The Winter of Our Discontent

Richard III – Promethean Theatre Ensemble

Promethean Theatre Ensemble is back with its first show since the shut down and is staging Shakespeare’s classic Richard III, the tale of the scheming duke who plots to seize the throne from his brothers then his young nephews by any means necessary.

Reviewing a Shakespeare production is both and an easier and a more difficult job a reviewer. On the one hand, it’s pretty hard to come up with a new insight for a 500-year-old play. But on the other hand, that leaves you to focus on the acting. Cameron Feagin portrays the villainous Richard III and is a Promethean Ensemble veteran. I’ve enjoyed her prior work in Gross Indecency as Oscar Wilde’s prosecutor and Blue Stockings as one of the first female professors at Cambridge. She was also great as the Earl of Kent in Redtwist’s King Lear in 2019. Here, she brought subtlety and menace to the part and did a great job anchoring the show.

The staging and costume designs are fairly minimal. A set of steps upstage serve as the throne. Simple dresses for the women, and different styles of jackets for the men largely indicate position and rank. The choice to use modern military vests for the combat scenes didn’t really land for me, but overall, the style choices were clearly to get out of the way of the actors and the words, and on that score, I think it succeeds. Personally, I am not a huge fan of Shakespeare adaptations that try to reset the action in other places and times. With rare exception it just gets in the way of the story, so the choice to do a minimal staging that kept the focus on the actors was a good choice for me.

Overall, this was a straightforward, well-executed production of Richard III. I found myself thinking first about watching a political order damaged by people willing to lie and cheat their way to the top and what insight that may have for the current world. Then I remembered that Shakespeare wrote it to make the political order of his day look good, which of course means making the predecessor look bad, and wondered about what insights were there as well. Anchored by Cameron Feagin’s thoroughly evil but ultimately still human performance, I thoroughly enjoyed this production.

Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

Presented May 20 – June 26 by Promethean Theatre Ensemble at The Factory Theater at 1623 W. Howard, Chicago.

Tickets are available online.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.