Review: Richard III from the Melbourne Theatre Co.

The latest adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III from the Melbourne Theatre Company, featuring Ewen Leslie, demonstrates the dangers of misreading epic theatre as eternally adaptable to ‘current affairs’. Audiences are meant to swoon or feel repulsion at contemporary themes as they are thrown into a play with more politics than an angered Parliamentary session in full force. Political advisors come to resemble Condoleezza Rice, the much maligned former US Secretary of State, for the sake of relevance. The eventually triumphant figure of Richmond resembles a progressive force of bloody insurrection against an institution in turmoil and murderous decline. (Shades of Obama versus the Bush legacy?). Equilibrium is thereby restored over camera, flash lights and dais.

Adaptations and readjustments to Richard III are far from unusual. Laurence Olivier was most enthusiastic in his amendments, scraping and excising any unnecessary blubber in the text, and eliminating such characters as the prophet-heavy Queen Margaret. Olivier, when putting together his version, was also fully aware about the political resonances that Richard III might have for the audience of the day. As he told the drama critic Kenneth Tynan in an interview in 1966, ‘There was Hitler across the way, one was playing it definitely as a paranoiac; so that there was a core of something to which the audience would immediately respond.’

Indeed Ian McKellen, currently visiting Melbourne for a season of theatre and very much a practitioner of the Shakespeare canon, was involved in a 1995 film featuring an England turned fascist in the 1930s. The play provides rich matter for those wishing to make scenes contemporary.

This modern staging by Simon Phillips does have enormous potential, and it resounds with, at least initially, cleverness. We get a sense about where the direction is heading with the presidential fronts and the frequent use of screens. Modern politics is the drivel and dross of television and make-up, though this works uncomfortably with the dialogue at stages. Shakespeare meets the control room of the Pentagon and the make-believe of the press corps.

It may well be that Ian McKellen was impressed by the performance, and that the production ‘made absolute sense of the play’. Comments, even from the great practitioners of drama, may well be mere ornamentation and fine braiding. Leslie’s performance is what holds the piece together. Other sections prove less convincing.

The revolving stage used by Shaun Gurton (all stages seem to be revolving in Melbourne at the moment, be it opera or theatre) can induce a sickness in momentum, off putting in the sense that main characters move to the other scene, supposedly seamlessly. There is a certainly novelty initially, though like all novelties, it wears off.

The last stages are intolerable. Are we watching a distorted version of the West Wing run by dreams and fantasies of triumph and failure? That irritating cleverness again: a conflict foiled by coalitions of forces dedicated to usurping power. Or perhaps the distortion is the fault of the West Wing: all roads of political drama and genius surely lead, in their sheer manipulative power, back to Richard III. But that is hardly a good excuse.

There is little doubt that Leslie’s performance was remarkable, his deformity impressively kept throughout, never wavering with the malicious intensity of his role. He runs the full gamut of political emotion, transforming from comic to grotesque in a phrase and a scene. He flirts and toys with is audience as he does his allies and enemies, showing them how power can be made to live and seduce. He takes them into his confidence, making them, in a sense, collude with him in his conquests and ultimate demise. We do, at least in some part, get the governments we deserve.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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