Richard III: A Challenge Met

By John Farrell

Long Beach Shakespeare Company may be small. Its Richard Goad Theatre up on Atlantic in north Long Beach is really a converted storefront, with parking for the actors in back and a dressing room upstairs. It seats perhaps seventy when over-full.

But Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s artistic heart is large, ambitious, seeking to produce, even in its humble circumstances, full versions of some of the Bard of Avon’s most critically acclaimed works. A few months ago it was King Lear, which featured a full and effective cast in one of the most difficult of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

This month they did something a little less daunting, that great melodrama Richard III, memorable from several film portrayals and the relatively recent news that that king’s remains, lost when he was defeated at Bosworth field hundreds of years ago at the end of the War of Roses, had been found and re-interred in York Cathedral, as befitted a king who was on the wrong end of Tudor history.

Richard III is not history. Shakespeare lived in a Tudor world and his story is based on the Tudor view of matters: Richard was a hunchback and a murderer who had everyone close to him killed and married the wife of a man, who he had murdered. He is evil, even a little slimy, and he is willing to tell the audience directly what he is planning and doing, how he intends to become king despite his deformity and how he intends to have love (or at least sex) even though he is unsightly.

But for all that he is, in Shakespeare’s play, wonderfully attractive, one of the best villains ever, a scheming sharpster who you love to hate.

All that is readily apparent in Carl Wawrina’s decisive, even attractive, portrayal of Richard. Yes, he has a hunchback, but save for that he is attractive, even pleasant when he wants to be. His evil isn’t on the outside but an interior phenomenon: He has years of being third in line to the throne, years of being relegated to an also-ran performance and he intends to make up for that with the crown.

Wawrina wasn’t originally cast as Richard. He had been Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s King Lear and only took on the role after the man who rehearsed the role had to back out. The company founder, Helen Borgers, even  offered an apology in advance in Wawrina had to use his book for lines in the play. It wasn’t a problem: Wawrina was letter perfect and inhabited the role with a sly smile and a determination to succeed that was palpable and a little frightening.

Mike Austin was King Edward IV, Richard’s elder brother, and Sean Mo Williams was the unlucky Duke of Clarence, one of the first to be killed by Richard. Fiona Austin was Lady Anne, the widow of another Edward, Henry VI’s son, who was properly amazed by Richard’s wooing, and doubled in other role effectively. Brian Patrick Williams was Henry, Earl of Richmond (and at the play’s end King Henry VII) and was tall and commanding at the play’s end a survivor and Tudor hero.

The two children killed in the Tower at Richard’s command were played by Garret Martinez as the Prince of Wales, a seventh-grader who had perfect concentration and a regal bearing, because he knew he would be king (if Richard hadn’t intervened and Cassius Clay-Harris, a fourth-grader who played Richard, Duke of York. This wasn’t Clay-Harris first play and he had no problems with his part.

The sets were minimal but effective and the costumes, designed by Dana Leach, were often elegant. The battle scene at the play’s end was directed by fight coordinator Daniel Foray, with Fiona Austin doing her role as fight captain.

Borgers directed this production, which was only cut a little: it lasted almost three hours.