During the holiday theater lull, I caught up with Patrick Page’s brilliant solo show All The Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Created the Villain at the tiny DR2 Theater. In a dazzling 70 minutes, this dark-voiced thespian explores the Bard’s development of his sinister characters, making them multidimensional.
Page traces a line from the pure evil of symbolic figures in medieval mystery plays to the Bard’s introduction of characterization in his baddies and how they influence modern nogoodnicks such as his own Green Goblin in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” Page illustrates his points with flavorful, deliciously malevolent performances of multilayered miscreants such as Iago, Claudius, and Edmund in King Lear.
Not all the choices are obvious, such as the comically vainglorious Malvolio’s monologue of self-love in Twelfth Night and a dual of dirty deeds between Barabas from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus. Simon Goodwin directs with economy and Page delivers the goods on the bad guys spectacularly.
