bad about because the program itself resorted to "etc." when listing the parts played by these actors. They literally wore different hats -- a simple change in headgear was the most common device for effecting the change in character. The only person with a single role was the actor playing Richard.
Another daring (I felt) approach of the production was that, of the eight actors, six were female. Richard and his vanquisher Richmond (Henry (Tudor) VII) were men. All of the other roles in this well-populated dramatis personae were played by women. While this doesn't take as much liberty with the play as those productions that transfer the setting to another place or time (and about which I'm somewhat meh), at the same time it felt somewhat more fundamental, being a partial reversal of the well-known Shakespearean all-male convention. It had me wishing that Barter had gone all the way and presented the play with an all-female cast. How might that have set off some ripples of suggestive thought in this day of toxic masculinity!
So the Barter upheld its part of the deal in its usual fresh and creative way. With this particular play, the only problem I have is with the playwright. Not with the poetry or the plotting or any of that -- the play dazzles from the very first line: "This is the winter of our discontent." But it is altogether such an ahistorical piece of flimsy Tudor propaganda that it is really quite laughable. And you don't have to know much history for this to be the case. All you have to know, really, is that the good guy who comes out on top at the end -- Richmond (Henry Tudor) is the grandfather of Queen Elizabeth, the monarch when the play was written. Once you realize that, the whole thing comes across as a bashed-up piece of folderol to curry favor.
Richard is a self-avowed villain from the very beginning, so embittered at being a hunchback that he seeks only to destroy those unlucky enough to be within his orbit. Along the way there is much self-conscious wit and jest, and it is to be supposed that Richard is able to seduce the audience in the same way he seduces Lady Anne Neville, whose spitting contempt of him (not only does his appearance fill her with revulsion, but her father and her husband were killed by his hand) is transformed into a pledge to marry him in the space of less than ten minutes. I was not convinced, and it wasn't the fault of the actor who played Richard. I'm not convinced by professional wrestling either. Or superhero comics with their mirror-image rotten-to-the-core bad guys.
The real problem for me with this play, however, is that I know that Richard's villainy is based on a number of egregious falsehoods. According to the play, Richard is responsible not only for the deaths of Anne Neville's father and husband, but also Anne herself (so he can then marry the sister of the princes), Henry VI, and Richard's brother Clarence. None of this is remotely true. And I doubt that Shakespeare's reliance on previously-published chronicles can entirely shelter him from blame. When you're trying to impress the queen by blackening the memory of the dynastic bete noire, no amount of tar is too much.
The real history is so much more interesting and full of the kind of human drama that Shakespeare supposedly reveled in. One of dramatic high points in the play is Richard's own mother's diatribe against him. To invite this kind of maternal scornful bitterness is a sure sign of Richard's unforgiveable rottenness, and Barter's actress delivered her lines with spine-tingling verisimilitude. But. Bad history. Richard's mother was in fact his champion. She even went to the extent of engineering doubts about her older son Edward IV's legitimacy because he'd pissed her off so bad for marrying beneath him. Let that sink in. She allowed it to be put about that she was an adulteress whose illegitimate child became king. Why did she do this? In order to strengthen the case for Richard's succession after the death of the then-supposed bastard Edward IV. Now that would've been a play worthy of a Shakespeare.
Instead we get an English Titus Andronicus without all the killing happening on stage. A little transcendence, but not much. Chalk it up to a journeyman's trials: Richard III was an early play, written not much later than the toga slasher Titus Andronicus. It is unfortunate for Richard's reputation that he was played false by the greatest playwright in history.
Perhaps, though, it bodes well for our immediate future if there is to be a future Shakespeare inspired by the events of our own age. The future play (enacted entirely by women, of course) will be about a villain who comes to power over a trail of dead bodies. It will be presented as historical, but the history will be as fake as Richard III. The title of the play will be Hillary I. Lucky for us! And I thought she was dead in the water after 2016.
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