Booth's Richard III by The Hidden Room (review)

standing above and behind Malcolm, continued his sarcastic tone even as Davenant’s script celebrated Malcolm’s virtue: “His vice shall make your virtue shine more bright / As a fair day succeeds a stormy night.” As Robert Richmond wrote in the program, after the murder of Duncan, “the acting is rooted in realism and more kin to 21st-century performances of this play” and, one might add, to twenty-first-century sensibilities. While any production of a play is necessarily an interpretation and it would, in any case, be impossible to replicate in our time the theatrical conditions (stage, acting, audience) of the Restoration, the director’s concept and his choices seemed too often to deconstruct the script Davenant had written and leave the audience to wonder just what elements in the production actually derived from Davenant’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.