Has there ever been a more contested Richard III? Michelle Terry’s self-casting as Shakespeare’s “rudely stamp’d” king has led to an explosion of anger, with charges against the Globe’s artistic director of “cripping up” and taking opportunity away from disabled actors who might more authentically play the part of the would-be king.
There is a legitimate conversation to be had on whether actors should be free to play any characters, irrespective of identity, or if that abstracted ideal is disingenuous in the face of real-world inequalities. But it is irrelevant here because Terry’s Richard is not rudely stamp’d at all, though he is determinately villainous.
The mission in this reconceptualised production seems to be the study of masculinity that is so entitled and ambition so overweening that it has turned gleefully murderous. Elle While’s direction turns it into a play about toxic masculinity of the highest order.
An almost exclusively female cast plays both male and female characters, which casts the play’s sexual politics in a different light – more ironic and emphatic in its violence against women. Richard uses and abuses the likes of Lady Anne (Katie Erich), but it is also women such as the excellently enraged Margaret (Poppy Miller) and his own mother, the Duchess of York (Joanne Howarth), who see through his wiles while the men are duped and killed.
Terry plays a playfully antic sociopath, a younger brother with an enormous, almost mischievous, will to usurp by any means necessary. He is a pure villain – and the consummate actor too in his deceptions. Terry infuses him with a charm built out of a humorously violent masculinity, pumped up and ready for the fight. She petitions us and elicits laughs, occasionally adding one-liners to Shakespeare’s text, which adds to the swagger (“I like your blouse,” she tells the lady mayor). The performance risks descending into clowning – she wears a prosthetic “six pack” male chest and body armour that makes her look like a Power Ranger.
But the comedy pulls back and the play’s shocks hit in all the right places: when the princes in the tower (here played by two young female actors) are murdered; when their mother, Queen Elizabeth (Marianne Oldham), is shown in grievous mourning.
It is handsome in its look, E Mallin Parry’s set slowly modernising itself, from a spare court to a graffitied one. The period dress, designed in a lovely palette of creams, golds, greys and blacks, does the same in the second half, which brings us closer into our world, with perhaps cruder references to strongmen leaderships, closed borders and Making Britain Great Again.
The music, composed by James Maloney, turns from jazz to strangulated strings to electro beats and adds a compulsive nerviness to the action. On a rainy opening night, the various elements of the production cohered in its critique of power and high octane patriarchy, and each performance worked.
Ultimately, it is a fast-paced, energised and entertaining production, the humour sometimes overplayed and hammy, but nevertheless a hugely compelling picture of corrupted male power. A lesson for all of us, perhaps, not to judge a production before its opening night.
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At Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 3 August