Gloriously foul but unconvincing
Richard III Lyceum, Edinburgh
When the bones of Richard III were interred at Leicester Cathedral last year, their pomp-filled reburial led to a public re-examination of the notorious king, with historians mounting a defence of this much-maligned figure.
On stage, however, the eponymous villain of Shakespeare’s magnificently dark play, a man who murders his family to get to the throne, is as nasty as ever. He’s on particularly repugnant form in this Edinburgh International Festival production from the influential German theatre director Thomas Ostermeier and his Schaubühne company. Ostermeier has a reputation for confrontational reimaginings of classic plays. Performed in German with English subtitles, and running at two hours and 45 minutes with no interval, this Richard III is not for the faint-hearted, and there are plenty of Ostermeier’s distinctively provocative stage choices to chew on.
Lars Eidinger as Richard III is utterly grotesque, complete with fake hunchback. He interacts with us like an edgy stand-up, spitting and snorting into the stalls. His commitment is not to destroying the fourth wall, so much as making sure it’s never built in the first place.
The comedy is played up in many places to great effect, and the treatment of some scenes is vibrant and fresh. When Richard courts Lady Anne (Jenny König), who despises him because he killed her husband and King Henry, the scene becomes a comic horror. Richard strips naked before her, exaggerates his deformities and teases her from a position of affected vulnerability. König’s performance is wonderfully subtle as she falls under the spell of this sickminded schemer.
But there are puzzling decisions: Richard’s occasional forays into rap shouted into a hanging microphone, for instance. And the play shrugs off much of Shakespeare’s language by improvising around it in German and in English (“The devil doesn’t wear Prada,” Richard declares). Ostermeier has also diminished the play’s battlefield ending, with the famous “My kingdom for a horse” moment delivered in English, apparently just to remind us how famous it is, during a hallucinatory dream in which Richard is at war only with himself and the ghosts of his misdeeds.
Although he gives the villain the gloriously foul performance he deserves, Eidinger fails to convince completely, and Richard’s anger with himself and his relationships with others are not explored with enough sensitivity to make us as interested as we should be in the mind of Shakespeare’s most intriguing antihero. Many of the ideas here are fascinating, but the patchwork doesn’t quite fit together.