Review: Spare, Disorienting RICHARD III at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company

Because we cannot generally recreate the conditions of William Shakespeare's stage (all-male casts, natural lighting, Renaissance garb being the default mode of costuming, unrecoverable accents spoken by the original casts), we are both freed and required to innovate in every staging. That is not to say, however, that we can't sometimes have a pretty reliable sense when a production is going in a different direction from the one the Bard would have chosen. The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company's staging of Richard III, a revival of one done five years ago, would be a good example of going in a different direction.

We know in part from the way the list of characters has been trimmed. I count 14 fewer speaking parts in this production than Shakespeare wrote (though my count may be imprecise, because it's not always clear whom members of this cast are portraying at any given moment). The mob of the citizenry, so key to Shakespeare's political conception, is gone, hinted at only in background noise in what is supposed to be a crowd scene. The wailing women, the mothers and sisters and aunts who bewail Richard's murders, are barely to be seen.

We know too because there's so much less of the play. There are large passages that Shakespeare must have thought were a good idea or he wouldn't have written them that have nonetheless wound up on the cutting room floor of director Ian Gallanar's production. Much of the bereaved royal mothers' weeping and wailing is gone along with some of the mothers. Assassin James Tyrrel (Kelsey Painter) is bereft of his moment of regret. The conspiracy against Richard is mostly gone. And the wonderful scene where a crescendoing stream of different messengers come in to bring Richard tidings of the uprisings and attacks against his regime is badly curtailed - perhaps in part because there are not enough performers to pull it off. Richmond (James Jager), who enters the play in the fifth act to become Henry VII after beating Richard at Bosworth, is barely introduced. (Richard and Richmond's final combat is pictured above.) Almost all the speeches of other characters that set him up, that make clear to the audience that he is to be the vindicator of the political order that Richard disrupted, so that we all look forward to his arrival, are missing. And then there's the battle scene, which is rushed into, in contravention of Shakespeare's careful efforts to reconstruct the atmosphere of two army camps on the eve of battle, and which barely happens - of which more in a moment.

What do we get instead? Two big things.

First, there is Vince Eisenson's performance in the title role. He is a very good Richard, all baldfaced dishonesty and lethal deception. He may not relish being the bad guy as much as some other Richards I've seen (a lot of people want to see the play just for the bwa-ha-ha of Richard's villainy), but his reading of most of Richard's lines is outstanding. And the scene where he seduces Lady Anne (Lizzi Albert), literally over her husband's corpse, nails it.

Second, there is a very interesting First World War setting. That is, the male characters are dressed up as Tommys or doughboys, and the War of the Roses armor, halberds and swords are replace by greatcoats, military caps, rifles with bayonets and hints of the heavy artillery that made the First World War's trench warfare so horrifying. The women are dressed like Edwardian ladies, including a memorable shooting outfit on Leslie Malin in the role of Edward IV's wife Queen Elizabeth. The evocation of the era is topped off with songs from the era, including the closing, in which the cast sings Pack Up Your Troubles in You Old Kit Bag, the ultimate WWI feel-good song. This evocation of the militarized world of a century ago certainly imparts a certain resonance to the play, which can be interesting at times. But ultimately, I don't think it works as well as doing it straight would do.

Recollect that World War I was the war that made a mockery of concepts of individual valor. The first great British charge in the 1916 Battle of the Somme, for instance, was led off by an officer (or maybe more than one - accounts differ) kicking a soccer ball toward the German lines - and promptly being shot dead. The war was fought with horrible machines like enormous field artillery and Gatling guns, and with poison gas. Individual soldiers hardly mattered. Even when there was hand-to-hand fighting, much of it was done with bayonets. CSC's production more than genuflects to this reality by suggesting mortar explosions with light and sound, but these shells never land anywhere near the participants onstage. They hardly could; Shakespeare never situated a character near incoming artillery. In fact trench warfare is the antithesis of the battle that Shakespeare wrote. Shakespeare's Bosworth is about stirring speeches, and battle formations, and royal participants in the thick of the fight. Basically, there's a disconnect between the battle Shakespeare paints with words and the milieu conjured up by the costuming and the sound and light effects in this production. They mean more or less opposite things.

In sum, this version of the play has been stranded in a setting where it does not fit very well, and gives us an exceedingly tight focus on Richard himself. The Shakespearean tapestry, by contrast, featured a plethora of characters and relationships; the complexities of dynastic politics were more fully displayed; the commons were visible onstage presences; characters who were not Richard could converse among each other; with this wealth of incident and character Shakespeare depicted the entire world in which Richard moved. Here, much of the tapestry has been cut away. The spareness of the resulting work is disorienting. Who are all these people and why are we supposed to care about them, again? Maybe we'll figure it out and maybe we won't.

Of course, half a loaf is better than none. Richard himself has been foregrounded, and, even with less context than Shakespeare tried to give us, Richard remains a fascinating character: a moral and physical cripple who takes the audience into his confidence and challenges us to dislike him as he schemes, murders, seduces, and marries his way onto the throne. Whether this production is for you depends, then, on how much you're willing take your Richard nearly neat, without no mixers besides some strange stuff from an irrelevant war. Most audiences, I suspect, will opt for the nearly-neat variety.

Richard III, by William Shakespeare, directed by Ian Gallanar, through March 5, at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, 7 South Calvert Street, Baltimore, MD 21202. Tickets $15.50-$49.50, 410-244-8570, http://www.chesapeakeshakespeare.com/tickets/box-office/. Onstage lethal violence. Some material may be too intense for small children.

Photo credit: Teresa Castracane

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