Arts Listings

In black battle dress, a figure hobbles onstage to the unlikely strains of Patsy Cline belting out “Wheel of Fortune” over a big band. As he performs an exhausted striptease—one suited for a locker room—the battle-weary wraith launches into “Now is the winter of our discontent” and finally dons topcoat over white T-shirt: Gloucester, who will one day soon be Richard III. 

As played by Reg Rogers, Richard’s a twisted, evil brute, but of an almost whimsical humor in California Shakespeare Theater’s Richard III, playing in the Orinda outdoor Bruns Amphitheater through Sunday. 

His humped back and splayed foot become the trimmings of a kind of vaudeville eccentric—he skips and hops on and off, and such galumphing rhythms provide off-kilter rimshots to his slurred, strident, scathing punchlines. His woebegone demeanor, a kind of cartoonish, Wile E. Coyote goggle-eyed slouch, belies his mastery of hypocrisy and seduction—seduction even of Lady Anne over her husband’s coffin as she curses Gloucester, who killed him. (Susannah Livingstone and Rogers give this famous, fantastic scene a few good twists in their display of it.)  

Opposite Gloucester is his brother, Edward IV, “every inch a king,” though criticized for dalliance with courtesans. James Carpenter, in his delivery of Edward’s soliloquy eulogizing their brother Clarence (Max Gordon Moore), when Richard’s scheming brings about his death while imprisoned (the sleight of hand of warrants and interpreting royal wishes doesn’t quite come off here), brings off a coup of grand theater, as Edward is laid low with grief and remorse, a semidivine creature made mortal. 

The cast is generally pretty well spoken in a very talky play (though some, like Catherine Castellanos as Margaret, widow to Henry IV and general Cassandra, just declaim), but Carpenter’s high tone and manner rise above the rush of “Shakespeare Festivalese” the others sometimes slip into.  

With all the talk, the groupings are usually well enough choreographed by director Mark Rucker, as is the fight on Bosworth Field that brings Richard III, both the character and the play, and the War of the Roses itself to a close—despite a little unnecessary dry ice smoke, and a lot more cloying use of Patsy Cline to underscore the precarious state of the crown and the lives of those near to it. (At one point, Richard sings along while swinging a bloody plastic sack with the head of the latest he’s dispatched.) 

The more serious intricacies of public and private demeanor, and the personal ambition, fear and remorse that play behind the courtier’s face are best shown by Dan Hiatt’s performance as Buckingham.  

The gruesome is therefore combined with the whimsically insouciant to realize a breezy, black-edged humor for much of the show. At times this seems to underline, at others undermine, the point made: how Gloucester’s unscrupulous climb to the top—made by cutting a bloody swathe across Britain—opens up the floodgates to general dog-eat-dog mayhem. 

The plot is pretty well delineated by the way the action is represented, the lines delivered. The production attempts “that savage, old English humor” T. S. Eliot spoke of, which amplified and distorted the Tragic. But sometimes the reverberations of poetry and meaning are muffled by repetitive “sight gags” and riffs, or by the lack of will to go beyond making a scene or a turn and turn the corner into the lonely byways of the strange, hybrid form of Tragedy which bears The Bard’s name. 

RICHARD III 

Presented by California Shakespeare Theater through Sunday at Bruns Amphitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda. 

$15-$60. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org.