There’s something refreshingly 19th century about Patrick Page‘s traveling Shakespeare seminar, “All the Devils Are Here,” which opened Thursday at BroadStage in Santa Monica.
The show, a touring tutorial he created and performs solo, allows Page the opportunity to animate with barnstorming crackle a rogue’s gallery of shakespearean scoundrels. Villains come quite naturally to this stage veteran, who might not smack his lips when impersonating evil, but he certainly doesn’t stint on the flamboyant color. An American Shakespearean who can hold his own with the Brits, he combines mellifluous diction with muscular creativity.
Page received a Tony nomination for his performance in the musical “Hadestown,” in which he played Hades, ruler of the underworld, with a sexy, tyrannical malevolence and a voice so deep it resonated as darkly as Leonard Cohen’s. And he’s had prior success creating outlandish villains on Broadway with the Grinch and, from “Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark,” Norman Osborn/green Goblin.
But shakespeare has long been a touchstone. He’s dedicated himself to the work, as was evident in his triumphant turn in the Shakespeare Theater Company’s 2023 production of “King Lear” in Washington, D.C., directed by Simon Godwin. the producers of which had the good sense to stream worldwide for all of us outside the nation’s capital who wanted to experience the thunderclap of Page’s lear.
Godwin, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company and an associate director of the National theatre in London, leaves little distance between Page and the audience in his staging of “All the Devils Are Here.” The direct-address simplicity of the production serves the fluidity of page’s performance. The actor transitions from talking about the characters to becoming them with just a shift in his posture and vocal tone.
Proximity is the point. shakespeare’s bad guys, with a few notable exceptions, are quite like you and me, which is to say they are human. Their worst deeds are the product of desires and fears that aren’t foreign to any of us. we might not be capable of atrocities, but in our dreams we’re all occasionally raving lunatics, giving vent to feelings we keep buried away in the light of day.
Page makes the tendentious claim that Shakespeare invented the villain, then walks it back to explain exactly what he means. His thesis is that Shakespeare early in his playwriting career followed the prevailing models of villainy. These vicious and vindictive antagonists tended to be outsiders, jews (in the case of Christopher Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta”), Moors (such as Aaron the Moor in shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”) or the physically deformed (most notably, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who first appeared in Shakespeare’s “henry VI” and proved to be such a hit that he was given his own play, “Richard III”).
We get a taste of these Machiavels, who have none of the misgivings about vengeance that will plague Hamlet. Page portrays them without much introspection. They tell you what they’re going to do and then they bloody well do it. They can be scathingly ironic, alert to every hypocrisy that corroborates their cynical worldview, and even seductive in a perverse, power-mad way.
for these reasons, they are, like the arch-villains of “Batman,” the most entertaining characters in their stories. This lawless crew shar
