Review: Shakespeare, Richard III (dir Elle While), The Globe, 31 July 2024 (****)
Tonight’s key moment came late on from an impassioned Richmond (Sam Crerar):
Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a response.
And I urge you to go and look at the source material for that quotation, and consider the message. [1]
Richard III isn’t just my favourite play: it’s a role to die for. It’s no surprise that Michelle Terry was determined to face down any opposition and play the role, and she obviously had a lot of fun doing so. Like the unholy offspring of Barbara Windsor and Johnny Lydon, she careered round the stage in a selection of increasingly burlesque outfits and codpieces. James Maloney’s excellent score was chaotic and discordant, perfectly matching Terry’s petulant protagonist. Unpredictable in diction, volume, and mannerism, she commanded attention, and often laughter, but never sympathy.
And there’s the rub. The Globe tells us that this was Elle While’s return ‘to explore the enduring allure and charisma of evil’.[2] But Terry was never alluring, never charismatic - just something obviously and horribly damaged, which needed a close eye kept on it until it died. This was too much an attack on Donald Trump and the far right to permit our protagonist any redeeming features. No-one can accuse the production of being indifferent, that’s for sure.
If you accept the play as presented, there were some strong passages and performances. In the week when the knuckle-draggers hijacked the horrific stabbings in Southport for their own twisted ends, it was startling to see familiar hooded idiots on stage as Clarence’s murderers. Catrin Aaron was an excellent Hastings, and Helen Schlesinger (Buckingham) is always charismatic, even if today she seemed to spend more time declaiming her lines to the audience, rather than engaging with other characters. She would make a fine Richard, I think. And the venom about foreigners in 'small boats’ in Richard’s pre-Bosworth speech to his troops was the moment which drew the greatest outrage from the audience.
Sometimes the play made itself felt through all the hatred and anarchy. Richard’s final confrontation with Elizabeth (Marianne Oldham) was charged with the unbridled hatred of a bereaved mother. And it was emotionally as well as physically uncomfortable for a few of us groundlings, when we were all commanded to kneel and pledge ‘long live Richard, England’s royal king!’
But let’s rewind.
It’s a tragedy. It’s actually in the title, despite being a ‘History play’. And it only works as a tragedy if you can connect with the protagonist. Paradoxically, given that the play was all about indifference being an evil in itself, it encouraged us to view Richard as dispassionately if he were one of the creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water at the beginning of The War of the Worlds. No proper sense of backstory, no disability, no reason for Richard to be unable to ‘prove a lover’ apart from his own spiteful, toxic character.
And absolutely no anagnoris - no moment when Richard realised his own moral bankruptcy and the collateral damage he had caused. You get to know and love a play and you look out for certain lines. After waking from his nightmares on the eve of Bosworth, Richard utters what I think are the saddest lines in Shakespeare:
‘There is no creature loves me, and if I die, no soul shall pity me.’
Here they were tossed off at speed, inflectionless. I had to check myself that Terry had actually said them. Of course, with the direction the play took, the last thing they wanted was sympathy for the devil, I understand that. But if they merely wanted to attack Trump, dressing cast members in MAGA-style caps and interpolating the script with some of his more famous misogynist outbursts, they could / should have picked another play. Julius Caesar has been Trumpified before, and would have worked better.
So, a few hours of sound and fury (and I enjoyed it enough to give it four stars) but in the end what did it signify?
A sledgehammer used in the hope of cracking a nutter.
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