The last time I saw Shakespeare’s Richard III was the stellar 2012 production at the Globe Theatre, in which Mark Rylance played the Duke of Gloucester as a self-loathing schemer, climbing balefully over fresh corpses during his repulsive ascent to the British throne. I attended that show the same week Katy Sullivan ran in the London Paralympic Games, becoming one of the first bilateral above knee amputees to compete in the Paralympics on blades and setting an American Record in the 100m. The marathon route for those Games ran right by Tower Bridge, across the Thames from the Tower of London, where Richard is believed to have dispatched 12-year-old Prince Edward V and his 9-year-old brother, Richard, Duke of York, in 1483.
So to witness Sullivan playing Gloucester with ferocity, cunning, raw athleticism and a castle’s keep full of cruel, contemptuous humor in the full-tilt current production at Chicago Shakes in the Courtyard Theater designed in homage to Shakespeare’s Globe, well, the mind fairly reels. Time is a flat circle, as those of us watching the current season of True Detective have been lately reminded.
Sullivan, who swaps prosthetic legs onstage as quickly as most of us change channels on the remote, employs her physical gifts to stunning effect–whether alighting with a devilish spin onto a platform using just her powerful arms or, most memorably, springing about on her blades like a royal centaur from Hell just before Richard III is piteously unhorsed in his fatal 1485 Battle of Bosworth against Henry Tudor. (Incidentally, his body was taken from the battlefield to Leicester for internment in a grave that was lost to time until it was rediscovered beneath a car park there in 2012. That, of course, was the very same summer when Rylance played the part while Sullivan set a track record. Truth, how thou art stranger than fiction.)
Director Edward Hall and scenic and costume designer Michael Pavelka conspire with Sullivan to create a period piece dripping with modern horror-film vibes via such anachronisms as chainsaws, curtains made from thick strips of plastic like one finds in slaughterhouse doorways, and undead apparitions in cloth masks roaming the pre-show aisles and climbing the metal scaffolding at the back of the stage throughout the proceedings. As Gloucester and his minions dispatch one rival after another in increasingly horrific ways, a sense of dread permeates the theater, leavened only by Sullivan’s leering, sneering winks and snarls to us Groundlings taking in as much wickedness as we can stand.
It’s all enough to leave one with the impression that Richard III is the Shakespearean villain most suited to the current charnel-house politics dragging us closer to an illiberal world of tyranny every day.
Richard III runs through March 10 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Liz Lauren
