As Cooke panned during the play's self-identifying first speech across Richard's bare, burdensome flesh, one clocked his gentle mockery of the word "summer" alongside a seductive tone incapable of fully concealing its speaker's scars.
Using the camera as his ally the way a stage Richard III might work the audience, Cumberbatch caught to an unusual degree the physical and psychic pain that drives this merciless monarch-in-waiting on. (Credit, too, to the dusky elegance of Zac Nicholson's cinematography.)Īnd because Cumberbatch by now is so thoroughly marinated in the demands of celluloid, he easily scaled back a potentially OTT character to become someone shiveringly, compulsively real: not a caricature of malignity but a master class in it. No less apt was the repeated sight of Richard's fingers tapping nervously, the agitation an aural prefigurement of that famous horse without which Richard has no kingdom and no life. Along the way, its visual command confirmed director Dominic Cooke as a screen natural, should this gifted theatre director (his National revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom remains the London stage highlight of the year so far) choose to segue to the cinema, as many of this series' other directors have already done.įrom its title character's opening soliloquy through to a climactic image suggesting the charnel house of history, Cooke carved a compelling visual path through adaptor Ben Power's deftly filleted version of a particularly single-minded play that here used a chessboard as a cunning visual motif.
Those who associate Shakespeare's "bottled spider" with various excuses through the years for overindulgence and/or camp got instead a portrait of gathering psychosis that was considerably more biting and bitter than has generally been true of this play of late.
0 kommentar(er)
