Made Glorious Summer

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: RICHARD III

AUTHOR: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

WHERE: BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC

THE BOTTOM LINE: A brilliant actor and director find, in a tragedy about the 15th century, relevance for the 20th.

From the moment he appears onstage, uniformed and martial, barking out "Now is the winter of our discontent" with the guttural fury of a drill sergeant, Sir Ian McKellen's Richard III is arrestingly cruel and humorless, all chill and absolutely no charm. Not for him the leisurely glories of the play's language or the seductions of direct address and droll comedy to woo an audience. In a role that can epitomize the concept of the villain one loves to hate, McKellen avoids anything lovable or even approachable. This production, which has won raves from London to Cairo to Tokyo and which opened a 16-week, six-city U.S. tour last week, is an unrelenting portrait of the rise of a dictator, assailing equally the tyrant and the rapacious society that bred him.

The show, produced by Britain's Royal National Theater and staged by its artistic director, Richard Eyre, is modernish -- 1930s -- in its dress and visual vocabulary. It is meant to evoke 20th century memories ranging from Oswald Mosley's English fascists to the Ceausescu and Marcos regimes. Yet it is entirely faithful to the politics and psychology of Shakespeare's text. No production in memory has better evoked the terrifying instability of this buccaneer world. Rather than the embodiment of motiveless malignity, Richard is simply a skillful and ruthless practitioner of the techniques of his backstabbing times. While invested by McKellen with all the understandable self-pity of a man whose mother reviled him from birth for his physical deformities and who contemplates death in the certainty that no living creature will mourn him, this Richard is no less reprehensible for being comprehensible.

Eyre and McKellen share credit for devising a production full of startling visual imagery. McKellen casually snuffs out clumps of candles as he enumerates, deadpan, the friends and relatives he means to kill. Richard's brother, the Duke of Clarence, hunches in custody under a single, searing overhead lamp in a scene eerily suggestive of all interrogations that turn to torture. Most striking, the King's counselors sit at a long table and talk in bureaucratic euphemisms about bloody murders to be done someplace out of sight, while simultaneously the crimes are being enacted in full view of the audience.

Unfortunately, all these shrewd insights were muffled in the American debut performance by the acoustic shortcomings of the opera house at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Long sections of dialogue were indecipherable even to those seated far forward. Worse, the production -- which will tour to Washington, St. Paul, Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles this summer -- is encumbered by a generally second-rate supporting cast. Part of the problem may be in attracting top-quality actors to so long a tour, for the standard is well below what is customary on the National's stages in London.

Eyre sought the tour in order to heighten his theater's profile, not least in the U.S., where its lesser rival, the Royal Shakespeare Company, is much better known. McKellen has made it clear that he savors the family feeling of a tour and welcomes the chance to proselytize widely for gay rights. Fortunately for audiences, whatever their other agendas, the two creators still see to it that the play's the thing.