How fun to have orthodoxy in the afternoon and heterodoxy in the nighttime. Antoni Cimolino's production of Shakespeare's "Richard III" at the newly-reopened Tom Patterson Theatre is hardly Peter Pasyk's radical updating of "Hamlet," currently running down the street at the Festival Theatre. Nor need it be. The Stratford Festival is an ecosystem, which allows multivalent approaches to the classics, even if the company's general bias is towards a more conservative style of Shakespearean performance. That style, in no way disagreeable, is capably exemplified by Cimolino's production.
The framing device of the fifteenth-century action takes us to a modern-day car-park in Leicester, England, where, out of the bowels of the asphalt, Canadian superstar Colm Feore emerges as Richard to implicate the audience on his odyssey of murder and mayhem. Then we are back to the land of cloaks and tunics, as we see the final installment of the Wars of the Roses. The device uses the finding of Richard III's skeleton underneath a parking lot in 2012 as a springboard for the action of Shakespeare, a dramatist who had a much more Machiavellian view of Richard than scholars now find fashionable.
As is often the case with his Shakespeare productions, Cimolino's gives us a solid, starter-"Richard III": not the final say in conceptualization by any means, but, like his 2014 "King Lear" (also with Feore in the lead), the production is a clear and unpresumptuous intro to the wicked ways of Richard Plantagenet. Feore gives us a less gleefully villainous Richard than some have been wont to see. In a moment more concerned with ableism and discrimination in performance practices (Feore himself is not an actor with disabilities), playing the wicked king for morbid laughs feels like a relic of a bygone era. Feore's command of the thrust stage is unquestioned: he knows just how to present his body so the 270-degree vantage-points of the Tom Patterson audience will feel included. As seen in his Lear and his 2006 Coriolanus (also directed by Cimolino), Feore puts clarity and simple communication first; despite his various characters' physical differences, you wouldn't describe him as a chameleon. As a performer, he takes to heart that the audience only has one chance at understanding these words, and thus extended layers of characterization tend to stay closer to his own actor's energy.
Where Feore's skills are most rewarded is in Richard's Act 5, Scene 3 soliloquy, where a moment of self-realization hits our bloody adventurer:
"What do I fear? myself? there's none else by:
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!...
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul shall pity me..."
This speech has been derided as weak writing by Shakespeare scholars from Harold Bloom to Stephen Greenblatt (or maybe varying New Haven buildings isn't all that far a range). Some find this Gollum/Smeagol version of interiority crude, and a far-cry from the greater subtlety of solo-expression the Bard showed later in his career (Brutus, Hamlet, Iago, etc.). However, it feels like part of their antipathy towards the speech is its naked emotionality; however blunt, it hits at something very raw in the psyche. Shakespeare shows us here that, even at the furthest reaches of monarchical power, most people's ability to express their desire to be loved is not going to be terribly suave. Feore serves this speech up ably and arouses an appropriate amount of audience discomfort.
"Richard III" is a reliable if unrevelatory production that maintains Stratford's ethos of digestible Shakespeare presented in fittingly period dress. While I can't say how it may fare for the uninitiated, for the devoted theatre-goer it renders its nourishment as comfort food. The greatest pleasure is that Stratford makes its business to train and maintain classical actors of a bent rarely seen anymore. That flame is worth preserving.
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