The Stage

Richard III

Published Thursday 30 June 2011 at 11:10 by Michael Coveney

Kevin Spacey clicks off the film footage of Edward’s coronation and sarcastically blows a party squeaker. He wears a paper crown. His left leg is clamped in a calliper and twisted inwards at 90 degrees to the rest of his body. His hunch protrudes from his right shoulder like a rolling dune, or giant boil.

Kevin Spacey in Richard III at the Old Vic, London Photo: Tristram Kenton

He is, of course, mesmerising. The pace and vigour of the performance is relentless. He corners Annabel Scholey’s Lady Anne like a pit bull (“Take up the sword, or take up me”), stabs the head of Hastings in a cardboard box, stumbles en route to his throne and screams at Chuk Iwuji’s beseeching Buckingham (“I am not in the vein”) like a lunatic.

He’s dead behind the eyes, exchanging the party hat for a tunic of medals and dark glasses, malice and contempt playing at the corners of his mouth, each flicker registering poisonously throughout the theatre. And yet it all seems played on one note.

Much of the support acting is poor and poorly articulated, in Sam Mendes’ production, the last throw of the Bridge Project, bound for New York (after Athens, Hong Kong and Spain) in the New Year. There’s an awful lot of shouting. The princes in the Tower are pointlessly played by fully fledged actresses.

Tom Piper’s grey box design of countless doors recycles as a perspective corridor as the show settles into a bland all-purpose portrait of tyranny (oh, no - Spacey’s strung up by his feet like Mussolini at the end) rather than a rich chronicle of politics and power.

Gemma Jones wanders madly through the action as cursing Queen Margaret and Haydn Gwynne as Queen Elizabeth gives as good as she gets in her great wooing-by-proxy scene. Maybe the show will settle into a rhythm and Spacey’s bunch-backed toad will accommodate more nuances of black intelligence - he’s not very funny right now, though every bit as commanding as you’d expect.