By Aspyn Jones

October 22, 2009

This wasn’t the winter of our discontent. “Richard III,” performed at Navy Pier’s Chicago Shakespeare Theater, was a well-acted, perplexing, and mesmerizing production. With orchestrated elements, it successfully mirrored the theme of the written play, following its details down to the very last soliloquy.

“Richard III’s” macabre, dark motif is strikingly captured by director Barbara Gaines and the use of technical support crews. To make for a ghastly, somewhat gothic backdrop, fog emanated from the ceiling. When the play began, heavy rock music poured from the speakers, a nod to the overall atmosphere of the play. The music aligned with a text that is rich in betrayal, manipulation, a threat of incest, and murder.

When characters launched an emotional speech, lights targeted their faces. During one scene, a mechanism in the stage ascended, showcasing all of the ghosts of the people Richard had killed, fog surrounding them.

Even the sound effects were spot on. Loud noises accompanied death themes and major plot developments, including a terrific stamping sound when Richard‘s henchmen sealed a victim’s death warrant. Minutiae such as this reinforced the dark ideas of the play.

The acting was magnificent. Everyone’s expressions were fitting, and gesticulation was a key component.  Wallace Acton as Richard III was incredibly in-touch with his character. Because the character Richard III was born with a hunchback, weights were placed on one of the actor’s feet so that Acton limped around the stage and portrayed the character effectively.

The accurate inflection and impeccable delivery only added to Acton’s trance-like appeal to the audience – as in the script, Richard successfully manipulates others to fall underneath his conniving spell – and a portrait of the king-to-be is painted.

Richard was not the only one to find the spotlight.  Phillip James Brannon delivered an amazing performance as Richard’s brother Clarence when he spoke of his dreams in which he was murdered in captivity. Brannon was actually crying, yet his words were spoken clearly.

In probably the most heart-wrenching and empathetic scene of the play, Lady Anne (Angela Ingersoll) mourns the death of her husband with great passion and anger. Wendy Robie also gave a skilled performance as Queen Elizabeth. The embattled queen’s contempt for Richard’s behavior, and then her complete turnaround at the end, tricking Richard into thinking she’d let him marry her daughter only to set him up for his downfall, is a fantastic play on the otherwise recurrent notion that women were weak in the Elizabethan era.

The female roles of the play were honored heavily. In other productions of “Richard III,” for example, the part of Queen Margaret is usually omitted, but Gaines upheld her role: Jennifer Harmon was powerful, demanding, and captured the audience in the part. When she curses Richard, one can feel emotion in her venomous tirade. 

Although Gaines’ production stays close to Shakespeare’s text, a dash of modernity is tossed in. For example, the sword fight between Richard and Richmond, while possibly blasé in the book, is intensified on the stage with battle music in the form of a heavy metal riff, adding excitement.

“Richard III” proved to be everything that the text was, and sometimes wasn’t, perhaps making up for the lack of action in such a talky play. With new elements applied to a centuries-old text, it reached new audiences. Richard may have been determined to prove a villain, but we’ll enjoy the pleasures of his days.