The twin-turbo powerhouse team of Sam Mendes and Kevin Spacey brings us this new production, and a lead role that, as everyone agrees, Spacey was surely born to play: the evil crouchback and elvish-marked, abortive rooting hog Richard III. Mendes surely has in mind Spacey’s pitch-perfect screen performance as the terrifying Keyser Soze in the 1995 movie The Usual Suspects, and there’s a nod to that role in his first appearance here, in white shirt and black waistcoat, one arm and one leg withered.
Spacey is blistering as the bloody villain, revealing to us a scheming hypocrisy so epic in its ambitions that it’s almost magnificent, and certainly hilarious. This is one of the most bitterly funny and satirical Richard IIIs I’ve ever seen, Spacey’s smiling, self-delighted collusion with the audience wickedly enjoyable, but never pantomimic.
All those who seek political power over others have a serious personality disorder, as Auberon Waugh used to say, sometimes covert (D Cameron), sometimes overt (G Brown). Richard of Gloucester is so darkly exhilarating because he not only knows all about his disorder — a total lack of pity, love or fear, he self-diagnoses — he revels in it, luxuriates in it, inviting us to appreciate it too.
The movements are creepily arachnid and the look is powerfully memorable: a very visible hump, left arm bound in black leather, left leg withered and clamped. He can only put the ball of his foot on the ground, and his spine is twisted throughout the exhausting three-plus hours. You admire Spacey’s sheer hard work, apart from anything else, and hope he has a good physio afterwards.
His diction is immaculate and he delivers the pentameter lines with a villainous relish, unlike too many Shakespeare actors, who seem to find metre embarrassing. The accent is English-ish, with occasional American notes, especially in the pronunciation of proper names like Salisbury and Buckingham. No big deal.
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Aside from Spacey, however, this is a disappointingly uncertain production. Haydn Gwynne is suitably queenly as Queen Elizabeth, Chandler Williams a touching Clarence and Gavin Stenhouse an uncommonly pretty Marquess of Dorset. Yet too many other minor parts are weak.
The set is especially dull: essentially a greyish box with a lot of doors. The scene when Gloucester plays with the little princes, before their big sleep in the Tower, can be one of the most tense and terrifying in all Shakespeare, but here it passes by barely noticed. And the final pell-mell half-hour is noisy and confusing, loud and blustery, but with little real sense of battle. Mendes is not an action director.
Other touches are equally unconvincing. In the opening scene, we see Gloucester in a paper crown, slumped in a chair, surrounded by beer cans and even foil takeaway trays. Why? One thing such a darkly driven character is not, surely, is a self-indulgent slob. Gemma Jones is a convincing Queen Margaret, but her look is distracting. In an old army greatcoat, mittens and witchy, shampoo-shy long grey hair, she looks like one of those funny Greenham Common ladies circa 1983. There is no overall unity of style and a strong sense of directorial diffidence in a production wholly dependent on a scintillating central performance.
Isolated moments suggest what the production could and should have been. There is some thunderous, nerve-jangling percussion to end the first half, although this is later overused; and a terrific scene when Spacey appears on an overhead screen, kneeling before the altar in prayer, suggesting that toxic mix of hard politics and fake religion that we know so well. Unlike Blair and Campbell, Richard most definitely does God, very publicly and ostentatiously indeed.
Yet there’s a problem here, too. This isn’t theatre, it’s cinema, or some uncomfortable hybrid (thinema?), although, like all hybrids, it has a certain vigour.
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It also has the unfortunate effect of reminding us forcefully that theatre is an old art form, and that it certainly cannot compete with cinema in one vital way: the facial close-up. Few actors have faces as pouchy, lived-in and fascinating to watch as Spacey, and here, in huge, sustained close-up, it’s mesmerising to see the play of secret thoughts, ambitions and chilling private humour at the expense of all the gulls and fools around him. To return to the merely life-size after this is doomed to feel anticlimactic, and only highlights a limitation.
There’s a strong “Arab spring” feel to the closing scenes, with anachronistic but interesting suggestions of Henry, Duke of Richmond as leader of a democratic uprising, and Spacey a corrupt Middle East dictator, distinctly Gadaffi-like in swaying epaulettes, rows of tawdry medals and dark glasses. As twin-turbo engines go, however, here there seems to be only one turbo firing. It’s a brilliant central performance by Spacey, but it’s stranded in the middle of an otherwise extremely average production.
Richard III, Old Vic, SE1