🚀 go-pugleaf

Shakespeare's Richard III starring Ian McKlellan is playing at the 
Kennedy Center in Washington for a few more days.  I saw it Wednesday night.
Performed by England's Royal National Theater, this most intriguing of
the bard's histories horrifies the audience with the specter of a malevolent
maniac using lies and the complicity of those around him to gain
England's crown.  Shakespeare's lines are set in the context of
a 1930's England gone fascist.

McKlellan plays his physically and spiritually deformed character with
the unmistakable intention of evoking Hitler as we imagine him after 
seeing footage of mass lunacy at Nazi rallies.  But the meaning of
the play is respected so much that everyone in the play, including
Richard, remains completely English.  While the Royal National Theater
give the play an unusual setting, they succeed admirably in illuminating
the darkest possibilities of human ambition.

The performance had some small faults.  The most annoying of these was
the use of a few sound effects which obscured some of the dialogue.
The combination of Elizabethan English, British accents, and amplified
noises was, at a few spots, confusing.  Another cause for concern
on my part is that I could swear some lines were left out.  This 
perception might be due to the sometimes very fast dialogue.  But I
read the play just before going, and again went back to the text after
the play, and there are one or two instances in which I have no 
recollection that certain words in the text were actually spoken.
There is a high probability that this is not the performance's deficiency,
but my own.

Overall, the performance was outstanding; well worth the price of a 
ticket, especially at the half-price student rate.
-- 
Skip Collins