Richard III

With these costumes, and with the metal scaffolding that framed the stage and pieces of furniture with galvanized metal frames that alternately resembled torture instruments and hospital equipment, the set had the menacing aura of a clinical torture lab. The masked men took on many roles as essentially shadowy stage-hands to state power, doing everything from inflicting torture to providing sound effects and music (which ranged from medieval chants to lullaby-like ballads at often highly incongruous moments, such as the murder of the princes). [...]the soliloquy and Richard's dialogues with Clarence and Hastings in the first scene were interspliced with jump-cuts to interpolated vignettes that depicted, in a kind of dumb-show, the King ordering Clarence's imprisonment with a nod as Richard flicked cigar ashes into another courtier's wine glass; Clarence being tortured with syringes plunged into his eyes; and the King in a chair spewing out a torrent of liquid vomit into a pail. [...]what was ultimately most terrifying about Propeller's Richmond was precisely that the production seemed to bring the audience into a parallel state where we viewed terror as a customary implement of power; in the stunned and emotionally depleted state that the production induced, even as one paradoxically continued to feel resistance to the violence, the ferocious vehemence of Richmond seemed to be the logical extension of and response to Richard's reign of terror.