Richard III, Propeller Theatre Company, Dir Edward Hall, Design Michael Pavelka
Inventive. As always with Propeller this production of Richard III is a gargantuan visual feast. The set, Michael Pavelka, is a mass of scaffolding, black & decker artifacts, hospital screens, and plastic curtains which resemble hammer horror dungeons and torture chambers. It constantly changes adding to the fast pace and imaginative direction of Edward Hall. The pitch throughout is grand guinol in style. Often grotesque, fitting the mounting body count as Richard, last of the Plantagenets, cuts down anyone who stands between him and the English throne, it is fluid and flexible.
Yet a difficulty in this full-on approach is that sometimes this B movie execution threatens to over-tip the play towards a vaudevillian farce. It’s left to the moving scenes between the three widowed queens to re-focus the play, and underline the personal, as well as political tragedy. What does work with sharp clarity is the foregrounding of Queen Margaret’s curse dispensed in a ritualised blood-letting. Each victim refers to this before they are brutally done to death by the ever-present assassins and murderers in surgical, sinister masks.
The soundscape, a Propeller trademark, is witty, satiric and at times moving as it combines and re-sets Down Among the Dead Men, charting Richard’s descent into madness, Dies Irae, madrigals, hymns and other folk tunes. The addition of an electric guitar gives a punchy, contemporary edge; and the revs of drills and chain saws, sets the teeth on edge......
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