At the gala performance of “Richard III” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, the audience gave Charlotte Cornwell, as the Dowager Queen Elizabeth, a hand when she went offstage after her Act IV scene with Ian McKellen. That’s the highly enjoyable scene in which Elizabeth gets to tell Richard off, so it may have been the scene itself the audience was applauding, but I’m pretty sure it was Ms. Cornwell. She’s the only one doing that highly specific and stylish kind of Shakespearean acting that New York audiences so rarely get to watch. It’s a treat to see Mr. McKellen, too, of course, even if his performance turns out to be a letdown—a star turn rather than an inspired one. It’s more calculated than it is compelling or persuasive, more striking than telling or ingenious—which is to say, you’re never remotely affected and never allowed to forget that you’re in the presence of Great Acting. McKellen plays the withered-arm thing to the hilt, so to speak, making a great to-do out of managing this or that task one-handedly, but there’s no particular persona developed and little of the revealing virtuosity he brought to his one-man show, “Acting Shakespeare,” some years ago. This is showmanship of a less liberal (and liberating) variety.
For me, the production at BAM—which is directed by Richard Eyre, the artist formerly known as director of the National Theatre (now director of the the Royal National Theatre) and runs through the twenty-first before going on to five other American cities—was a disappointment: lots of highly trained classical actors standing around shouting at each other. I greatly prefer the Royal Shakespeare Company style of production, in which the ensemble is equal in importance to that of any particular performance. The “Cyrano” and “Much Ado About Nothing” that played here in the mid-eighties (with Derek Jacobi, Sinead Cusack, and John Carlisle), the Chekhovian “All’s Well That Ends Well” that played on Broadway the preceding year (with Margaret Tyzack and Harriet Walter), the “Love’s Labour’s Lost” and “Richard II” that Harvey Lichtenstein brought to BAM in the seventies (the latter had Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco alternating as Richard and Bolingbroke)—these were all R.S.C. productions, as, of course, was the famous Peter Brook “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in the early sixties, that started it all.
The problem with star-centered Shakespeare as the British serve it up is that it leaves the actors thinking they have nothing to do—which is to say, nothing to act. The star ends up playing the history of a role rather than the role itself—anything, just to be different—and the secondary characters mostly play to some antiquated notion of theatricality. Generally, this means that scene after scene moves from pompous pontification to mounting hysteria, until everyone is roaring at everyone else and every third word is unintelligible.
Which is certainly what happens in the current instance. Mr. Eyre’s production, though designed by the incomparable Bob Crowley (with lighting by Jean Kalman and ominous music by Dominic Muldowney) has some of the most egregious performances I have ever seen from the touring company of a world-class theater. Prominent among them are Anastasia Hille’s Lady Anne, Antonia Pemberton’s Queen Margaret, and Peter Darling’s Richmond. (The rest are merely out of a “Beyond the Fringe” parody.) The production is set in the nineteen-thirties—an idea that goes nowhere, though it gives McKellen a chance to make Mussolini-like gestures and pattern his accent after vintage BBC radio broadcasts. I can’t say that I see the point of transposing “Richard III” to a more contemporary setting if you’re going to have all that ranting anyway. But you don’t get anywhere telling the British how to do Shakespeare. They’ve seen it all and have done everything there is to do to the stuff—which is why they’re churning out a gimmicky, star-centered production of an old chestnut like “Richard III” to begin with. They don’t realize that for us the novelty would be seeing the play.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, June 22, 1992