Hand in Hand to Hell

RICHARD III has some curious overtones now that we've hung up our bruised arms for monuments once more. It begins with a "bloody tyrant" named Richard's announcement of a peace he must accept and aches to overthrow, and it ends with his dethronement by the people he calls "base lackey peasants": Shakespeare, after all, was not for an age but for all time.

The Theatre Company of Boston lacks faith, however. The company seems particularly unimpressed by Richard's dethronement, although the battle that precedes it features alarums, excursions and enough flashing lightbulbs to make one wonder whether Shakespeare might have considered writing a script or two for Star Trek. In fact the new production seems unimpressed by all the play's melodramatic moments, eliminating a lot of them and embarrassing the rest. One might dismiss this as evidencing a pedantic belief that audiences don't like cheap thrills, were it not that Al Pacino, formerly of The Godfather and as Richard a properly menacing uncle, presumably knows better.

In any event in this production the ghosts of Richard's victims never show up to curse him: he never delivers the speech about how no creature loves him or exhorts his men to follow him "if not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell." And though TCB does have the grace to let him reprove the deep-revolving witty Buckingham for swearing. Pacino mutters the reproof so softly that nobody can hear him. Hastings' head doesn't exactly bounce, but it doesn't exactly terrify either, and why Richard's unfortunate nephews should be so unmistakeably female is a mystery deeper than any of Richard's plots. Possibly someone with a misplaced sense of justice knew that Elizabethan theaters cast boys as women and thought that turn bout is fair play.

ALL THIS MATTERS LESS than you might expect, because David Wheeler, the director, doesn't stress Richard's melodramatic side, offering instead a sad, slight cynic whom Pacino makes astonishingly convincing until he loses interest towards the end. Pacino speaks measuredly and quietly, with sudden intervals of rage and continual flashes of humor, and when he talks of descanting on his own deformity or wonders at the blindness that finds him a marv'llous proper man, he means what he says. In even his blackest lies, we sense some sincerity, as though he has indeed determined to prove a villain reluetantly, after sounding his own nature and discovering that he cannot prove a lover.

Most of the cast can't match him, and only intermittently--in the fatuous joy of Norman Ornellas as the doomed and "sweating lord" of Hastings, for example--does the play rise to its full height and mock the dead bones that lie scatt'red by. Penelope Allen and Pacino offer another such moment in the scene where he woos her before her murdered husband's bier; except for Clarence's dream. Richard III's poetry doesn't sing of its own accord like the later plays', but Allen's almost lilting threnody--

O. cursed be the hand that made these holes!

Cursed the heart that had the heart to do it!

Cursed the blood that let this blood from hence!

leaves a sad aftertaste that might make the production worthwhile by itself. Even if it is not an unqualified success, the production offers a glimpse of a Richard whose depravity derives from some deeper longing, some sense of loss, a Richard who knows that

All of us have cause

To wail the dimming of our shining star:

But none can help our harms by wailing them. Who sees others' depravity and recognizes his own.