Richard III
by William Shakespeare,
directed by Thomas Ostermeier
(in German, with supertitles).
Brooklyn Academy of Music,
October 2017.
We English-speakers are notoriously possessive about our Bard, and though some Germans, even to this day, will insist that you have not really read Shakespeare until you have read him in Schlegel’s translation, we always beg to differ. So it was with some hesitation that I initially considered, in the spring of 2014, going to a performance of Richard III at the Schaubühne theater in Berlin.
My hesitation didn’t affect things one way or the other, because the run had long since sold out. The production was directed by the well-regarded if quirky Thomas Ostermeier; perhaps more importantly, it featured Lars Eidinger in the starring role. Eidinger was repeatedly described to me as a “famous stage actor”—a phrase so alien to the theatrical situation in our own country as to make it seem translated directly from the German—and his virtues as a performer were universally praised. So when an American-born Berlin friend offered me her extra ticket to the event, promising that there would be English supertitles, I happily accepted.
The Schaubühne is not a large theater, and my seat was in the front row. Despite the language barrier, therefore, my initial encounter with Lars Eidinger was visceral and direct. It’s possible, even, that some of his hard-earned sweat and spittle landed on my shoes, though if it did, I was too entranced to notice. I have seen some great Richard IIIs (I saw Ian McKellen do that wonderful one-handed thing with the glove, for instance), but I had never before seen Richard performed with such animated, electrifying velocity. Eidinger tore around the sand-covered stage like a mad thing, and when he had used up the stage surface, he expanded upward via a hanging rope, or outward into the audience. He was dressed, initially, in what seemed to be sloppy white gym clothes (and this in the midst of a court scene filled with fancily dressed ladies and gentlemen), with his hump protruding noticeably from his upper back. When he removed his clothes, which he soon did, the hump was revealed as a strapped-on appendage, a black leather item that looked like something from sado-masochistic bondage practices.
Naked, Eidinger came off as a splendid physical specimen, or would have, if he had not been constantly contorting his body into bizarre positions, even as he crooned his lines into a dangling microphone. That mic—which he snatched up intermittently, like a monkey grabbing a banana or Tarzan grabbing a vine—was itself a clever conceit. Not only did it turn Richard into a kind of dance-club D.J. (complete with occasional pop song lyrics interjected in his remarks), but it also converted his soliloquies into fake-broadcast form. When his lines were addressed to his fellow actors, Eidinger delivered them in the normal unamplified way, but when he communed with himself, he always spoke into the mic. That his self-communing was intended to reach us—was in fact aimed at us, his acknowledged audience—thus became part of the point.
As the pop song lyrics suggest, this was not your standard Shakespeare. It was not even Schlegel’s standard Shakespeare. The “translation and adaptation” had been done by Marius von Mayenburg, a young German playwright who was apparently not worried about preserving the unities or anything else. The language, according to what my friends told me, was strictly modern, creating a sense of snappy dialogue that was frequently interrupted with improvisation. These improvisatory remarks (some of which may have been scripted) were often aimed at the audience: in the performance I saw, for instance, Eidinger aggressively asked a young woman in the balcony, first in German and then in English, whether she was asleep or awake. Other spontaneous lines were comically addressed to those onstage with him. (“No,” I said to the woman next to me, who was asking me about the original text, “Lord Buckingham and Richard III were never in an improv troupe together. That was the actors speaking, not the characters.”) Von Mayenburg, no doubt at the behest of Ostermeier, had also cut out a great deal of the plot, so that the little princes—who in this version were played by child-sized dolls—died offstage, and most of Richard’s final battle, including his “kingdom for a horse,” occurred in his own tortured mind. In short, everything that felt tragic in the written play, and in the play as I have previously seen it performed, felt comic or at least satiric in this version. I was not at all moved by it, but I was thrilled. “It’s not Shakespeare,” I told my Berlin hosts, “but it’s definitely something.”
I repeated this line to everyone I knew in New York when the Schau-bühne production came to BAM last fall. I wanted to warn them, but I also wanted them to see the show. In this I was largely unsuccessful: Americans, if anything, are snobbier about Shakespeare than the Brits, and my friends and acquaintances emphatically did not want to see the play performed in German.
But that was their loss. This time around, with all Shakespearean expectations pushed aside, I found that Eidinger was, if anything, even more gripping and charismatic in the role. He is not a particularly handsome man—not in the way a “famous movie star” would be, say—but I couldn’t take my eyes off him throughout the entire performance. I happened to be seated on the aisle he used for many of his entrances and exits, and every time he pounded up or down the steep steps of the Harvey Theater, I turned my head to follow his departure or arrival, ignoring whatever else was onstage. Untroubled by the language difference, he kept up a flow of communication with the audience, often in English (“Excuse me,” he said to a front-row patron whose feet almost got hit by a plate he threw during a tantrum), but sometimes just with a quick pat on the shoulder or a sustained, piercing glance. As extra tools in his interaction, he used not only the microphone but also the supertitles: “Contemporary Shakespeare,” he hissed in English, staring up at the screen as something particularly unBardic appeared in the projected translation.
The production was funnier than I remembered it, perhaps because I was now seated amidst an audience whose laughter I fully understood. But it was also scarier and more horrifying than I had recalled. When the two clownishly stupid murderers arrived in the prison cell to kill Clarence at Richard’s behest, the scene at first seemed comic, and we all laughed at their Dumb and Dumber manner; but as they stabbed him to death, the blood that flowed into the sand-filled floor seemed endless, unstoppable. It was perhaps the most graphic murder scene I’ve ever witnessed on a stage, and it caught us in mid-emotion, as if to say: Wait, wasn’t this just a joke a minute ago?
Even more telling was the moment when Richard (who by now had become a total lunatic, eating and dressing like a big baby and smearing his food all over) shoved his bowl of chocolate pudding into the face of Buckingham, his erstwhile supporter and collaborator. As Buckingham stood helplessly on the stage, Richard stepped out into the aisle, stared back at this man drenched from head to foot in brown gunk, and began to shout repeatedly in English: “You look like shit. Have you eaten any pussy today?” He waved his hands as if conducting a chorus, and when the audience didn’t immediately follow his lead, he turned and asked us, “Where are you?” That caused people to join in goodnaturedly, and suddenly, it seemed, the whole crowd was chanting in unison, “YOU LOOK LIKE SHIT. HAVE YOU EATEN ANY PUSSY TODAY?” The taunt died down only when Eidinger left the room, at which point Moritz Gottwald, the fine actor playing Buckingham, stood alone onstage, looking despairingly at us. “I just find it terrible,” he said, also in English, “that no one in this whole place” (with a broad arm gesture indicating the audience as well as the stage) “had the will to stand up to him…” And then, as his line trailed off, he too exited.
I don’t think the company would have tried to pull a similar routine in Berlin. Theater audiences there are too attuned to the dangers of crowd compulsion, having been schooled in its harmful effects since their youth, and they would probably not have joined so readily in Eidinger’s chant. But something about this moment made me realize that, even in Germany, the play had been about complicity—about our freed-up excitement, our almost libidinous enjoyment of this outrageous figure and the lengths to which he was willing to go. If the Schaubühne’s Richard III had been turned from tragedy to comedy, that itself was the tragedy: the way the play had sucked us in and made us into admiring witnesses of excruciatingly bad behavior. The Germans, of course, have had decades in which to reflect on what this kind of complicity means, to think about how easily a charismatic madman can take over the minds and hearts of his countrymen. America has only had a couple of years to contemplate the possibility, but now its outlines are becoming more apparent. For me, the major difference between the Berlin show I saw in 2014 and the play I witnessed at BAM in 2017 was precisely this—that in the two-and-a-half years which separated the two performances, we had acquired a disgustingly babyish, terribly dangerous, addictively watchable monster of our very own.
Wendy Lesser edits The Threepenny Review. Her biography of the architect Louis Kahn, You Say to Brick, is just out in paperback.
