This is the last article you can read this month
You can read more article this month
You can read more articles this month
Sorry your limit is up for this month
Reset on:
Please help support the Morning Star by subscribing here
Richard III
Arcola Theatre, London E8
5/5
IN AN age of “post-truth” politics and in the run-up to the June 8 election, watching Mehmet Ergen’s fantastic production of Richard III is an unsettling experience.
Shakespeare’s play about the deformed prince Richard Gloucester (Greg Hicks), his ruthless machinations to become king of England and his rapid demise, certainly has a contemporary resonance.
At its conclusion Richmond (Jamie de Courcey), later taking the crown for himself as Henry VII, informs us that “England hath long been mad.”
That madness and corruption has been born out of the deep trauma of the long and bloody War of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster of which the bloody power struggle in Shakespeare’s play is the last chapter.
Richard, deformed from birth, compares himself to a “bottled spider,” yet here that image is a physical manifestation of the psychological scars of a man and society brutalised by years of war and intrigue.
Even the gentle Clarence (Paul Kemp), Richard’s brother and his first victim, has blood on his hands.
The costumes and the stage design call to mind the art of Otto Dix and George Grosz in Weimar Germany post-WWI.
All is decadence, deformity and grotesqueness.
Richard’s apparatchik Catesby, eerily embodied by Matthew Sim, is his fixer and executioner, second only to Richard himself in his seeming lack of morality.
But neither are psychopaths — the former grimaces when given his orders to kill but carries them out nevertheless and Richard himself, the night before the battle of Bosworth which brings his death, is visited by all the ghosts of those he’s murdered for the crown.
While he’s too much the nihilistic brutalised veteran for remorse, he’s not a man without conscience. In Greg Hicks’s incredible performance, he even drinks his wine like the soldier who’s seen and done enough to make him hate all men.
While Richard feigns piety and even reluctance in order to persuade the citizens to back his claim to the crown, one can’t help think of Theresa May’s claims to care for the working poor and her repetition of the mantra “strong and stable.”
A bottled spider indeed.
Runs until June 10, box office: arcolatheatre.com
