Spacey commands the stage ? and a big screen ? in Sam Mendes's Richard III. But it's all too much for some critics
With his talent for camp villainy, Kevin Spacey really couldn't find a role in Shakespeare better suited to him than Richard III. Or that, anyway, seems to be the consensus. "I'd always felt," Sam Mendes said recently "that he was born to play this part." And now, in this production which concludes the current cycle of the Bridge Project, Mendes has given Spacey the chance to prove it. With one exception, which we'll come to, the critics like what they see.
According to the Telegraph's Charles Spencer, Spacey turns in "an often electrifying performance which brilliantly identifies the two forces that drive the 'poisonous, bunch-backed toad' ? heartless ambition and a profound self-loathing." Ditto, says Michael Billington. "Spacey doesn't radically overthrow the Olivier concept of Richard the satanic joker," he explains. "What he offers us is his own subtle variations on it: a Richard in whom instinctive comic brio is matched by a power-lust born of intense self-hatred."
In the Independent, Paul Taylor paints a more detailed picture. "There have, it's true, been more creepily charismatic and more unnerving portrayals," he says. "But Spacey's performance combines instinctive, stage-commanding authority with lovely, droll touches of drop-dead understatement. There are times when this Richard seems like a satanic second cousin of Vincent Price, with his little mocking tosses of the eyebrows, flouncily dismissive flaps of the hand, archly subversive pauses ..."
On theartsdesk.com, James Woodall is in a concurring mood, though he too would like a bit more peril with his prancing. "Is he dangerous enough?" he asks of Spacey's Richard. "In a revealing moment in a programme Q&A, Spacey says he's 'stopped drinking, smoking, everything to dedicate [himself] to this character'. I rather wish he hadn't. If there's anything missing from his performance, it's decadence, a whiff of sweaty corruption and moral disintegration."
Overall, however, these are very good notices, which also scatter quite a bit of praise on Annabel Scholey's Lady Anne and Haydn Gwynne's Queen Elizabeth, as well as Mendes's grandiloquent staging. "The moment I shall cherish," Billington says, "is that of Richard newly enthroned at the start of the second act. Spacey's eyes express the momentary exultation of power only to move in a second to a restless insecurity."
Interestingly, however, this is precisely the moment that embodies what is wrong with the production, in the eyes of its one sceptic. Quentin Letts ? for it is he ? does like the showmanship evinced by Mendes (though he could have used less drumming). Yet in the end, he says, "I found myself wondering if Mr Spacey's self-esteem was an obstruction," citing "a surfeit of sarcasm and campness". Needless to say, while Letts wondered this, the giant close-up of the movies star only made things worse. "There's just a big screen full of Spacey," he protests in his review. "Too much." Note to ticket-buyers, perhaps: sit further away.
Do say: Spacey gives an authoritative account of the self-loathing in which villainy gestates.
Don't say: A bit like Alan Rickman in Die Hard.
The reviews reviewed: A lot of Spacey for your money.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jun/30/kevin-spacey-richard-iii
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