Bloody bloody King Richard
Mar. 11th, 2019 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxOn Friday, I went to see the Shakespeare Theater Company's production of Richard III, which was An Experience. I went in knowing that it was going to be very bloody – if I hadn't picked this up in advance from the reviews, the theater also helpfully informed us on our way in by decorating the lobby/bar area with Halloween-store blood splatters and offering a "Bloody Richard" specialty cocktail – and from the couple of promotional photos I'd seen online, I was kind of expecting, like. A non-campy Repo! The Genetic Opera vibe.
...actually, I was pretty much right about that, aesthetically, but oh boy. Whoever designed this show was a genius, and specifically an evil genius, because it was the creepiest thing I have ever seen. They showed all of the deaths on-stage, in increasingly, creatively awful ways that typically involved being strapped down and lots of struggling and twitching and screaming, and the set was this stark, eerie, concrete-walled industrial murder basement with the walls of drawers they have in a morgue. These were put to use when Richard dreamed of the ghosts of all the people he'd had killed in his climb to the throne: they literally came out of the walls, covered in blood and/or ghastly make-up. Which was, as a staging decision, objectively super cool, but also gave me actual nightmares.
(I would like to apologize to the friend I saw the show with, because I'm pretty sure I bruised his hand, I kept gripping it so hard during the scary bits, and also to the complete stranger sitting next to me who had to deal with me swearing under my breath every time someone got killed. The murder of the two young princes was actually the one thing I knew about this play going in, but it was the one scene I could not handle even a little bit: I closed my eyes as soon as I figured out how this one was going to play out, because it was, uh, especially horrific.)
The creepiest thing, though, was that whenever Richard soliloquized about how he was going to do away with the next person standing between him and full control of the throne, the show had ensemble members lurking in the background, making an unsettlingly arrhythmic series of inherently unsettling noises: the shivers-up-your-spine shhkk of two knives scraped together; a belt being cracked like a whip. I flinched every. single. time.
The costumes were fantastic, especially when, after Richard came to power, the court dressed in garish, steampunk homage to the braces Richard wore (had to wear) on his torso, leg, and neck. This ended up being a bit of a Chekov's gun as well as aesthetically/symbolically cool when Queen Anne is killed by... essentially being strangled/crushed to death with her corset? Also, Queen Margaret looked like a steampunk sea-witch pirate queen and it was awesome.
I'm not sure how unusual a staging decision this was, but one of the cast interviews in the playbill mentioned that they made the decision to have the royal women (Elizabeth, Anne, the Duchess of York, Margaret; Elizabeth's daughter was also included, which Wikipedia tells me is not always so?) go on-stage alone instead of accompanied by servants/attendants/etc. in order to not distract from them as the stars of their scenes. I could definitely see the impact of this: the scenes where it was just 2 or 3 of the women, in various combinations, trying to figure out together how to deal with the mess of backstabbing and terror and loss that the court – that their lives – had become were super powerful.
One thing that struck me about the show was the intimacy, for a lack of a better word, between Richard and the audience: he spent much of the play alone, waxing poetic about his nefarious plans, stalking along the very edge of the stage, making and holding eye contact with those of us visible in the first couple of rows. I feel like a big theme in this play (oh-so-relevant these days, in this city) is complicity; this delivery of Richard's soliloquies made us complicit.
It was interesting to see the spell break. There was one line in particular, which... I am not going to repeat here, but basically the gist is that Richard was trying to convince formerly-Queen Elizabeth to let him marry her daughter (his! own! niece!) after killing both of her sons, and he said a thing that was so stunningly horrible that the entire audience, like, gasped/reacted in audible shock. Like I have never heard in a theater before, even in the previous two hours we'd spent sitting there watching people getting murdered in increasingly fucked-up ways.
Speaking of complicity, my friend also pointed out that Catesby, the longest-lasting member of Richard's court, spent most of the second half of the play wringing his hands and making distressed faces in the background, but never actually did anything to stop him.
To end on a slightly lighter note: I have no idea what context I expected "a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" to be uttered in, but I guess I assumed it was, like, a metaphor during a dramatic speech or something. Not just Richard running around mid-battle, screaming it, because he... literally didn't have a horse?
...actually, I was pretty much right about that, aesthetically, but oh boy. Whoever designed this show was a genius, and specifically an evil genius, because it was the creepiest thing I have ever seen. They showed all of the deaths on-stage, in increasingly, creatively awful ways that typically involved being strapped down and lots of struggling and twitching and screaming, and the set was this stark, eerie, concrete-walled industrial murder basement with the walls of drawers they have in a morgue. These were put to use when Richard dreamed of the ghosts of all the people he'd had killed in his climb to the throne: they literally came out of the walls, covered in blood and/or ghastly make-up. Which was, as a staging decision, objectively super cool, but also gave me actual nightmares.
(I would like to apologize to the friend I saw the show with, because I'm pretty sure I bruised his hand, I kept gripping it so hard during the scary bits, and also to the complete stranger sitting next to me who had to deal with me swearing under my breath every time someone got killed. The murder of the two young princes was actually the one thing I knew about this play going in, but it was the one scene I could not handle even a little bit: I closed my eyes as soon as I figured out how this one was going to play out, because it was, uh, especially horrific.)
The creepiest thing, though, was that whenever Richard soliloquized about how he was going to do away with the next person standing between him and full control of the throne, the show had ensemble members lurking in the background, making an unsettlingly arrhythmic series of inherently unsettling noises: the shivers-up-your-spine shhkk of two knives scraped together; a belt being cracked like a whip. I flinched every. single. time.
The costumes were fantastic, especially when, after Richard came to power, the court dressed in garish, steampunk homage to the braces Richard wore (had to wear) on his torso, leg, and neck. This ended up being a bit of a Chekov's gun as well as aesthetically/symbolically cool when Queen Anne is killed by... essentially being strangled/crushed to death with her corset? Also, Queen Margaret looked like a steampunk sea-witch pirate queen and it was awesome.
I'm not sure how unusual a staging decision this was, but one of the cast interviews in the playbill mentioned that they made the decision to have the royal women (Elizabeth, Anne, the Duchess of York, Margaret; Elizabeth's daughter was also included, which Wikipedia tells me is not always so?) go on-stage alone instead of accompanied by servants/attendants/etc. in order to not distract from them as the stars of their scenes. I could definitely see the impact of this: the scenes where it was just 2 or 3 of the women, in various combinations, trying to figure out together how to deal with the mess of backstabbing and terror and loss that the court – that their lives – had become were super powerful.
One thing that struck me about the show was the intimacy, for a lack of a better word, between Richard and the audience: he spent much of the play alone, waxing poetic about his nefarious plans, stalking along the very edge of the stage, making and holding eye contact with those of us visible in the first couple of rows. I feel like a big theme in this play (oh-so-relevant these days, in this city) is complicity; this delivery of Richard's soliloquies made us complicit.
It was interesting to see the spell break. There was one line in particular, which... I am not going to repeat here, but basically the gist is that Richard was trying to convince formerly-Queen Elizabeth to let him marry her daughter (his! own! niece!) after killing both of her sons, and he said a thing that was so stunningly horrible that the entire audience, like, gasped/reacted in audible shock. Like I have never heard in a theater before, even in the previous two hours we'd spent sitting there watching people getting murdered in increasingly fucked-up ways.
Speaking of complicity, my friend also pointed out that Catesby, the longest-lasting member of Richard's court, spent most of the second half of the play wringing his hands and making distressed faces in the background, but never actually did anything to stop him.
To end on a slightly lighter note: I have no idea what context I expected "a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" to be uttered in, but I guess I assumed it was, like, a metaphor during a dramatic speech or something. Not just Richard running around mid-battle, screaming it, because he... literally didn't have a horse?
