In the German prose production of Richard III that opened in Adelaide last weekend, deformed villain Richard – played by Lars Eidinger with a hunchback and a club foot – stands on a table, takes out his penis, and urinates towards the audience.
This moment is neither in Shakespeare’s script, nor is it always in Thomas Ostermeier’s groundbreaking interpretation: according to someone who went the night before me, the actor farted into a microphone instead.
It is a very different production of Richard III to the one I watched two nights earlier, at the Sydney Opera House. In one scene there, which is etched into my memory for different reasons, Richard shouts his lines furiously as he begins to strip off his clothes, hurling each garment to the floor until he is standing nude in front of his family and foes.
But when he forces them to look at his naked, deformed shape, he also forces them to look at his breasts. In Bell Shakespeare’s gender-flipping production, Kate Mulvany plays the lead, revealing not just her female body but the severe spinal deformity she has been masking since she was a child.
The two performers are stunning in their interpretations of the role, but the productions couldn’t be more different. Watching them essentially side by side, I was reminded of that lesson we all learned in high school: Shakespeare can become whatever the director chooses to make of it – at least up to a point.
The explosive German production, from Schaubühne Berlin, was in Australia this week for the Adelaide festival, after acclaimed runs at the Edinburgh festival and London’s Barbican. The monochrome stage is set with a hanging microphone, and Richard – skulking, seductive, charismatic and captivating – grabs the mic like a rockstar about to take a bite.
Into it he shouts, spits or whispers lines in German, and occasionally in Shakespeare’s English. At one point, as the drumkit clamours to the side of stage, he raps the ratbag lyrics of Tyler, The Creator: “The devil doesn’t wear Prada / I’m clearly in a white tee”. He shares grimaces with the audience as if we’re all in this together, and rolls his eyes at the surtitles behind him: how stupid is his family to swallow all this crap he’s spinning?
Eidinger’s Richard is both puerile and pure evil, stripped of humanity, and in Ostermeier’s production he ends up murdering even himself. He gorges on fruit and cream, forces his nude body at poor Lady Anne, and towards the end he smears Lord Buckingham in chocolate mousse and encourages the audience to chant at him: “You look like shit. Have you eaten pussy yet today?”
We have to shout it five times as Buckingham stands upright and still, looking terrified and alone.
We don’t have to scream at the cast in Sydney, and nobody urinates on the stage; on a surface level, Bell Shakespeare’s production is fairly by-the-book, right down to the sword fight at the end. As someone said to me of the company during interval: “They always have to remind us that it’s Shakespeare, don’t they?”
Mulvany’s Richard is less puerile and more snide than Eidinger’s; she plays most scenes with a joker face, but occasionally plays the victim too. Richard will always be Shakespeare’s villain of villains – the ruthless prototype for Frank Underwood – but she imbues him with a brattiness that becomes almost endearing. She slouches and squirms in her chair and rolls her eyes, like the younger brother who never gets to stay up late – and then kills everyone in his family.
In his production notes, director Peter Evans says Mulvany brings an unexpected and confronting empathy to the role: “What she brought into the rehearsal room is the belief that [Richard] is created, not born. She sees the victim in him.”
In Richard III, it is the women who suffer most, used as tools by the misogynistic Richard – who grossly alternates between abusing, threatening and wooing them – and grieving throughout for the fathers, brothers, sons and husbands that he slays. Evans’ interpretation highlights these women in a way that extends far beyond casting one in the lead. (Mulvany gives a fantastic performance, but she is not playing Richard as a woman.)
Under Evans’ direction, the male characters – and there are an awful lot of them – become interchangeable, with each actor playing two or three different roles and remaining on stage throughout. After Hamlet, Richard III is Shakespeare’s second-longest play, and it’s mostly men’s dialogue that has been cut from this production, while the women – Queen Elizabeth, Margaret, the Duchess of York, and Lady Anne – deliver some of the most powerful scenes, and remind us continuously of their presence.
It was striking to watch the German production two days later, to find the women for the most part stripped from Shakespeare’s text. Most of the fantastic linguistic parries that Evans highlights are missing or overshadowed – in fact, Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York, has been cut altogether. Ostermeier’s Richard III was more inventive, more bombastic, and much more fun to watch – but the women were left behind.
Cassie Tongue wrote this week that Bell Shakespeare’s attempt to foreground the women was ultimately unsuccessful: “The more you highlight the women, the more you highlight that they’re little more than narrative punching bags,” she said. But I’m not so sure. I left Bell Shakespeare’s production feeling so much more for the women, who never left Evans’ stage, and who had been endowed with an empathy that Ostermeier mostly did without.
Breasts on one stage, a penis on the other – in the end, what a Shakespeare production leaves out can be even more telling than what it chooses to expose.
• Bell Shakespeare’s Richard III is showing at the Sydney Opera House until 1 April, Canberra Theatre Centre from 6–15 April, and Arts Centre Melbourne from 20 April until 7 May
