30 years ago there was a brilliant Richard III in Russian at the Round House. Sadly, history does not repeat itself. The Richard III of Companhia Bufomecanica, which has arrived in London as the guest of the RSC and as part of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival, should have stayed in Brazil. It is not ready yet for export. Richard III is a one-man play. If you haven’t the actor there is no sense in staging it. The Brazilians have five different actors playing Richard, including an actress, sometimes all at the same time, and none of them is any good. There’s no deformity and no hump. Richard is a boar.
The production by Claudio Baltar and Fabio Ferreira opens with the company taking off all their clothes. The nudity is totally gratuitous. The costumes they get into are ugly. The cast are acrobatic but what they do acrobatically adds nothing except acrobatics. The acting is well below par. The two most striking images – a man tied up in ropes and a man with candelabra on his head – are not on stage but photos in the programme.
The messy production is in Portuguese with English sur-titles. The play has been cut and new dialogue has been added. “I don’t know how to die on stage,” confesses one actor in broken English. “I want to stay in London.” (Some members of the audience thought this was a hoot.) The play ends, very oddly, with a quote from King Lear: The worst is not as long as we can say, “This is the worst.”