The Adelaide Festival juggernaut has rolled into town, bringing with it possibly my favourite theatre company on the planet, Berlin's Schaubühne Theatre. Director Thomas Ostermeier, the wunderkind auteur at the head of the company, is someone whose work I have always admired, so I was thrilled to see that the Adelaide Festival had managed to program this show. In the past I've found Ostermeier's productions to be thrilling and irreverent, theatrically compelling and consistently surprising. His production of Richard III opened at Her Majesty's Theatre in Adelaide last night, starring longtime collaborator Lars Eidinger as a grotesque, banal, utterly magnetic Richard.
Walking into the theatre, the set recalled at once the Globe theatre, and the country taverns where Shakespeare and his contemporaries may have performed during the theatre off-season. A raked pit covered in sand, a dirty carpet hanging from the centre of the upstage wall hiding an entrance, a scaffold structure masking ladders and doors and a fire pole - the set was performative in a utilitarian way. In other theatres and particularly at the Schaubühne, this production has been performed on a thrust stage, pulling the sandy rake out into the audience and heightening the impression of the audience as commoners gathered at a tavern (an audience characterisation which shifts later when we are cast as the court - Ostermeier plays with an interesting duality here). Initially, the only staging detail bringing this production into the 21st Century is a microphone hanging from the fly bar, attached to cords and some kind of noose-like harness.
When the play begins, it quite literally explodes onto this utilitarian stage. The court, dressed in monochromatic black tie, to a deafening soundtrack of heavy guitar music and live drumming gambol onto the stage from the auditorium with handheld glitter cannons, while gold streamers pour down from the fly space. It's utterly thrilling - as a companion of mine said afterwards, it makes you want to go up on stage and join the party. Cleverly laid underneath this bacchanalian opening however, is a martial drum beat, a rhythmic undercurrent that recalls the battles that have already been fought and foreshadows the battle that ends Shakespeare's play. The party of the "glorious summer" looks wild, but there is something unsettling in it from the outset.
I have seen interpretations of this play that give Richard's evil some motive and justification - he is vengeful and bitter, he is damaged or unloved - Eidinger's Richard, on the other hand, revelled in the grotesque banality of evil. He swore, spat, farted, rapped Eminem at one point, threw food, constantly wiped his nose and his face - his Richard was evil because it was fun. He got a kick out of humiliating people. And he was hilarious - Eidinger had his audience completely on side. He would deliver conspiratorial soliloquies into the hanging microphone, which was rigged with lights that cast his face in light and shadow that was Hannibal Lecter-esque. He was in constant communication with his audience, bringing us - initially commoners - into his court. At one point, he made us yell profanities at the utterly humiliated Buckingham. Eidinger hardly left the stage, and his performance was disgustingly compelling. Virtuosic.
There is so much in this production to talk about - it was detailed and complex, extremely funny and at some points (such as the scene where the dying king attempts to reconcile his warring family) dramatically profound. For me, however, there were a few scenes that truly stood out, the first being Richard's wooing of Lady Anne over the corpse of her husband. To my mind, it is in this scene that the audience first gets to see the true measure of Richard; his ability to manipulate and perform and twist words and meanings. Partway through the scene, Eidinger began to undress in front of the shocked and appalled Anne, and asked her to run him through with a sword, completely naked. This studied vulnerability - the unmasking of his deformed body (which in Eidinger's case was not that deformed at all), the audacity of his nakedness in that situation, his crying and kneeling and suing - was shocking. What was brilliant about the interpretation of this scene, was that as soon as Anne left the stage, Richard's nakedness immediately transformed from a signifier of vulnerability to one of triumph. Within a second, he was strutting around the stage like the alpha male he believed himself to be - utterly shameless in every way.
Another surprising and brilliant moment of staging happened at the other end of the play, when Richard dreams of those he has murdered. The hanging microphone had a camera inside it, and could be projected live onto the back wall of the stage in a grainy, sepia, grotesquely oversized live feed. As Richard slept in the middle of the stage, his victims emerged through the back wall and stood behind him, holding the microphone up to each of their faces so that they were writ large on the back wall, and in Richard's mind. The two young princes, played by incredibly lifelike puppets manipulated by the rest of the cast (an entirely appropriate characterisation) became particularly haunting in this scene. I've seen this dream scene done in a number of different ways, but none have struck me as so theatrically compelling and effective as Ostermeier's.
The real stroke of genius in this production however, is the ending. The martial undercurrents that are foreshadowed through the entire show, even to the point where Richard says "my kingdom for a horse" about half way through, result in utter bathos. Richard fights his final battle alone, nearly naked, his face smeared in some sort of white food, scrambling around the set yelling at adversaries who are nowhere to be seen. He is a bathetic fool, tilting at windmills. For all the posturing and performing Richard has done throughout the play, the manipulating and dissembling, his end is utterly banal. The final image is Richard, hung by one leg from his own microphone, ungainly and strung up above the stage. In the words of another Shakespearean character (who Eidinger has also played to great effect), Richard is hoist by his own petard.
The production is not entirely without flaw - Ostermeier has made the decision to not have an interval, and therefore the play runs at 2 hours and 40 minutes. Scenes have been cut in order to facilitate this, and the cuts have been applied primarily to the women's scenes. A brief scene with Margaret left me wanting much, much more. As a result, the play is very male (Eidinger hardly leaves the stage, and if he does, he pops up again in another entrance seconds later), and very white. Conversations surrounding diversity and cross casting, which are becoming more prominent in Australia, perhaps have not yet taken hold on the European mainland.
This show, however, was magnificent. A beautiful and cleverly arresting sound design, excellent performances across the board, and perhaps the most I've laughed in a Richard III, Ostermeier's interpretation is, to my mind, a triumph. It's theatrically invigorating and constantly surprising. It's the kind of theatre that has a physiological effect on the audience - heart rates are raised, jaws drop involuntarily, hairs stand up on end, gasps are elicited without warning. Certain theatrical images from this show will stay with me for a long time. One of my artistic heroes has delivered again, and I couldn't be more delighted that I got to experience it.