Patrick Page summons the Vice character of the medieval morality play in his exploration of villains in Shakespeare, All the Devils Are Here.
Patrick Page’s investigation into Shakespeare’s villains is a master class on the Bard and a bravura demonstration of Shakespearean acting. In All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain, Page brings a lifetime of performing and thinking about Shakespeare to the stage. He inhabits characters running the full range of Shakespeare’s dramatic career and imparts some of the wisdom he has accrued along the way, summoning evil spirits one moment and serving as congenial, good-natured, and charismatic host into the heart of darkness the next.
Page opens the performance with Lady Macbeth’s incantation: “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts.”
Page opens with a sterling rendition of Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here” soliloquy, before the lights come up and he addresses the audience, laying out his plan for the evening (terrifically lighted by Stacey Derosier). As our guide into villainy and evil, Page displays erudition without pretentiousness: yes, he will quote from Robert Greene’s 1592 Groatsworth of Wit (which seethes with jealousy as rival playwright Greene brands the young Shakespeare an “upstart crow”), but he’ll also bring up Star Trek or The Simpsons, all in service of crafting a narrative of how Shakespeare takes the generic Vice character from medieval morality plays and invents what we call the villain today—flesh-and-blood characters with psychological depth and moral complexity.
There are different iterations of villainy in Shakespeare, and Page seamlessly dips into various characters, proceeding chronologically from 1590 to 1611; they include Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Malvolio from Twelfth Night, and, of course, Macbeth. He refers to Macbeth as “Shakespeare’s darkest play,” but also has some fun with the curse of the Scottish Play, even showing an actor’s trick for exorcising it that relates to Page’s time in the ill-fated Broadway show Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
Page delivers the soliloquy by King Claudius in the prayer scene from Hamlet.
In a brilliant decision, Page doesn’t just perform soliloquies, but some multi-character scenes as well, and his characterization is so precise that it’s always clear in these scenes which character is speaking without the aid of overdone flourishes. In one case he invents a conversation between Marlowe’s Barabas from The Jew of Malta (ca. 1590) and Aaron the Moor from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594), performing their litany of villainies as though in a bragging contest; and he performs a scene between Iago and Othello from Othello to develop his theory that Iago is a pure psychopath.
In a particularly moving sequence he performs the scene between Shylock and Antonio from The Merchant of Venice where Shylock calls out the hypocrisy of anti-Semitism. Page sees this scene as a moment that would have confounded the original audience, who “really believed Marlowe’s monstrous libel about Jews poisoning wells and drinking the blood of Christian babies. So, when the Christian merchant, Antonio, approaches the Jewish moneylender, Shylock, to ask for a loan, there is little doubt which character Shakespeare’s audience would have been inclined to side with. But Shakespeare had a surprise in store for them.”
“As our guide into villainy and evil, Page displays erudition without pretentiousness.”
Page concedes that the biographical stories he presents about Shakespeare are conjectural, but he’s trying to build a narrative, and it never seems like he’s overreaching, such as when he speculates about young Will watching the medieval Vice in 1572 as the Earl of Leicester’s Men visited Stratford; or the so-called Dark Lady of the sonnets possibly denoting an actual person who shifted Shakespeare’s focus, for a time, away from villains and toward love. His take on Shakespeare is simultaneously romantic and levelheaded, and thankfully he never alludes to any of the stubbornly persistent “Oxfordian” conspiracy theories about his identity. (I’m looking at you, Mark Rylance.)
“Is this a dagger which I see before me?” Page asks, as Macbeth from “Shakespeare’s darkest play.” Photographs by Julieta Cervantes.
Lighting and sound design (by Darron L West) cue the audience when Page is entering a character, and Simon Godwin, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., who recently directed Page in an acclaimed King Lear there, uses some theatrical flourishes here that enhance the performance but never distract from Page’s utter command of the language and the cadence of Shakespeare’s verse, which Page renders in his rich baritone. Some subtle costume choices (designed by Emily Rebholz), such as dog tags when playing the soldier Iago, and limited but effective props (Macbeth’s dagger, Prospero’s staff) assist Page in briefly immersing the audience into a new character’s world, before springing back to himself with enlightening exposition or a wry aside.
In addition to being deeply entertaining and a triumph of craft, the show is genuinely informative: Page makes Shakespeare so approachable and alluring that both a novice and an expert could enjoy it and come away emotionally and intellectually gratified. All the Devils Are Here is a must-see theatrical experience.
All the Devils Are Here runs through Jan. 7 at DR2 Theatre (101 E 15th St.) Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday–Thursday and at 8 p.m. Friday–Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday and at 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are available by visiting allthedevilsplay.com.
Created and Performed: Patrick Page
Director: Simon Godwin
Sets: Arnulfo Maldonado
Costumes: Emily Rebholz
Lighting: Stacey Derosier
Sound: Darron L West
