RICHARD III by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE at the LYRIC THEATRE, BELFAST on the 16th of October 2024

 

RICHARD III by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE at the LYRIC THEATRE, BELFAST on the 16^{th of} October 2024

The Tragedy of Richard III

The Lyric’s new production of Shakespeare’s Richard III announces itself with puerile themes, a bouncy castle, crazy drummers creating diegetic sound, and George, Duke of Clarence, Edward IV’s and Richard’s brother, being led away to incarceration in the Tower of London.  He’s dressed in fishnet stockings, later dons a pair of angelic wings, and wears a pair of old-fashioned white underwear.  He seems unworried about the grizzly fate that awaits him in a butt of wine.  It’s difficult to assess when the play is set and hard to view it as employing anachronism.  Richard wears modern clothes, some of the other characters medieval clothes, in other words a confusing clash and mixture of styles as if the director could not settle on a definite vision of the play or establish a coherent conceit. 

Charlotte McCurry as Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth appears wearing medieval garb and with a big pregnant tummy.  Later, she grasps a plastic toy baby in her hand.  The costume design establishes an effective shorthand, describing the characters and the things that concern them.  The prince appears, a puppet on a hobbyhorse, Clarence and King Edward are wheeled away on morgue stretchers.  The energetic performances and the beauty of Shakespeare’s language enables the director to foreground the tragi-comic nature of Richard.

Michael Patrick as Richard III

The set design is a simple, economical shorthand suggesting palaces, towers and castles, even the very depths of the ocean as suggested by Richard’s soliloquy.  The lighting design reinforces the strong contrasts of light and darkness that are suggested by the themes outlined in the play.  Richard, Duke of Gloucester feels entitled to be King, but he must leapfrog his brothers Edward and George and his young nephews too, who have a better claim to the crown.  How better to do it than through murder?  Richard is deformed, we are tempted to conclude that he is twisted in body and in mind.  That’s not a modern viewpoint but one shared by Shakespeare’s contemporaries who viewed John Milton’s blindness, for instance, as a punishment from God for his involvement in Regicide.

Ghaliah Conroy and Charlotte McCurry

Richard is played by Michael Patrick who suffers from ME and is wheelchair bound for most of the play.  There are other disabled characters such as Paula Clarke who plays the murderer Tyrel and why not?  Disabled people have been excluded from the acting profession for quite a long time and this signifies a certain redress.  However, the casting of Ghaliah Conroy as both Lady Anne and Richmond seems questionable.  The part of Lady Anne is quite substantial and would seem to require one actress dedicated to the role.  It was hard to know who Conroy was playing and the overall effect was confusing.  Of course, the play is both colour and gender blind and that’s alright because women were not allowed to act in Shakespeare’s time, and this is another kind of redress.

Chris McCurry and Ciaran O'Brien in the Tragedy of Richard III

The sound design consists of percussive beats, military drumbeats.  There are plastic bucket chairs, a low fi mise en scene implies an improvisational, hectic, frenetic effect.  Richard imagines himself to be a supreme cynic and ironist related to the audience through his monologues and soliloquys.  The play is sometimes classified as a history, sometimes as a tragedy.  However, it has a strongly tragi-comic basis which this rather abridged version is at pains to underline.  Richard is the puppet master, a director of violence rather than a participant who instigates foul deeds while others commit them.  Ultimately, he becomes ensnared in his own strings and crashes to the ground.

Michael Curran-Dorsano and Patrick McBrearty in the Tragedy of Richard III

Later in the play Richard acquires some medieval accoutrements and a track suit, a photoshoot implies the importance of Richard’s public image and propaganda shoring up the regime.  Richard is overwhelmingly concerned with the curation of his own image to imply that he is England and England is him.  He’s clearly in trouble and has started taking oxygen.  Lady Anne is murdered, Richard has burnt all his bridges, alienating friend and foe alike.  His right-hand man Buckingham demands his reward but Richard refuses to reward him.  Buckingham rebels but his army is dispersed, and he is executed.

Michael Patrick as Richard III

Richard staggers towards Bosworth field.  We are lost in the fog of war literally, constant atmospheric smoke is pumped across the stage, objects symbolic and literal litter it.  Eery string music makes convincing psychedelic effects.  Before the battle Richard’s ghosts, Clarence, Edward, Lady Anne, the young princes, Henry VI, torment his dreams and his conscience, an effect which Shakespeare also employed in his play Julius Caesar to imply Brutus’s bad conscience before Phillipi.  The effect is hardly subtle, Richard III is Shakespeare’s most popular play but not necessarily his best.  Now Richard loses his horse and writhes about in agony as his deformed body is hacked up by Richmond, Stanley and their soldiers. 

Alison Harding in the Tragedy of Richard III

Credible deficiencies in the production are made up for by the sheer enthusiasm of the cast and crew which is infectious and palpable.

Paul Murphy, Lyric theatre, Belfast, 16^th October 2024