Kevin Spacey's "Richard III' in Brooklyn

Anyone who complains about Kevin Spacey's larger-than-life, over-the-top performance as Richard III is just plain jealous, if you ask me. I mean, you've never seen an actor having so much fun in your life.

This daring, ambitious American star of the stage and screen, having originated the role at London's Old Vic (where Spacey currently rules as artistic director), has taken the production to Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore, Istanbul, Sydney, Europe— you name it.

There is nothing subtle about his super-sized interpretation of the hunchback tyrant. Au contraire, Spacey's hunchbacked body is twisted into a pretzel that rivals any contortionist— to the extent that it's almost a mockery of deformation. As he slithers through a sea of dead bodies on his way to the throne, Spacey delivers a performance that at times comes dangerously close to camp (including a throwaway imitation of Groucho Marx).

Spacey plays it both ways, entertaining us while getting away with murder. He elicits willing audience laughs while seducing the helpless Lady Anne (whose husband he has killed), while mocking his mother (whose other sons he has murdered), while simpering and smiling and plotting the death of everyone in his path to power. By the end of Act I, Richard III has murdered nine people, including two brothers, two nephews and at least one best friend. And that's not counting everyone he's killed before the play begins.

Flirting with the audience

Just about everything critics disliked about Spacey's performance— his mugging, camping, shticking— are the elements that I found most entertaining in their outrageousness. Milking the direct addresses that Shakespeare's text offers, Spacey flirts with the audience, takes it into his confidence and just about makes love with it.

"I'll have her— but I'll not keep her long," he confides in us after seducing Anne, and we marvel at his skill. By Act II, when he's crowned, we're completely under his spell. It's a double display of nerve and verve"“ and if there's madness in the excesses of this flamboyant performance, there's definitely "method in it."

I've admired Al Pacino's ironic Richard in the meta-film Looking for Richard, and Sir Ian McKellen's chilling Richard onstage at the National Theatre in London in the 1990s (later a film, too). But what makes Spacey's Richard so fascinating is the way he wins over the audience. We're so enjoying his show in Act I that we hardly realize that it is we who are being seduced.

Like losing Saddam

By Act II, we're more than his captives"“ we're his accomplices in murder and mayhem. We hardly even mind when, having discarded poor Anne, he moves on to woo his niece "“ the daughter of a brother he's just murdered. Indeed, we actually empathize as he writhes in terror and paranoia the night before he meets his death in the battle with Richmond.

As Richard goes down ("My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse"), we're left with a curious feeling of emptiness— like the one we feel today with the fall of our offstage villains (Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Qadaffi.)

As a film actor, Kevin Spacey is an artist "“ and a virtuosic one, capable of playing a wide range of roles— villains (in The Usual Suspects) as well as sympathetic protagonists (Margin Call, American Beauty). As a stage actor, however, Spacey is more of a showman"“ from his charismatic Hickey in The Iceman Cometh to this tour de force Richard.

He knows how to work an audience, to entertain them with variety, to "milk" the role of Richard for comedy as well as tragedy, to deliver a Shakespearean script with ease as if it were today's speech— to play all the notes, as Hamlet says.

Scenic wonders

Director Sam Mendes's production is the culmination of the Bridge Project, a three-year series of classical co-productions by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Old Vic. All his imports have been staged minimally, this one most successfully.

Utilizing every inch of the deep, bare BAM stage (both vertically and horizontally), Mendes and his designers achieve wonders with few scenic elements, creating strong diagonal perspectives with multi-doored stage flats through which the large cast flows, captioning scenes with smart Brechtian supertitles, and dressing the bare walls with projections.

High in a balcony box overlooking the stage, a percussionist punctuates the many scenes, and soon everyone on the stage is carrying a drum and marking the barbarian beat of Richard's bloody rise and fall.

Meanwhile, the current winter of our discontent has become a season filled with other tyrants, albeit on film. Ralph Fiennes is giving Shakespeare's killer Coriolanus a star turn, while Meryl Streep is dazzling us with her dark interpretation of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Jeremy Irons plays a bloodsucking Wall Street CEO in Margin Call with such elegance and wit that we can't help admiring his criminal audacity.

What does that say about a world where, given a paucity of heroes, we turn to our villains for entertainment?