metempsychotic: thoughts on rd3rd (spoilers)

in rd3rd, richard does not die. he ends the play on a rather triumphant note, being disturbed at the penultimate scene by the nightmares that in the original illuminated his duplicitous nature, but in the reinterpretation by directors dr anton juan and dr ricky abad and dramaturg dr judy ick, he recognizes himself for the villain that he is, and embraces it fully. when the victimized minorities chant repeatedly in the final scene, ‘now is the winter of our discontent,’ the circle is made complete, with the people taking richard’s lamentation, and removing any possibility of a glorious summer.

teroy guzman is himself as gloucester subversive of the hunchbacked king the bard presented, being open about his crudeness, peppering his lines with putangina’s aplenty, choking missy maramara’s lady anne, and flaunting his gun at every opportunity–he is richard, but frighteningly, richard as duterte seems scarier, less human and as calculating as he is irrational. he carries himself with a flamboyance that convinces witnesses he himself does not believe the things he says, as he declares his flaws before a backdrop of graffiti depicting the elements enabling him–the naïve, the forgetful, the apathetic, the opportunistic, the fearful–and touts them as strengths.

towards the end of the play, as richard ascends to kingship, dr ricky abad instructed the audience to participate by not participating–to keep still, to keep silent. this would come off as strange instructions in a normal play, seeing as the director has basically informed the audience to behave as audiences in theaters should, but rd3rd is decidedly not a normal play–it functions as a comparative literature study executed in theatrical form on the universality of shakespeare, literature, theatre, and human failure, as social critique of the silence of the more knowledgeable sectors of society that enabled duterte’s staggering rise to fascistic power as much as the clamor of the less knowledgeable, as scathing satire–even parody–of philippine political dynamics, and even as an investigation on the relationship between the actors, the director, the play, and the audience.

that is to say, rd3rd knew that it had something to say–many things, in fact, and they certainly hit the jackpot for literary transcendence in retroactively transmigrating duterte’s soul into gloucester–and made sure that it would say it. the name of the play itself maximizes the visual similarities of the names richard the third and rodrigo duterte as signifier for their shared character. in addition to the graffiti backdrop mentioned above, other elements of the set included a corpse suspended from the ceiling, babies that drop to the ground in the middle of the bleachers where the audiences sit, the names of ejk victims printed and taped on the chairs provided for the audience, and–most certainly a touch of dr anton juan’s experience with screen macbeth–projections on walls of videos of ejk, and a list of names projected on the ghosts that haunt richard to little effect. all the while, dr ricky abad stalks his own production, offering narration that hammers in the point of the play. ‘richard the third was the medieval herod,’ he says. ‘who is the philippine herod?’ the audience laughs with discomfort. at one point, the lead character taunts his own director. as it so happened, dr ricky abad was at that point sitting in front of me, and teroy’s guns and eyes sometimes went in my direction. i thought, if he were a real madman, if that was a real gun, he could have shot me without being aware of my existence, and that makes the metempsychosis even better.

i am not sure if it is the universality of the theater or the universality of the reader, or possibly some combination of the two, but i have read into rd3rd more than what they cite in the primer. the powerful scenes of female lamentation reminds one of the trōiades by euripedes, and the intimate set-up that brings the audience uncomfortably close to the act, as well as the interaction between characters and the director, reminds one of weiss’s the persecution and assassination of jean paul marat as performed by the inmates of the asylum of charenton under the direction of the marquis de sade (which, incidentally, is another play that would be perfect for the black box). perhaps these connections were not intended, but that only proves the beauty of literature. it is a cracked lookingglass of the servant, as stephen dedalus has said of (irish) art, and one can only imagine the possibilities: one could focus on mocha uson and produce a local version of the crucible; bato dela rosa could be the exact opposite of coriolanus; philippine society could be investigated in an adaptation of rhinoceros, or waiting for godot, or who’s afraid of virginia woolf? or any absurd play for that matter.

rd3rd is an education, a propaganda, a necessity, a powerful piece of art. as i leave the theatre, i observe that one of the baby dolls from the ceilingsuspended board that drops them remained hanging there, and i wonder if i could take it as a sign that there could yet be a glorious summer to augment the winter lamented by the minorities at the end of the play.