The Heroic Monster

By Melvin Maddocks

RICHARD III

by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Shuffling onto the bare, makeshift stage of Boston's Church of the Covenant, Al Pacino's Richard could be taken for a failed Mafia assassin seeking asylum. The left sleeve of his green knit pullover bunches around some unspeakable wound of a hand. The yarn in the shoulder stretches obscenely over his hump. His cheeks quiver with little tics. His lips pout in private arrangements of humor and rage. When he speaks, Elizabethan English seems to acquire a Sicilian accent: Shakespeare out of The Godfather.

This is but one of several Richards that Pacino offers. Wooing Lady Anne across the corpse of her father-in-law, whom he has murdered, the Pacino Richard becomes the archetypal Latin lover, a superior Rudolph Valentino with sound. Playing off against his brother Edward IV--prim in gray double-breasted suit with pink button-down shirt and polka-dot tie--he cuts up like a sinister baggy-pants clown. Cornered on the battlefield where he is about to lose his crown and his life, waving the royal dagger like a switchblade, he turns into pure street fighter.

Pacino is performing a brilliant solo with variations in front of the supporting cast of the Theater Company of Boston. Only Linda Selman, as Edward's Queen, is strong enough to hold a scene against him. Still, he is not simply another Big Name using Shakespeare as his showcase.

For Pacino's virtuosity rests upon a profound insight: that Richard is primarily an actor himself. Deprived of the gift of normal humanity, the crippled killer role-plays with savage, self-mocking ingenuity at the parts other men confidently assume: seductive lover, charismatic leader, gallant warrior. In Pacino's conception, Richard's ultimate triumph is not to become King but to put on the whole world. His ultimate tragedy is that he cannot deceive himself. But with what energy -- with what charm, with what venom -- does Pacino stretch Richard toward his illusions, like a Pirandello character trying to obliterate the obdurate line between actuality and fantasy.

This Richard may be a monster. Yet how heroic and finally touching a monster Pacino makes him, trapped between his unappeasable self-contempt and his perverse ambition to have others honor him as supreme human being, as King -- even if he has to kill half of England in order to stage what he, more than all other men, knows to be a hollow charade.

--Melvin Maddocks

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