Richard III
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Richard III is a murderous marathon. Three hours of cruelty, conspiracy, violent death and grief. It depends absolutely on its central performance to hold it together. I spent much of the evening pulling a face: flinching, gritting my teeth, squirming - but this is only to compliment Jonathan Slinger on his outstanding performance as Richard. He has the audience in the palm of his disfigured hand. This is a galvanising portrait of a warped man who talks and kills his way to the top. He is nasty, brutish and short. He's a compulsive talker who spits when he speaks, smiles like an animated gargoyle and sounds, when he relaxes his guard, like a bigoted London cab driver. He is fond of strawberries and has a deep strawberry birthmark across his bald pate. He gets his kicks out of wooing the grief-dazed widows of men he has killed: obscene courtship.
And as King, he doesn't do decorum: observe his lizardy tongue flicking out of his mouth and his gross laugh at his coronation. He is an unsuitable soldier, too, like a miscreant child in his party hat of a crown.
Michael Boyd's fresh, urgent, modern production is less a universal meditation on tyranny than the study of one botched individual. This Richard III is a casualty first, sadist second - his life story a runt's revenge. And he is hard work to watch because, unlike Macbeth, his conscience seems never to have existed. Tom Piper's austere set, dominated by a rusty tower, throws Richard's excesses into relief. The cast is dressed in black, white and grey. Everyone looks like a potential pallbearer.
The black is right: there is so much shade in the play's imagery - a parade of shadows that culminates in Richard's sunless finale on the battlefield. The sorrowing quartet of women are all good. Katy Stephens's Margaret is like a slim pedlar with a black sack on her back in which she carries her dead son's bones. Her sweetness is aggressive, her smile does not conciliate. Ann Ogbomo's Elizabeth has a queenly stillness and a beautiful speaking voice. Hannah Barrie's Anne is angrily, edgily vulnerable. And Maureen Beattie's tremendous Duchess of York is passionately outspoken in her shame at being Richard's mother.
Smooth operators in dapper suits abound. Julius D'Silva is a convincingly suave creep as Catesby. Richard Cordery's Buckingham excels as a spin doctor with a wonderfully cheesy, fake smile.
But it is not entirely fair to dwell on individual performances - for this is, above all, a virtuoso ensemble piece. I shan't forget the beautiful staging of the night before Richard's death: a collective haunting by the people he has killed. The ghostly little princes whom he has arranged to have suffocated in the tower hold up their pillows like shields and white feathers fall from on high: down comes the down.
