Opening the Belfast International Arts Festival, a second Shakespeare production this season by the Lyric Theatre sees its first-ever staging of The Tragedy of Richard III, adapted by Michael Patrick, who plays the murderous, Machiavellian king, and Oisín Kearney, who also directs.
In a programme note, Kearney describes this staging as “a current story about power, life and death… reflecting Richard III’s predicament as a dying man”. That quandary is shared by Patrick, who was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease in 2023 and given a life expectancy of four years.
The eight-year-old Patrick also lost his father to MND, and the spectre of that cruel illness haunts an imaginative staging that plays with multiple theatrical ideas and brings a sardonic blast of droll, Northern Irish humour to proceedings.
Unavoidable is Patrick’s confinement to a wheelchair, Richard’s rise to power mirrored in the increasingly sophisticated and motorised versions on show; the appearance of a restorative oxygen cylinder and mask simultaneously pointing to Richard’s growing debilitation and a brute reminder of the daily toll on Patrick himself.
The text cut more deeply than usual—the House of York reduced to three; House of Lancaster to Lady Anne alone; et al to a mere six players—and discreetly amended in places to echo Patrick’s reality, there is heart aplenty at work in a portrait of a heartless man.
Patrick’s performance neither denies nor exploits his illness, his bluff appropriation of it delivered with nonchalant bonhomie in an apt take on Shakespeare’s most physically disabled character. Instead, he brings a conspiratorial black humour to bear that rather gets the better of his performance. Bedecked in a paper Burger King crown, there is a glancing touch of Jarry’s Ubu Roi to him, but only occasionally is the monster lurking within manifested.
Treating the verse with a conversational quality that, by default, lacks definition and bite—albeit enhancing his rapport with the audience—Patrick calls to mind Harold Bloom’s description of Richard as “a compound of charm and terror… a Panurge turned from mischief to malevolence”. There’s more of charm and mischief than those darker aspects here in an interesting conceit that sees the last Plantagenet king metamorphosing into Rabelais’s crafty knave.
Secure verse speaking is provided in admirable performances by Patrick McBrearty’s authoritative Buckingham, Allison Harding’s imperious Duchess of York, Ciaran O’Brien’s effusive Clarence and Charlotte McCurry’s grief-stricken Queen Elizabeth.
Chris McCurry’s Stanley and Michael Curran-Dorsano’s Hastings tread lightly as willing clowns aware of their own precarious place in a larger scheme beyond their influence. Paula Clarke makes much of the deadly henchman Tyrrell, her deafness and signing imbuing the willing assassin with Chaplinesque pointedness. The energetic attack of Ghaliah Conroy’s Richmond too often blurs focus, but her Lady Anne is a secure portrait of vulnerability exploited.
If Kearney’s production seems uncertain in its blending of domestic commonplace, political intriguing, cartoonish imagery and the grotesque—the final, decisive battle more an unconvincing street riot—Jonathan M Daley’s lighting imbues all with pastel hues and shadows that deftly lends shape to and colours the conflicted ideas and emotions at play.
Neil McKeever’s minimalist set and maximalist costume designs trip over themselves with copious borrowings from elsewhere. His set draws on Jan Pieńkowski silhouettes, Orson Welles’s 1948 film of Macbeth and iconic Peter Brook productions for the RSC; his costumes ranging from Holbein portraits to Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy to Swinging Sixties chequered fashions. A confusing imprint, but a vivid one, too.
Combining on-stage percussion and pre-recorded, Ligeti-accented electronica, Katie Richardson’s score adroitly provides necessary drama, poetry and due poignancy.
If that loaded word ‘tragedy’ in the title is never fully realised, there remains something of the tragic in a production that can’t be faulted for ambition and is lent obvious impact by the sheer tenacity of Patrick’s performance.
Following the Lyric’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there is much of interest here to suggest the timidity in staging more Shakespeare on Northern Irish stages (woefully parsimonious funding aside) is unwarranted.
In selected performances, Zak Ford-Williams, a wheelchair-user with cerebral palsy, will substitute for Patrick as Richard.