Embracing Richard III — body & soul

Victims, villains are pulled in many directions

July 20, 2010|Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff

LENOX — Noble, hypnotic, and just a little mysterious as Othello, John Douglas Thompson faced a curious challenge in his return to Shakespeare & Company this summer: Could he play the equally hypnotic but diametrically opposite Richard III without evoking the indelible memory of that magnificent performance in the minds of those who saw it?

The answer is an unqualified yes. Thompson’s Richard commands the stage as powerfully as did his Othello, but in an utterly different way. Eyes glittering like a snake’s, lips drawn back in a wolfish grin, he pursues and mesmerizes his victims with a sociopath’s ice-cold charm. Thompson fully inhabits the deformed body that Shakespeare describes, with a withered arm and a halting limp, but it’s his conjuration of Richard’s twisted soul that is most impressive. In the almost joyful freedom with which he describes and carries out his plots, this Richard is the most frightening kind of monster: one who half-believes his own protestations that he’s a saint.

For Thompson’s performance alone, Shakespeare & Company’s “The Life and Death of King Richard III’’ is worth seeing. But this production’s directors (we’ll get to that complication in a minute) also clearly want to place the infamous villain in a larger context. And with that broader focus comes some loss of clarity.

Shakespeare’s Richard, it’s true, is the product of generations of vengeful fighting between the houses of Lancaster and York, the Wars of the Roses to which only his own death would put an end. But he is also a prodigy sui generis, a horrifyingly fascinating exemplar of the glamour of evil. To reduce him to one player on a larger chessboard is to remove some of the propulsive force that Shakespeare created by heightening the character’s relentless malevolence.

The wider-angle perspective might still work if it were carried out consistently and with a strong guiding hand. But circumstances have conspired to make consistency and a single hand unavailable here. Artistic director Tony Simotes, who so ably guided Thompson and ensemble in that memorable “Othello,’’ was to have led this “Richard III’’ as well. A serious illness, however, forced him to cede the reins; the credits now say that he “conceived and adapted’’ the production, and that Jonathan Croy directed it with assistance from Malcolm Ingram.

Like founding member Simotes, Croy and Ingram are both longtime Shakespeare & Company actors. But they have less experience as directors — and, in any case, it’s always tricky to steer a steady course with so many hands at the helm.