Edward Hall's first-outing as Chicago Shakespeare Theater's Artistic Director shines most brightly in its Englishness. The British-born stage director happens to be the son of Sir Peter Hall, most widely known for being the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as the second Artistic Director of the National Theatre (not a bad gig to follow Lord Olivier). So while the cast of CST's Richard III is American, the thread of England establishing itself as an imperial power is the most revelatory element in this production as helmed by Hall the younger. Throughout the evening, as the brutal killings of Richard III (Katy Sullivan) are dispatched with perfunctory cruelty, Hall often has his ensemble, dressed in white lab coats and masked like spectral burn victims, choraling religious tunes from Anglican liturgy, as well as jauntier numbers with an air of the music hall. Such inclusion highlights how the prim and proper image of England (and later, Britain), exemplified by such cultural output, was underpropped by innumerable regimes of individual and colonial brutality. Placing ear-catching tunes next to the violent murders of Richard's victims seems a simplistic dissonance, but the intellectual stirrings it creates in the viewer can justifiably be called profound.
The production takes place in a generically contemporary location, and the ensemble is lead by Sullivan, a Tony-nominated performer and Paralympian, who during the course of the play often uses a wheelchair, being a bilateral above-the-knee double-amputee. In general, both in production and lead, this is a blunt Richard III, without much interest in emotional nuance. Much of the publicity of this particular production surrounds the casting of an actor who is disabled in the lead role, and not resorting to prosthetics as previous generations have done (and largely still do). Sullivan's focus as Richard seems to be expressing each line with volume and spirit, though ultimately does not end up providing a terribly memorable characterization of Richard III. No attempt is made to lean into the trope of Richard as a suave snake oil salesman, and thus the element of Richard's villainy being in any way the result of his own charm or charisma is lost. The notable "when I die, no soul shall pity me" soliloquy of Act V arrives as a foregone conclusion; we never love to hate or hate to love the anti-hero of Sullivan's concoction.
Overall, the cast serves up a meat and potatoes rendition of the story: clear and efficient, but lacking in emotional texture. The scene where Richard attempts to convince Queen Elizabeth (Jessica Dean Turner) to marry her daughter, after having been responsible for the deaths of her husband and sons, is a notable exception. The production also struggles with humor: it ostensibly uses a darkly comedic lens to peer through the (already) darkly comedic saga of Richard attempting to murder his way to sovereignty, but obvious elements like the two murderers (Mo Shipley and Jodi Gate, at the performance I saw) being interpreted as vaudeville schlemiels falls flat, and feels more 'clever' in a self-satisfied vein than genuinely funny. The choice to have a citizen rap a speech at the occasion of Richard's monarchical election was a serious misfire, and why in this world of guns and morphine Richard feels the need to call in battle for "a horse, a horse" is a real head-scratcher. However, Mark Bedard makes fine intellectual sense of Clarence's nightmare speech (though the torture of his eyes was a stutter-step of directorial storytelling), and the cursings of Margaret (Libya V. Pugh) feature some thrilling lighting effects from Marcus Doshi.
The production is no slog, and makes the tangled Wars of the Roses politics as easy to follow as I reckon is possible, but one comes away from the production wondering how this medieval drama of usurpation and subterfuge is meaningful in a contemporary lens beyond the most perfunctory connections. Not a bad time, but not exciting enough to overlook the cut corners.
