A fiery, charismatic central performance from Daniel Monks, an Australian actor with partial paralysis, galvanises this US high school version of Richard III. Michael Longhurst’s production is a raggedly brilliant evening largely but not wholly thanks to him.
Monks’s Richard is furious about his marginalisation from pretty, preppy, jock society. He sets out to beat stupidly handsome quarterback Eddie to become senior class president, not caring who he crushes on the way.
Monks slips easily from mock-Shakespearean poetry to manipulative wheedling and enlists the audience’s complicity with a snap of his fingers. He’s properly charming, and properly nasty. It shouldn’t be refreshing, but it is.
Mike Lew’s freewheeling play is an odd mixture of the sophisticated and the simplistic. It both deals in and subverts the dizzy, hyper-tense energy that drives American school dramas.
There are shrewd observations about the demonisation of difference and the corrosive obsession with popularity, but also some very obvious jokes.
In a cast of six, Lew asks for two disabled actors. Richard’s part is a tour de force, but that of wheelchair user Buck is underwritten, though she’s given heart here by Ruth Madeley, a fine actress with spina bifida.
Lew’s point is that disabled people can be heroes, villains or supporting characters. The most powerful moment is the dynamic, sensual dance that Richard performs with Anne, the popular hottie
he deliberately seduces to further his rise. The second most powerful is when Anne — dazzlingly played by newcomer Siena Kelly — asserts her place in the story even as she leaves it. Another unexpected detour in a play that regularly subverts expectation.
Chloe Lamford’s school-gym design is hilariously simple and suggests this small, angry play, which feels radical but shouldn’t, could be easily staged by the kind of institutions it is set in. The ending is a mess, but one that still manages to boldly challenge the audience.
Until February 1 (020 3282 3808, donmarwarehouse.com)
