TREACHERY FLOWS IN MACABRE `RICHARD'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Theater Critic

We've had comic Richard III's and macho Italian-American Richard III's, Sir Ian McKellen's jaded fascist and Richard Dreyfuss as a fey, nebbishy Richard in ``The Goodbye Girl.''

Now we have Geoff Elliott doing Richard as a kind of jocular Nosferatu, in the lively, stylishly macabre new production by Glendale's A Noise Within repertory company.

Bringing to mind the moldered elegance of the late-career Vincent Price, Elliott plays the villainous Duke of Gloucester (later King Richard) with a handful of grease in his hair and crocodile tears in his eyes. His left leg, outfitted with a weird wooden apparatus, might be a prosthetic hoax: Richard's limp promptly vanishes whenever he's alone in crafty soliloquy. At one point he even breaks into a frantic jig with his alter ego, the Duke of Buckingham (a cruelly elegant Robertson Dean), in honor of the duo's evil machinations.

Elliott made an exceptional Macheath in last season's ``The Threepenny Opera,'' and there are suitable touches of Elliott's Mack the Knife in his Richard the Dirty Blade: courtly sleaziness, amused self-delight, gloating false modesty, menacing sexuality and a sad-eyed, basset hound self-pity that Richard uses to gain sympathy from his would-be dupes. A highly physical actor, sometimes distractingly so, Elliott also is a master of feigned remorse, which here dissolves into withering contempt as soon as Richard's targets have moved beyond earshot.

To women, this Richard is a guilty pleasure: They loathe him, but watch out when he turns on the charm. Most of them grab his face and pucker up.

Director Michael Winters imparts a gruesome, slasher-movie sheen to Shakespeare's account of the 30 years' bloodletting between the rival York and Lancaster clans. The bag bearing Lord Hastings' head is visibly blood-soaked; ditto the coffin sheet around the slain Edward. When Richard suffers his prescient, pre-battle dream, his many victims rise up from the stage like bug-eyed zombies, reproaching him with spooky, tape-recorded curses.

Thomas Budderwitz's set design plops Richard's predecessor-brother King Edward IV (the indispensable Mitchell Edmonds) down on a throne of blood, and Paul Dinkel's lighting design brings out the lurid crimson shades of the damask drapes that enshroud the stage. The production almost could be subtitled ``Knight of the Living Dead,'' which is proper for a drama drenched more in plasma and rhetoric than poetry.

``Richard III'' is one of the Bard's earlier works, and its secondary characters aren't normally the sharpest tools in the Shakespearean shed. Not so this time. The female cast members are especially impressive, particularly Ann C. Miller as Richard's resolute sister-in-law Queen Elizabeth and Jill Hill as his grief-stricken reluctant bride, Anne. They summon a type of anguished, sexualized rage found in Shakespeare, the ancient Greek tragedies and not many other places.

And June Claman, a wraithlike figure with a mass of frizzy iron-gray hair, gives a blood-freezing performance as the Lancastrian Queen Margaret. Her vengeful croonings have such lyrical purity of hatred, they sound like lullabies.

THE FACTS

What: ``Richard III.''

Where: Through Nov. 16 at A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale.

When: In repertory. Call theater for specific dates.

Tickets: $22-$27. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: His bride (Jill Hill) endures Richard's (Geoff Elliott) machinations in the A Noise Within production of ``Richard III'' in Glendale.