STAGE REVIEW : A Repugnant Rex, Royally Done

The theater plunges into darkness with an apocalyptic explosion and Ian McKellen emerges from a fog: sinister, alone, sheathed in a great military topcoat, exuding evil.

When he narrows his eyes and opens his mouth in the title role of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” at UCLA’s Royce Hall, it is to spit out his first line. “Now is the winter of our discontent” becomes the tongue-lashing of a sociopath.

There is no leading up to villainy here. From the first, this Royal National Theatre of Great Britain production, now on the final stop of a nationwide tour, announces its intentions--and lives up to them.

Staged with clenched fist by the National’s artistic director, Richard Eyre, this uncut, unrelenting “Richard” pierces through all previous conceptions of the tragedy to become McKellen’s exclusive playing field. He has been lauded as a Richard for our time, not only because the production is vaguely updated to Hitler’s 1930s, but because it addresses our fears about the evil that men continue to do, from the recently departed Ceaucescus to Slobodan Milosevic.

Raw evil is a 20th-Century banality and McKellen’s Richard plays no favorites. He has plundered public figures to build his malefic persona. In addition to the traditional limp, hunched back and withered arm, hair refuses to grow on the left side of this Richard’s head. It is an unexpected physical manifestation of his psychological aberrations. “In Nature, nothing’s blemished but the mind,” says Shakespeare in another play. “None can be called deform’d but the unkind.”

Eyre has allowed McKellen free rein with his theatrical extravagance--grimaces and tics, vocal and physical, that would be inexcusably broad in an actor less skilled at keeping them tightly controlled. At one time, he adopts a Winston Churchill gait. At another, he stoops to a Rich Little Nixonian shake of the head, risking grotesque excesses that he knows won’t top reality but only mirror it. It is a feral, supremely calibrated performance.

But McKellen does not do it alone. His success is enhanced by Eyre’s tightly wound and inventive production, which is marred only--but significantly--by Royce Hall’s dreadful acoustics. The pace is smart and martial, people taunt one another, the menace is as thick as the pomp and circumstance--and the sound awful.

(No sound designer is listed in the program, but the importance of the production and its nearly four-hour length mandate that something be done. Struggling to hear Shakespeare’s language is one thing; struggling to hear the language and understand the historical complexities that are central to this play is more work than anyone should have to do at these prices.)

Too bad, too, because reports that the company is not up to McKellen’s standards prove unfounded. There are strong performances in the supporting roles, from Malcolm Sinclair’s exquisite anguish as the condemned Duke of Clarence, to Terence Rigby’s hard-nosed Buckingham, Tim McMullan’s dangerous Tyrrel and Phil McKee’s conscience-stricken murderer.

But it is the women, particularly the older women, who carry the deeper judgments of the play: Antonia Pemberton’s prophetic, mad Queen Margaret and Rosalind Knight’s Duchess of York, whose contempt for her malformed son is overrun only by her mounting horror at his actions.

Charlotte Cornwell’s Queen Elizabeth delivers a stylish woman progressively beaten down by the repeated emotional blows that she receives. Eyre has been masterful in staging the difficult scenes of Richard’s seductions, first of the Lady Anne (Anastasia Hille) and later Elizabeth.

Eyre’s ability to set mood and tempo is complemented by Bob Crowley’s haunting and spare design. He fills the cavernous stage with emptiness--blacks and reds that, under Jean Kalman’s interrogation lights, look like the unquiet mutants of familiar kinds of fascism.

Crowley’s costumes are another story: an eclectic collection of suits of armor, uniforms and tuxedos randomly borrowed from the Elizabethans, Soviet communism, Hitler’s Gestapo and Mussolini’s Black Shirts. You can choose to accept the odd mix, the absence of guns, the presence of swords and daggers--or not.

But McKellen is well-served by the ambience thus created. His portrayal of this tyrant, incapable of anything but the relentless feeding of his obsessions, makes this Richard his as securely as Henry V is Olivier’s or Hamlet John Gielgud’s.

Now if something can only be done about the acoustics at Royce Hall. . . .

“Richard III,” Royce Hall, UCLA, Westwood. Tuesdays-Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays, 1:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 27. $30-$40; (310) 825-2101. Running time: 3 hours, 40 minutes.

Ian McKellen: Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III

Antonia Pemberton: Queen Margaret

Rosalind Knight: Duchess of York

Anastasia Hille: Lady Anne

Charlotte Cornwell: Queen Elizabeth

Terence Rigby: Duke of Buckingham

Malcolm Sinclair: Duke of Clarence

Richard Simpson: Lord Hastings/Sir Walter Herbert

David Foxxe: Bishop of Ely/Sir James Blunt

Tim McMullan: Sir James Tyrrel

Peter Darling: Henry, Earl of Richmond/Lord Grey

Bruce Purchase: King Edward IV/Earl of Oxford

Dominic Hingorani: First murderer

Phil McKee: Second murderer

A Royal National Theatre of Great Britain production of Shakespeare’s play, presented by the UCLA School of Film and Television and UCLA Center for the Performing Arts. Director Richard Eyre. Deputy director Chris Barton. Production designer Bob Crowley. Lights Jean Kalman, reproduced by Laurence Clayton. Movement Jane Gibson. Fight choreography John Waller. Music Dominic Muldowney. Production manager Rodger Hulley. Stage manager John Caulfield. Deputy stage manager Jane Suffling.