Richard III

Reviewed by Gray Palmer
Independent Shakespeare Company
Through July 24

RECOMMENDED

The bottled spider is back! And for the Independent Shakespeare Company’s production of Richard III, now playing at Griffith Park, a sleek vintage bottle has been redesigned to display this specimen of vice. The production is based on Colley Cibber’s 1700 adaptation — with improvements.

You’ll die laughing. The actor David Melville seduces us immediately to Richard’s deranged point-of-view, and the gleeful effect on his audience is an alarming intoxication. Melville’s Richard is a weirdly congenial rock-and-roll killer. The cold undertow is concealed by a dazzling, rapidly shifting surface.

It isn’t iconoclasm to say that adapter Colley Cibber addressed practical deficiencies in the received texts. First of all, we can infer that the First Quarto version is not what Shakespeare’s audiences saw, much less the Folio. As the scholar of production history Joe Falocco informs us, “In 1594… the Lord Chamberlain promised the Lord Mayor that the players operating under his patronage would ‘begin at two and have done between fower and five.’ ” The length of the reading versions would have made their performance illegal.

The published texts have been compiled, moreover, by a process that has been called “continuous copy.” They are probably reported texts by players, with later insertion of additional material, then collation and compilation by early editors (a backroom business likely sponsored by De Vere’s daughter). So what we have in the received texts is a reader’s theater, not the rough, immediate, dirty, practical playhouse script.

Aside: There has long been, and ever will be, something like a dirty war between aesthetic camps in the theater, a poetry war between literary and theatrical factions. Alexander Pope, that literary hunchback, fired a volley of paper bullets at adapter/playwright Colley Cibber’s “past, vamp’d, future, old, reviv’d, new” plays. (Cibber replied in print with a brothel story referring to the size of Pope’s member. Then Pope in 1743 revised his satire, the Dunciad, making Cibber its hero, ruled by the goddess Dulness.)

Aggressive adaptation here is a wise theatrical choice. For American audiences, royal history plays like the fable it is, removed from even faint identification with actual, material consequences and affiliation. With canny taste and imagination, ISC’s production uses much of the Cibber scenario, two, if I’m not mistaken, of his original scenes (these are very effective), but with restoration of Shakespeare’s language (Cibber kept only 800 lines from Shakespeare).

Director Melissa Chalsma’s fine staging favors the ladies of the story (and the company). The audience loved the scenes of calculated wooing — with Ann (Mary Goodchild), bewildered as she is seduced over the corpse of her father-in-law by the murderer; then with Queen Elizabeth (Aisha Kabia), to whom Richard presses suit for her daughter (his niece, played by Katie Powers-Faulk), with a final, shocking gesture of violation (this audience gasped). Director Chalsma restores the appearance of Margaret (Kalean Ung) — missing from the Cibber — and a good thing: Ung’s performance of Old Margaret’s curse (a magic diagram that proves true in almost every particular) is one of the highlights of the show.

The doomed children, Prince Edward (Tatiana Louder) and the Duke of York (April Fritz) are murdered onstage unlike in the Shakespeare, all very well played.

David Melville also composed the rocking music for this production, plays tasty lead guitar to draw the audience back from intermission, and in the final single combat with Richmond (noble Evan Lewis Smith), makes one last, sly, rock-and-roll gesture.

Costumes (by Garry Lennon), lighting (by Bosco Flannagan), props (by Eric Babb) were very good.

After the show I was accompanied briefly by a coyote as I walked past the merry-go-round, and from what I can tell, even the coyotes liked it.

Old Zoo at Griffith Park, near the Merry-Go-Round; Wed.-Sun. 7pm. Through July 24. (818) 710-6306, iscla.org . Running time: two hours and 50 minutes with intermission.