The storm clouds gather over England in Thomas Ostermeier’s robust production, originally seen at Berlin’s Schaubühne. Lars Eidinger stars as a mesmerising, rapping, swearing Richard; an outsider who seizes centre stage with relish, caressing his microphone like a rock star gone to seed.
In this 400th anniversary year of his death, the Edinburgh international festival has already featured two Shakespeare productions. Dan Jemmett’s Shake reimagined Twelfth Night as an end-of-the-pier show and Declan Donnellan presented his punchy, sinister, Russian version of Measure for Measure. Both Jemmett and Donnellan are from the UK but, like Ostermeier, they work mostly in Europe, where directors such as Ivo van Hove are reinventing these old familiar plays with real vigour and insight, unfettered by several hundred years of performance history and the reverence that afflicts so much Shakespeare produced in England.
Ostermeier’s production, which runs for two and a half gripping hours without an interval, begins with thunderous drumming and a cacophony of noise. The Yorks celebrate their victory on the battlefield with a shindig at which almost everyone behaves very badly indeed, as if they’re all auditioning for a part in Laura Wade’s Posh. But Richard is left skulking around the edges of the celebrations, looking like a servant at his own family party. He helped the family get where they are, but he goes unacknowledged.
It’s as if the seeds of what will follow start to take root and grow in that moment. The glitter that falls from the heavens during the party remains visible on stage for the rest of the evening, still sparkling, as if in reproach, as it gets walked into the mud and blood when Richard takes control and in so doing loses control of himself. By the end, Eidinger’s Richard cuts a lonely figure, battling not just an increasing number of enemies but also his own demons.
Not every aspect of the production works. Despite the substantial cuts in this version by Marius von Mayenburg, the politics of court remain a little dusty and the women are sidelined in favour of the monstrously watchable Richard, a man who knows that life is just one big performance – and that performance is all about the art of seduction. Both Lady Anne (the brilliant Jenny König, recently seen in Ophelia’s Zimmer at the Royal Court in London) and Elizabeth (Eva Meckbach) find themselves powerless, not just pawns in the politics of power but also victims of Richard’s ability to make lies seem like truths.
At one point, Richard appears in a shiny jacket, like a second-rate magician who has come to believe in his own tricks. Which is, of course, his downfall. He’s no Superman. Just another man who overreaches himself, who thinks he can touch the stars and fails. He ends up dangling like a pig on a hook in a slaughterhouse, taking one last look at the chaos and carnage he has caused.
•At the Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 28 August. Box office: 0131 473 2000.
