Richard III

Town Hall Theatre, Galway

It seems appropriate to set Shakespeare’s brutal and lustfully violent history play in the Edwardian era – after all, the play begins with Edward on the throne.

Yet the second play of Propeller’s double bill at Galway Arts Festival brings his festering court into the early years of the 20th century. More specifically, it occupies a stage which Michael Pavelka’s design renders as part military field hospital, part abattoir, where the victor of the War of the Roses celebrates by sucking greedily from the hose of a blood bag. It was a bloodthirsty war, you see.

Director Edward Hall’s agenda to create full-throttle and accessible versions of Shakespeare is certainly laudable, and as an ominous chorus in trench coats and burn masks deliver hymns and drinking songs in ethereal close harmony, you appreciate the incredible skills of his all-male ensemble. What they are employed to do here, though, is to stylise and sensationalise the rapacious trajectory of Richard Clothier’s deformed tyrant.

It is not enough to usurp, dispatch and conquer, there will be blood, gore, face smashing, stabbing, drowning, eye-drilling, axe murdering, chainsaw massacring, disembowelling, decapitated-head pickling and an obstacle course of body bags.

Such lurid excess is first shocking, then grimly funny, and finally numbingly regular, as though each violent one-upmanship exposed the crude action of the play but smothered its words.

The lesson Richard III still holds is about the deforming effects of power.

Clothier, his imposing height and silken voice only slightly inconvenienced by a leg splint and a stump for a hand, complains he is “cheated of feature by dissembling nature”. But Hall’s production shows a misshapen society contaminated by avarice and appetite. It’s a point made with megaphone subtlety, aimed for a world that is hard of hearing.

Propeller’s all-male ensemble emphasises the prowess of its performers (Jon Trenchard, Dominic Tighe, Tony Bell and Kelsey Brookfield are steely and undistracting in the female roles) but it is actually the company’s touring agenda that informs its aesthetic: the shows are designed to play anywhere.

If that broadens interpretation to achieve universal effect – the child-killer Tyrell is mute and chilling as a generic bogeyman while the opposing Richmond appears as a force of light in a white suit – it inevitably bleeds the possibility of nuance. Richmond’s weapon of choice, incidentally, is a pistol, which will hardly rouse anyone who, like Richard, feels “so far in blood that sin will pluck on sin”.

Whatever the era, whatever the means, violent succession doesn’t end the bloodletting, it merely staunches the flow.

– Ends run tomorrow