I hope I caught that right. If I did, it's from Richard III. Specifically, the Richard the III featuring Kevin Spacey playing now at BAM. And it's awesome. Seriously, you should all go see it. I think the ballonatic Menendes' Bridge Project has finally turned out something worthwhile. Since this is Shakespeare, I'm going to go ahead and spoil the ending a bit because its been around for 400 years. If you are averse to that, read no further.
Richard III is Shakespeare's second longest play (after Hamlet), but you wouldn't know it to see this production. There's never a dull moment in the court of England when Kevin Spacey is present, and even when he is off stage there is rarely a pause in the action. As he himself says, this play is destined either for heaven or for hell; and while Richard himself is certainly going to hell, this play is ecstatic. If only for the technical feats of focusing on the lights, check out the play for the staging. The multi-doored set seems to have a single light focused on each door, which let me tell you is a feat. I'd love to sit down with this lighting designer to talk to him about his shadows, because they were gorgeous. It is impossible to escape the feeling that the sun is setting on all of them. This sense is compounded by the projections, the text of which seems to lengthen faster or slower depending on when each character dies. And a lot of them do. The omniscient, mad Queen Margaret curses the whole court within 45 minutes, and they all seem to meet the fate she sets out for them. It is she that places x-es on each door as each character passes on, creating an inescapable sense of predetermination. It seems that the characters could do nothing else but fall.
As for the bunch-backed, toad himself, I have nothing but wonderful things to say. Spacey seems to taunt the rest of the cast with his grotesqueness of character and physiognomy. It seems that he's testing them to see how far they'll let him go. All in all, he manages to take in Anne - whose father and husband he has killed - various lords and dukes, the princes regent, and the populace of England (thanks to a spectacularly media savvy Buckingham); all the while telling the audience how much he should be hated. And not for his physical features. He seems to have come to terms with that. No, we should hate him because he has consciously decided to be a villain. And he loves it. He begins the play with a Nixonian sweating problem, graduates to the Kim Jong Il-style aviators, and ends the play strung up by his feat a-la Mussolini. As I said, the staging is spectacular, but it is made that much better by the way the actors play with the space. (Yes, I just gave credit to the actors. Deal with it.) They know exactly how to run their show, and they make a truly memorable Richard III out of a spectacular technical environment.
So go see this show. NOW.
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