Shakespeare: Richard III (Public Theatre of Central Park, PBS-TV, recorded July 2022, aired May 19, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, May 19) at 10 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing presentation on PBS of a Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard III with a Black woman, Danai Gurira, in the title role. This production, directed by Robert O’Hara – whose artistic priorities are exemplified by his most famous previous credit, as director of Jeremy Harris’s 2018 work Slave Play (not a play about American slavery but a modern-dress one about sexual dysfunction in mixed-race couples and the “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy” they undergo to address it) – took non-traditional casting almost to the max. Richard III is played by a Black woman but his older brother, Edward IV (Gregg Mozgala) is white, as is their brother George, Duke of Clarence (the strikingly handsome Paul Niebanck). Edward’s queen, Elizabeth Woodville York (Heather Alicia Simms), is Black, but their two sons, Edward, Prince of Wales (Wyatt Cirbus) and Richard, Duke of York (Sam Duncan), are white. Charles was trying to discern some rhyme or reason behind the cross-racial casting, noting that Elizabethan England did have some African-descended people in it (though they would probably have been called “Moors”), but there really wasn’t any.

Danai Gurira played Richard III without the famous hunchback, though there were some differently abled people in the cast: the actor who played Sir James Tyrrell (the murderer Richard III sends to the Tower to knock off his two nephews) was a little person, Queen Anne (Ali Stroker), the widow of Prince Edward, Henry VI’s son, whom Richard successfully seduced after killing her first husband in one of Shakespeare’s most amazing scenes, is in a wheelchair (and she’s white), and at least two characters, the Second Murderer in the scene in which Richard hires two professional killers to knock off his brother George, and Richard III’s mother (Monique Holt), are played as deaf people communicating in American Sign Language. (The Second Murderer is also gender-changed into a woman.) There’s a long sequence in which Richard and his mother converse in sign language, which was helpfully subtitled for us, but mostly when Richard’s mom speaks one of the other characters interprets for her. This production of Richard III was powerful and compelling, but it had one major flaw: it was way overacted. Danai Gurira in particular started at 11 and worked her way up to about 25, and just about everyone else in the cast doesn’t speak when they can scream.

One reason I wanted to see this is that Charles and I had just seen Gurira in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, in which she’d played Okoye, commander of the Dora Milaje (essentially Wakanda’s all-female Special Forces) until Wakandan Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) demoted her in mid-movie, but in that role she seemed far more self-controlled and self-contained than she did here. Charles defended the intensity of Gurira's performance, and the production as a whole, as in keeping with the spirit of the play, but I can’t recall seeing another version of Richard III that was this relentlessly overwrought. When Gurira bellows out her soliloquies about how Richard can modulate his voice and affect to be slyly seductive or seemingly loyal to people he intends to do in, we don’t believe it for a moment. The show made me want to get out some of the previous films or TV adaptations of Richard III just to confirm my impression that earlier versions hadn’t played the story at this level of continuous hysteria. In previous comments about Richard III I’ve noted that though none of these people had existed yet when Shakespeare wrote the play, Richard comes off as a prototype of Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Saddam Hussein and others: the pathological revolutionary leader who has no compunction whatsoever about ordering the deaths of anyone who’s crossed him or just seems to be in his way. But it’s hard for me to believe that anyone this openly pathological could have survived as long as the historical Richard III did.

Also I come to Shakespeare’s Richard III from my familiarity with Josephine Tey’s remarkable 1951 novel The Daughter of Time, which within the framework of a modern-day mystery argued the defense case for Richard III and said Shakespeare was working from highly propagandist sources produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch and granddaughter of Henry VII (played here by Gregg Mozgala, who also portrayed Edward IV, in a nice and rather appropriate bit of double-casting from director O’Hara; both his characters are usurpers who take the throne by force), who wanted to paint Richard III as a particularly dastardly villain to justify the Tudor takeover. Tey first wrote the case for Richard III in her 1934 play Dickon (her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh but she wrote plays as “Gordon Daviot” and mystery novels as “Josephine Tey”) and then in The Daughter of Time (in which her regular detective hero, Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, is recuperating in a hospital from an injury sustained in the line of duty when he comes across a reproduction of a contemporary portrait of Richard III, decides he simply doesn’t look like a murderer, and re-investigates the case from his hospital bed). But even within Shakespeare’s characterization of Richard III as a black-hearted psychopathic murderer, there is still room for a less hard-edged, more subtle approach than all the bellowing and screaming which Daniel O’Hara let Danai Gurira get away with here!