At Mappa Mundi |
| Mappa Mundi- Richard III , Sherman Theatre Cardiff , February 18, 2005 |
| This review first appeared in the Western Mail... There is one thing about Mappa Mundi’s latest sortie into pop Shakespeare: the story’s easy to follow. Nasty guy, hunchback, gammy hand and leg, greasy hair, unshaven, gets to be king by killing personally everyone who gets in the way, only to lose out to clean-cut fit guy with a nice Welsh accent. Well, maybe the Bard told the Tudor Myth a bit more poetically, with a tad more complexity, but that is the plot of Richard III – and Mappa Mundi, a company dedicated to making the classics accessible, follow that line and the familiar trend these days of setting it all in the not too distant past. That means the court is a bunch of besuited politicians, which poses problems with talk of swords and horses but emphasises the already obvious, that this tragedy is about manipulation, power and ruthless ambition. But if a Shakespeare play could be summed up in one sentence this production would be adequate – and it cannot, and that is the strength and lasting quality of the work. Simplifying Shakespeare, Mappa Mundi’s forte, inevitably means oversimplifying it so that all that remains is the bare bones of the storyline. It also means changing it to fit into their mould, including rewriting the ending so that in this version the repulsive and cynical caricature baddie Richard commits suicide – an act that approaches a nobility that he has patently lacked as he stabs his own brother to death, orders his bride’s death as soon as he’s wed her and generally chops off the head of anyone whom he takes a dislike to. The list of faults in Lynne Seymour’s production is too long to go through here, but it goes from the awful set to the loss of articulacy of Tom Englishby’s beleaguered Richard. I will not mention the programme, with its contentious scholarship and its grammatical errors, or the ambiguity of the setting, where steam trains coexist with 1970s phones and clothes, or the confusing symbolism of the chess set, where men gets randomly discarded. In short, it’s confusing and confused – the messages we get make no sense. But ‘twas ever thus in a Mappa Mundi show. Any production stands or falls on the main character, who is in virtually every scene, and it is not surprising, in view of the general irreverence and confusion, that we have a villain from Englishby who is more of a comic character – a villain, indeed, who is actually hopeless at being convincingly evil because he is so patently dishonest and, well, villainous. It’s a wholehearted portrayal but it is not the rise and fall of a tragic hero. In a political elite that lives by dissembling, Richard Duke of Gloucester is simply the most obvious liar, more like a child who does naughty things in an environment where the adults find it best to ignore such behaviour. He confides in us, the audience, much as most Richards do, treating us as his confidants, cackles, becomes petulant and finally very angry when he cannot have everything his way. The trouble with this interpretation is that it makes the play no more than a melodrama, trivialising the true tragedy, and the production is not helped by too much mediocre acting, even from those whom we know can do much better. The exception is Kathryn Dimery, who dominates the stage every time she appears, showing the rest not only how to act but how to inhabit the space, representing as Elizabeth, the wife and mother of two of Richard’s victims, the only moral opposition to the second-rate scheming crook that is Gloucester. Richard as misbehaving child in the playroom of politics may be part of the tragic story but it just isn’t enough to sustain a whole production – we need more coherence, more depth, more understanding, more subtlety. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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