Spacey's welcome twist on 'Richard III'

When the Bridge Project began in 2009, the three-year plan was to bring English and American artists together in successive brief touring seasons.

According to British director Sam Mendes, a co-producer with the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Old Vic in London, the hope of this union of transatlantic audaciousness was to find what would happen "if the barrier of an ocean and the separation of the theater communities could be erased."

Who knew the answer would be Kevin Spacey?

How funny that, at the end of the three variable, valuable, hard-to-generalize seasons, Spacey would be the most obvious, tangible achievement of this commingling of American and British theater styles.

The American actor, who has been in London running (and actually saving) the hallowed Old Vic since 2004, is back on our soil for the first time in too long. More, he is the mesmerizing vortex in "Richard III" -- his first local Shakespeare after an American stage career of Eugene O'Neill and modern playwrights.

We shouldn't be surprised that Spacey, with his virtuosic gallery of sleazy villains, would find a rakish glee in drama's best blood-loving humpback sociopath. What we could not guess, however, is the subtle modulations in Spacey's voice (except in hollering climaxes), the layers of hurt beneath the viciously cool mockery and the fury or the stamina that propels him onstage -- twisted leg, frozen arm, deadly cane -- for most of Mendes' 31 / 2-hour production.

This is modern-dress, high-tech Shakespeare -- fairly conventional, except for the scarcity of cuts in the text -- with elegant costumes, a stark backdrop of gray-on-gray doors, theatrical shafts of light and an occasional flat screen for newsreels. Mendes helpfully labels each scene with the name of its main character, the letters double-reflected as a smeared image below.

The cast is unusually consistent for Bridge Shakespeare. Highlights include Annabel Scholey's shockingly seducible Lady Anne, Haydn Gwynne's rigorous Queen Elizabeth, Gemma Jones' haunting witch of a Queen Margaret, Chuk Iwuji's complicitous Buckingham. The cast is almost equally divided between Americans and Brits, though, once again, the English have all the big roles -- unless you count Spacey.

WHAT "Richard III"

WHERE BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn, through March 4

INFO $30-$175; 718-636-4100; bam.org

BOTTOM LINE Substantial Shakespeare, spectacular Spacey