RICHARD III
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Well, maybe one idea. It’s possible that McCabe’s drive to direct Shakespeare stems not so much from the plays themselves as from a deep-seated desire to see Tom Mula act in them. A few years ago McCabe directed King Lear at the Body Politic; the production groaned under the weight of a ponderous concept having something to do with the Balkan Wars. At least that’s how I remember it. Nothing made sense–until Mula showed up as the Fool. Dressed in a bowler and armed with an umbrella, he was Charlie Chaplin waiting for Godot: an absurd clown, possessed of a vast, knowing, ironic, pathetic yet authentically deep sadness. Mula’s Fool constituted the one point of clarity in the show. It was as if McCabe had come up with the whole mess just so Mula could wear that bowler.
Now McCabe’s attempted Richard III, Shakespeare’s marvelously lurid history play about the deformed 15th-century spin doctor who connived and murdered and seemingly mesmerized his way to the English throne before getting tumbled off it at the battle of Bosworth Field. Again, nothing makes much sense. Again, there’s Mula–in the title role this time; done up in a hump, a set of crutches, and one pointy ear. But not even he can provide enough clarity to overcome the chaos around him. Especially not in that outfit. He ends up succumbing to it instead, and it swallows him down.
Unfortunately, Mula himself doesn’t survive. McCabe’s got him putting so many arrows and asterisks on his ironies that we start to wonder why nobody onstage is catching on to them. By the time we see Richard at the end, hobbling around a battlefield with the most ridiculous blades on his war crutches, we’re utterly beyond sympathy, empathy, horror, or laughter. Richard III is full of a grotesque and savage comedy, but McCabe reduces both the comedy and the tragedy to a diagrammatic silliness. Not even Mula can make that worthwhile.
