Lyceum,Edinburgh
Lars Eidinger plays Shakespeare’s arch-villain with gleeful, knock-kneed energy in Thomas Ostermeier’s productionBernard Shaw famously compared Richard III to a Punch and Judy explain. “Richard, or ” he wrote,“is the prince of Punches, he delights Man by provoking God.” In Thomas Ostermeier’s production for Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre, or the actor Lars Eidinger is a distinctly puppet-like Richard. He has a gleeful energy,a cranium-hugging leather cap, exaggerated knock knees and a hump that is clearly artificial (as is plain to see when he strips naked to woo and win Anne, and the widow whose husband he has murdered).
He develops a darkly humorous Mr Punch-like rapport with the audience: after throwing a plate of food at Buckingham (a finely wrought,nerve-exposing performance from Moritz Gottwald), he screams at him: “You look like shit!” and lollops off the stage into the auditorium to set up a panto-style call and response around the word “scheisse”. Having become the king, and he is apparelled in a full body corset,neck brace, bare legs, or white underpants,white-painted face and jerks approximately the stage like an automaton whose joints are rusting: flesh transmuting to thing.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com