Richard III (26 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
In England, meanwhile, William Charles Macready attempted to restore Shakespeare’s text:
Though he used Cibber’s adaptation, this was a Richard more Shakespearian than most, and his own briefly performed adaptation of Shakespeare, while not successful, demonstrated his aims. His Richard was intellectually supple, witty, proud, and commanding. He was less bitter than Kean, full of an organizing energy, with a passionate enjoyment of his vengeance. The performance was thus witty and controlled, with much evidence of suppressed power.
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Henry Irving was praised for finally eliminating Cibber in his production at the Lyceum in 1877. He managed to restore even more of Shakespeare’s text in a subsequent revival of 1896. Gone with Cibber’s text, though, was his fundamental conception of the role and Irving was blamed for this change of approach. As a reviewer explained in the
Athenaeum:
All that is conventional in tragedy is gone, leaving us musing whether after all we were wise in demanding its removal … We have no “sawing of the air with your hand thus” [
Hamlet
, 3.2.4–5], and we have no search for the flea in the actor’s bosom, as was irreverently described a favourite gesture of Charles Kean, Macready, and Phelps. We have, on the contrary, a polished presentment of Court manners, in which nothing offends and is as nearly as possible real. Where, however, is tragedy? It is gone. Richard III is not now a tragic role. It is what is conventionally called “a character part.” Very fine is some of the acting, and the character of Richard is charged with a ferocity that is impressive and we dare say original. We are, however, never scorched or electrified. We are gratified, tickled, amused.
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The old-style melodrama was still in evidence, for example in John Barrymore’s 1920 performance at the Plymouth Theater in New York, a production which incorporated even more of
3 Henry VI
than Cibber had done. The show lasted until one o’clock in the morning, but still had a rapturous reception. Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic in London in 1937 offered, by contrast, an ironic modern production. As the London
Times
reviewer explained:
Mr. Emlyn Williams might have attempted the difficult return to full-blooded stage tradition and sought to carry conviction by storm. Instead he wisely took oblique means to the same end. By giving Richard a humorous relish of his own excesses he did what he could to prevent the audience from smiling at them in the wrong way … if we were amused, so in his own devilish way was the royal murderer. The actor had cleverly outflanked our criticism of a demoded tragic villain, and at the same time had contrived to make of him an arresting theatrical figure—a figure of stealthy, cat-like cunning, with more perhaps of the poisoner than the soldier in his composition but formidably, relentlessly dominant and consistently exciting.
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The Second World War changed attitudes to the play and saw the start of productions which related more or less obliquely to fascism. Donald Wolfit confessed that his study of Richard in the 1942 production at the Strand Theater had been influenced by Hitler.
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The most famous postwar Richard, indeed the most famous Richard of all time thanks to his later film version, was Laurence Olivier. His acclaimed performance reconciled different facets of Richard, as the critic J. C. Trewin recognized:
A Richard must make his theatrical effects boldly; at the same time he must expose the man’s brain. It is the marriage of intellect and dramatic force, of bravura and cold reason, which so distinguishes Mr. Laurence Olivier’s study at the New Theatre.
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Kenneth Tynan analyzed Olivier’s performance in detail:
From a sombre and uninventive production this brooding, withdrawn player leapt into life, using the circumambient
gloom as his springboard. Olivier’s Richard eats into the memory like acid into metal, but the total impression is one of lightness and deftness. The whole thing is taken at a baffling speed when one recalls how perfectly, even finically, it is articulated: it is Olivier’s trick to treat each speech as a kind of plastic vocal mass, and not as a series of sentences whose import must be precisely communicated to the audience: the method is impressionistic. He will seize on one or two phrases in each paragraph which, properly inserted, will unlock its whole meaning: the rest he discards, with exquisite idleness. To do this successfully he needs other people on the stage with him: to be ignored, stared past, or pushed aside during the lower reaches, and gripped and buttonholed when the wave rises to its crested climax. For this reason Olivier tends to fail in soliloquy—except when, as in the opening speech of Richard, it is directed straight at the audience, who then become his temporary foils … Olivier the actor needs reactors: just as electricity,
in vacuo
, is unseen, unfelt, and powerless.
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Actors since the 1950s have inevitably felt the burden of Olivier’s performance as they have sought to offer their own representations of the role. Despite this a number of actors have succeeded in thoughtful, original, and exciting productions of the play; for example, Antony Sher in Bill Alexander’s 1984 production, Simon Russell Beale in that of Sam Mendes, and Ian McKellen for Richard Eyre at the National Theatre in London in 1992.
The play was edited to form part of Peter Hall and John Barton’s radical analysis of power politics,
The Wars of the Roses
, for the RSC in 1963, a production that received great acclaim and that was shown (in much abridged form) on television.
David Wheeler’s production at the Cort Theater, New York, starring Al Pacino in 1979, received mixed reviews; Pacino’s quest for the essence of the character was further developed in his idiosyncratic film
Looking for Richard
(1996), in which he explores the text and the rehearsal process in a series of workshops while attempting to relate the plot to the world around him. The Rustaveli Company of Soviet Georgia created a highly politicized production in 1979–80.
Directed by Robert Sturua, it received rave reviews, especially for physical inventiveness of a kind that also characterized a production by the Odeon Theatre of Bucharest that toured internationally in 1994, making particularly strong use of masks suggestive of Richard’s animal crest, the boar. In 2003 Barry Kyle directed the play at the Globe Theatre with an all-female cast. Kathyrn Hunter’s engagingly “ironic and humorously amoral Richard”
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was generally admired, as was Linda Bassett’s powerful Queen Margaret.
The most notable films have been Laurence Olivier’s (1955) and Ian McKellen’s (1995). Olivier’s was set in the Middle Ages and is theatrical in its use of long shots, which give it a static feel. The diction, especially Olivier’s famously clipped tones, now seems dated. For the McKellen film, which was developed out of Richard Eyre’s stage production for the National Theatre in London, director Richard Loncraine updated the period and set, relating the play to the 1936 British abdication crisis and the rise of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Both movies open spectacularly and employ what film critics call the “forbidden look”: in soliloquy, Olivier and McKellen stare straight into the camera, engaging the audience in a similar manner to the stage actor speaking directly into the auditorium.
Richard: A Discovery of Evil
In the last fifty years
Richard III
in performance has come to symbolize evils particularly relevant to our times. When performed as part of a history play cycle involving the three parts of
Henry VI
, the play and the character’s significance become part of a wider examination of sociopolitical concerns. When performed in isolation, the character of Richard becomes dominant, and the play usually delves into psychological territory encompassing modern beliefs on the nature of evil in man. In creating the early RSC landmark production
The Wars of the Roses
in 1963, directors Peter Hall and John Barton edited and rewrote the three parts of
Henry VI
so they could be played in conjunction with
Richard III
as a trilogy.
Richard III
was subsequently performed as part of a sequence involving the
Henry VI
plays in 1988, 2001, and 2006–08.
The Wars of the Roses
, strongly influenced by the politically charged, “alienating,” “epic theater” of Bertolt Brecht and the work of the Berliner Ensemble, took the play away from an acting tradition which had revolved around the star actor/director. It was a conscious repudiation of the “Olivier tradition,” which, in the words of theater historian Hugh Richmond, “was largely marked by an extremely naive moral structure supposedly excusing a delight in the portrait of melodramatic evil incarnate.” “We can,” Richmond continues, “find a far greater range of sociological interests in Hall’s production than any before it.”
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Peter Hall’s examination of the tragedy of kingship in the program note pointed to the dilemma of whether a ruler can remain moral when the instincts which placed him in a position of power are essentially selfish and amoral, animalistic:
Man in action is basically an animal … To hunt better, men unite into packs. Then the man who kills the beast becomes the king, and must kill his rivals to remain king … The tension between man the animal in action, murdering to protect, or lying to save, and the moral man trying to rule by a developed human ethic is what makes history tragic. I believe this is still the dilemma of power.
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Short in stature and boyish in appearance, Ian Holm cut a remarkably different figure from the likes of Olivier and Christopher Plummer, who played the part for the RSC in 1961. Critics seemed to miss the point of this new-look Richard, commenting on how his physicality diminished his domination of the play. This deliberate choice on the part of the director emphasized that Richard was only one in a long line of pretenders to the throne. What the designer referred to as the “great steel cage of war” portrayed the battle between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians as a disintegration of the country from feudal to fascist, its protagonists crushed or shaped by the processes of history, and the warring ethos of their families: “Richard, once on the throne [rules] by police-state methods. The barons supporting him are dressed in the black helmets and jackboots of bully-boy Fascists and tramping in unison to his every command.”
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Connecting
Richard III
with the major experience of evil in political form during the twentieth century—the rise of Fascism in Germany, resulting in the election of Hitler and the horrors which followed, demonstrated how the play could be taken away from medieval melodrama and conferred with contemporary relevance. It also pointed to a more nihilistic vision of the play, reminding the audience while they were watching that, although this tyrant was stopped, many more were to follow who were far worse.
In 1974 Barry Kyle’s production at The Other Place studio theater took place in “an asylum with all the characters dressed in costumes vaguely reminiscent of concentration camps.”
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Ian Richardson, who played Richard, was fascinated by what he called
The schizophrenia … in the very last soliloquy, the nightmare one where he seems to be two people talking to each other. The one is some horrid, monstrous spectre, the other what is left of the good soul of Richard, if anything is left at all. Any examination of that soliloquy will show that Richard’s mind has completely gone, in much the same way as some of the monsters of our own lifetime—Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin all spring to mind. This is total schizophrenia born out of megalomania.
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In order to make the psychology behind his Richard something recognizable, Henry Goodman (2003) found a parallel for Richard’s deranged mind with modern fictional serial killers, such as Hannibal Lecter. Similarly, actor Antony Sher described how he looked at the behavior of recent real-life serial killers in order to get a handle on Richard’s completely amoral behavior. Dennis Nilsen was a British serial killer who lived in London; during a murderous spree which started in 1978 and lasted five years, he killed more than a dozen men in his home and disposed of the bodies in his garden, attic, and other rooms about his house. Reading up on the case in preparation to play Richard, Sher became fascinated by the banal normality of elements of the psychopath’s character sitting alongside the perversity.
Richard’s “unnatural” tendencies are linked in the text with animal imagery. In Elizabethan times man was held to be the highest of creatures and exhibiting animalistic behavior was seen as a fall from grace, a sin against the order of the universe, which rendered the sinner somehow subhuman. In Shakespeare, characters who upset the natural order of things, whether turning against their family members or against the state, are often referred to as predatory or poisonous animals. Richard is referred to as a “poisonous bunch-backed toad,” a “bottled spider.” In productions of
Richard III
these beliefs about “unnatural” behavior are embodied in Richard’s deformity, physically demonstrating his twisted nature and his closeness to the animal world. In 1970 Norman Rodway repulsed many a critic by his resemblance to swine: “He lumbers onstage at Stratford, blinking at the sun: his great pig-head appears to have been crew-cut, and some animal’s skin is slung over his hump.”
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Antony Sher (1984) paid more attention to the spiderlike qualities of Richard as he wove his web of deception around the court: “The central image of his Richard he built on the ‘bottled spider,’ the assumption being that here was a creature too venomous to be set free.”
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The most dominant characteristic of the Sher portrayal was his use of crutches to give Richard an extraordinary mobility: “huge black arachnid-legs which flew him across the stage in giant leaps, and which he used as extension limbs to fight off attackers, beat lackeys and, in one famous moment, lift Lady Anne’s skirt and probe between her legs.”
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Dressed entirely in black throughout most of the production he appeared for the opening soliloquy like a black spider emerging through the finely wrought gothic screen which covered the stage, from the tombs of the dead, which lay behind in darkness. The
Sunday Times
critic described the effect: