McKellen turns the dangerously familiar opening speech (“Now is the winter of our discontent”) into a sinister manifesto, a mini-“Mein Kampf” that flaunts Richard’s physical deformity and proclaims his intent to get the crown at any cost. The modern military garb gives Richard’s useless left arm, limping gait and twisted back the look of battle traumas. He is a soldier–Satan, underscored by McKellen’s dazzling dexterity as he dons a glove onehanded, his fingers working into it like five sibling snakes slithering to their lair.
In a scene nearly impossible to make credible, Richard wins the Lady Anne, whose husband he has just killed. In his great performance (filmed in 1955), Laurence Olivier accomplished this by dumbfounding Anne with a surreal logic (" He that bereft thee, lady, of thy husband, / Did it to help thee to a better husband"). McKellen does it by turning his sheer chutzpah into a sensual force that crumples Anne (Anastasia Hille) into an erotic swoon.
Hille and the other women in the cast give the play an emotional effect beyond its political details (audiences today don’t care about these ancient dynastic vendettas). Eyre’s deft change to the modern age accents the timelessness of this play about a tyrant who slaughters everyone in his path to power-brother, wife, two child princes who are his cousins, and his accomplices. Richard is a serial killer posing as a leader, a scenario that has been replayed in our century with a fury that might have appalled–or delighted-Richard himself. What a great actor must do, and McKellen does, is scare us by investing Richard with the perverse appeal of a demon who’s also a superman of energy. At the end, sprawled on Bosworth Field like a stomped beetle, McKellen emits a bloodcurdling death rattle–the sound of that evil energy escaping like toxic waste into the dark.
