A trio of the most iconic and sought-after male title roles in world theater are currently being tackled Off-Broadway in a variety of productions ranging from wickedly sublime to well-intentioned but wrongheaded. On top is the Irish company DruidShakespeare setting the Bard’s Richard III.
Presented as part of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, this Richard III is a howlingly funny horror show presided over by a Joker-ish, sexy usurper played with giggling menace by Aaron Monaghan.
Shakespeare’s most popular villain, Richard murders and lies his way to the English throne, confiding to the audience his blatant treachery and mendacity. The play is a popular choice for actors eager to dig their teeth into such a juicy role. Plus it’s especially relevant now as Richard revels in spreading “fake news” about his rivals whom he sees as nothing more than impediments to his absolute power grab, not unlike a certain occupant of the White House.
Director Garry Hynes, the first woman to win a Directing Tony Award (for The Beauty Queen of Leenane), cleverly takes a description of the England Richard has made as a slaughterhouse and uses it as the main metaphor of her savage production. Set designer Francis O’Connor transforms the intimate Gerald W. Lynch auditorium at John Jay College into a place of butchery where victims are dispatched with an electric stun gun to the temple. In weird contrast, O’Connor’s costumes are gaudy and ornate, so the royal characters resemble elaborately dressed dolls dropped into a barnyard of death. A plastic cube containing a skull with a crown is suspended high above the earthly proceedings as a symbol of power and mortality.
We first meet Richard as he crawls out of a pit and figuratively grabs us by the lapels, mocking the gullibility of his victims and getting us to laugh along with him. Monaghan is strikingly sexy and charismatic even as he twists his body to convey Richard’s physical deformities. For once, the villain’s seduction of Lady Anne, whose husband and father-in-law have been murdered by Richard, actually makes sense. He is a convincing charmer here rather than a hissable cad playing to the audience. In addition, Hynes and O’Connor have Anne (a feisty Siobhan Cullen) dragging the corpse of the late king in the folds of her long gown. Monaghan literally relieves her of her burden by untying the gown and taking up the body himself—only to later dump it in the same hole from which he emerged. This innovative and fresh take on a familiar exchange is emblematic of Hynes’s daring and different Richard.
Kudos also to Marie Mullen’s venomous Queen Margaret, Jane Brennan’s brittle Queen Elizabeth, and Rory Nolan’s sneering Buckingham.
