Adelaide Festival<\/p>\n
Richard III
\nby William Shakespeare
\nTranslation by Marius von Mayenburg
\nSchaubuhne Berlin
\nHer Majesty\u2019s Theatre.
\nMarch 3. Until March 9
\nBookings: adelaidefestival.com
\nTickets: $30- $99.
\nDuration: 2 hrs 30 mins (no interval)<\/p>\n
\u201cI am determined to be a villain\u201d proclaims Richard III, \u201cAnd hate the idle pleasures of these days.\u201d In Thomas Ostermeier\u2019s latest, tantalising project with the Schaubune Berlin theatre, Richard is in the summer of his discontent. In Lars Eidinger\u2019s charismatic incarnation of the man who would be king of the House of York, the much reviled bottled spider, the bunch-backed toad, has become a more rangy joker with sinuous Iggy Pop energy and a prankster\u2019s smirk.<\/p>\n
Amid a carousing party of King and courtiers, dressed in modern black suits and grooving to the music provided by on-stage drum wizard, Thomas Witte, Eidinger\u2019s Richard watches from the perimeter, dressed in a leather helmet, scruffy white t-shirt, and a giant black clown boot for his club foot.<\/p>\n
As the music fades he leaps forward and grasps a microphone dangling from a hank of ragged electrical wire and begins his rap version, in English, of the winter of discontent soliloquy. He is an outsider, a punk iconoclast; Hamlet with the hump, and a chip on his shoulder as well. Later he asks: \u201cWhy be a king when you can be a god ? \u201cThen sniggers conspiratorally at the audience and whispers : Eminem.<\/p>\n
This version takes the famous set pieces in the play, such as Richard\u2019s reptilian seduction of Lady Anne across the corpse of her murdered husband, and winds them up a notch. To prove his penance he tears off his clothes and kneels naked in front of the flabbergasted Anne (Jenny Konig). Brandishing the sword he dares her to skewer him with it. When he asks us \u201cwas ever woman in this humor wooed ?\u201d He points gloatingly to the surtitles for emphasis: \u201cOr in this humor won ?\u201d<\/p>\n
The design by Jan Pappelbaum has a roughcast fa\u00e7ade with a mezzanine walkway and a staircase for elevated royal proclamations and doorways for exiting political liquidations. Erich Schneider\u2019s often stark lighting and Sebastien Dupouey\u2019s grainy live-feed video close-ups of Richard serve the sense of impulsive, lethal anarchy in the narrative. Especially in Richard\u2019s dream before the battle of Bosworth Field. His terror at the ghosts of those he has murdered is one of very few concentrations of emotion in an otherwise off-hand picaresque account of a serial killer.<\/p>\n
Letting Eidinger off his theatrical leash also has its thematic implications. His Machiavellian psychopathy drowns out the intricacies of the malevolence and treachery around him, although the humiliation of Buckingham (Moritz Gottwald) is powerfully realised.<\/p>\n
The women are mostly pushed to the edge. Elizabeth (Eva Meckbach) has her lines trimmed and Robert Beyer (excellent as Catesby) reduces the depiction of Queen Margaret to a wig and a string of desultory curses. As for the Freudian complexities between the despised congenitally-deformed boy Richard and his wolfish mother, they don\u2019t get a look in.<\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
\u201cRap by Richard, punk iconoclast\u201d The Australian<\/em>, March 6, 2017, p.12.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Adelaide Festival Richard III by William Shakespeare Translation by Marius von Mayenburg Schaubuhne Berlin Her Majesty\u2019s Theatre. March 3. Until March 9 Bookings: adelaidefestival.com Tickets: $30- $99. Duration: 2 hrs 30 mins (no interval) \u201cI am determined to be a villain\u201d proclaims Richard III, \u201cAnd hate the idle pleasures of these days.\u201d In Thomas Ostermeier\u2019s latest, tantalising project with the Schaubune Berlin theatre, Richard is in the summer of his discontent. In Lars Eidinger\u2019s charismatic incarnation of the man who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,5,11,19,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-37","category-archive","category-festival","category-international","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2752"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2753,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2752\/revisions\/2753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}