All the Devils Are Here
“Perfection is the rarest of stuff,” said
Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. “But that is what All the Devils Are Here gives us.” A one-man online show written by and performed by “one of America’s greatest classical actors,” it opens a window on an “insufficiently appreciated aspect” of William Shakespeare’s genius: his creation of villains so memorable and deeply considered that they changed our understanding of villainy. Patrick Page has played his share of Broadway villains, most notably in Spider-Man and Hadestown, and he possesses a bass voice “so resonant that it can actually make your theater seat shake.” Here, he doesn’t even need to change costumes to effect his transformations, becoming, among others, Iago, Shylock, Lady MacBeth, and a Richard III whose hair-raising smile is “so horrific that you half expect to see fangs.”
Page speaks to the audience as not just passive witnesses to his various performances, “but also as fellow scholars examining the text with him,” said Maya Phillips in The New York Times. To any Shakespeare buff, “the contextual analysis is a touch light,” offering little more than a thread connecting the members of Page’s rogues’ gallery. Even so, “Page asks worthwhile questions: Is Iago a sociopath? Does Shylock reflect Shakespeare’s early prejudices, and does Othello later subvert them?” And when Page shifts from one villain to another, or from lecturer to baddie, “it’s like watching a chameleon change hue before your eyes.” In the final scene, taken from The Tempest, he conveys Prospero’s change of heart before closing the book before him and breaking a staff in two, symbolically breaking the spell he’s cast on us. That trick didn’t work for me, though: “I’m still utterly beguiled.” $25 at shakespeare theatre.org, through July 28