Advertisement

Teenage Dick review – Daniel Monks is a dazzling high-school Richard III

Mike Lew’s relocation of Richard III to a US high school is part of a growing trend of transpositions of Shakespeare to a teenage setting. The key point, however, is Lew’s insistence that Richard and his female friend, Buck, be played by disabled actors: in this case Daniel Monks who has hemiplegia and Ruth Madeley who is a wheelchair user. While this is of major significance, I found myself questioning the assumptions on which the play is based.

Lew first follows then deviates from Shakespeare’s play. His Richard is a clever 17-year-old who decides to achieve the post of senior-year president by destroying his main opponent, Eddie (Callum Adams), a popular high-school jock. One of Richard’s tactics is to persuade Anne Margaret (Siena Kelly), Eddie’s ex-girlfriend, to accompany him to the school dance, and the scenes between the two of them are the highlight of the production.

Initially driven by virtue-signalling, Anne Margaret increasingly warms to Richard, inducts him into the delights of hip-hop and, when it comes to the big event, the pair of them enjoy a storming triumph.

Monks, who gives a dazzling performance in Michael Longhurst’s production, captures all of Richard’s complexity: his rage, his verbal wit and, above all, the tension between his need to be both feared and loved. Kelly as his dance partner and Madeley as the cautiously critical Buck are also outstanding. At the end, the plotting gets overcomplicated but my main reservations are to do with the play’s arguments.

Anne Margaret’s refusal to be an afterthought “like in a Shakespeare play where the ladies are all a bunch of objects and character foils” may be put down to her naivety. Far more central is Richard’s claim that abled people either make an instant moral judgment on disabled people or close their eyes and forget about them. That may have a grain of truth, but it ignores a radical shift in the politics of disability and a revolution in theatrical performance of which this production is a prime example.