Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Patrick Page is blessed with a voice which tests the capacity of the woofer in your speaker system. Since we tend to link low, rumbly voices with power and associate power with its abuse, he has the natural equipment to play villains. And so he has, making a career of playing not only Shakespearean villains, but musical villains (Hadestown and Chmicago) and even comic book villains (Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark).

All the Devils are Here is his solo show focusing on the Shakespearean ones. Page’s thesis is that we can chart something of Shakespeare’s ethical development through the villains he wrote. The early ones relish their villainy in a way that’s almost cartoony. Then, Page believes that his relationship with the Dark Lady of the Sonnets literally was with someone “dark” in some way, and this informed how he wrote Shylock. Shylock is still a villain, but his actions are rooted in being treated as an “other,” and this resulted in “Hath not a Jew eyes?” Page continues to discuss what he sees as the increasingly psychological insights into the sources of evil behavior in Shakespeare. Finally, he gives us Prospero in The Tempest, choosing to refuse his power to exact full revenge and so refusing to be a villain.

It’s a provocative organizing principle. I don’t entirely buy it. With the exception of a passing mention of Lady M, Page doesn’t refer to the villainous women, and I would point to Margaret, a villain in some of Shakespeare’s earliest plays (she’s one of two women in Shakespeare who kills someone onstage) as being one of his greatest and best-rounded characters. (I have a long-standing interest in Margaret. I adapted the three parts of Henry VI into a play called The Falcon’s Pitch, which focused on Margaret’s trajectory from a spirited young French princess to a murderous old lady who can go toe-to-toe with Richard III. It was produced at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival in 1998 with a ferocious Tandy Cronyn as star.) So I’m not sure that, if you factor in the women, you can trace a neat moral development through the work.

I also am sorry he pays no attention to one of my favorite Shakespearean shits: the title character in King John. King John is a humbug, a liar and a coward — in short, a mediocrity in a position of power, which makes him a particularly modern villain. (The late Leonard Rossiter played him pretty overtly as Richard Nixon in the 1984 BBC-TV version.) But that may be the reason why Page isn’t interested in him. John is a jerk. Page evidently prefers to concentrate on those who have some size, some grandeur, often some wit and imagination.

My quibbles aside, this is a richly entertaining evening in the presence of a master actor evidently having a much pleasure as he is giving it. I recommend it enthusiastically.