Richard III starring Adjoa Andoh at Liverpool Playhouse – review

There’s a programme essay by director and star Adjoa Andoh in which she describes how, as the only Black child growing up in the Cotswolds in the 1960s and 70s, she felt a complete outsider. It was this sense of difference and alienation that she wanted to explore in the character of Shakespeare’s greatest villain, Richard III.

You can see her point. There’s something terrifyingly isolating about the way Richard is drawn in Shakespeare’s text, his physical deformity playing into Elizabethan notions of evil and his ‘otherness’ being exploited – not least by himself – for political ends. The parallels are intriguing and could be well worth investigating. Unfortunately, beyond the initial idea, the concept simply doesn’t stand up to any serious scrutiny in this shouty, shallow production.

Andoh, a veteran of the RSC among other companies, is extraordinary in the title role. Her performance is quirky, bordering on the eccentric, with strange decisions about where to place the emphasis on certain lines, and even giving them away to unseen ethereal singing voices at crucial moments. Thus, Richard’s iconic opening monologue, ‘Now is the winter of our discontent…’, is considerably diluted by having been sung already by an off-stage chorus as Andoh’s Richard looks about him quizzically.

The eccentricity extends to other roles too, with almost everyone speaking in a cod west country accent that veers dangerously close to Stephen Merchant or This Country-type comedy. Things aren’t helped by Maybelle Laye’s costume design, which dresses everyone in the same Jedi-like karate pyjamas, creating a drab uniformity that robs monarchs of their nobility and warriors of their fearsomeness. Characters are distinguished by increasingly weird headgear and wigs or even, in one instance, with a puppet, giving rise to the bizarre spectacle of one prince in the tower ventriloquising the other as they discuss their fate.

Yeofi Andoh’s music, weaving lines of sung text in (seemingly at random), proves another sticking point. It’s sort of folky, sort of other-worldly, but rarely memorable and too often intrusive.

On the plus side, Amelia Jane Hankin’s set provides a striking backdrop, with a giant curved wall framing the action in orangey-pink and a centre-stage tree trunk creating a focal point. At strategic moments, Chris Davey’s atmospheric lighting throws huge silhouettes onto the wall from behind, allowing scope for stylised executions and armies.

But the fundamental problem is the decision to paint Richard as some kind of victim of circumstance, rather than the homicidal psychopath of Shakespeare’s imagination. The text just doesn’t support it, and it transforms the character from a genuinely terrifying study of evil into a less-than-credible example of victimhood turned bad. This reaches its apogee in the final moments, when the battle-defeated Richard comes back to life to sing a self-pitying lament as his Tudor vanquishers perform a slow-motion Morris dance of victory.

Apologies if that’s a bit of a spoiler, but rest assured: it’s far from the oddest element of this utterly mystifying production.