Authors: William Shakespeare
Richard III (28 page)
The curse on Alan Howard’s Richard (1980) created a mental disturbance from which he never recovered: “His mother’s curse leaves him so shattered that he plays the next scene with Elizabeth in earnest, as though he might really find in her a new mother. From then on he is on the edge of madness.”
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The duchess’ lack of motherly love has an impact on how Richard relates to other women in the play. The “wooing” scene of Lady Anne reveals much but, often heavily cut in performance, is a particularly difficult scene to make convincing. Actor Anton Lesser explains:
Richard must not be seen by Anne to be “acting.” The more she is confused about how genuine his feelings are, the more
unbalancing it will be for her … Richard bases his strategy on attack: everything she accuses him of he accepts, with the proviso that everything he has done he has done for her. He makes her, quite specifically, an “accessory” … producing a sense of guilt … she is forced into the belief that it was her body, her physicality, all that she as a devout Christian is trying to rise above, which provoked his behaviour. The idea we were aiming for was that guilt about her own sexuality, rather than any particular attraction toward his, is what governs her behaviour here.
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Lisa Stevenson, who played Lady Anne in 2003, found a truth to the scene through this guilt, and through the belief in the centrality of cursing to the structure of the play:
A lot of women suffer from guilt when they’re grieving … So when Richard comes along and tells Anne that it is her fault that her husband and father-in-law died, she was so vulnerable that on some weird level she believed it. I think that’s why she doesn’t kill him … I had an idea for the play that the sickness might be pregnancy-related … when she returns as a ghost, she says “thy wife, that wretched Anne … That never slept a quiet hour with thee.” I think Richard has been raping her and I think that it’s been horrific … Her prophecy about Richard’s marriage comes true: “If ever he have wife, let her be made / … miserable.” And she says “If ever he have child, abortive be it / Prodigious and untimely brought to life.” I had an idea that I was going to know that I was pregnant and the baby (Richard’s baby) was going to have died in my womb, but still be there, which would lead to terrible blood poisoning.
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In other productions Lady Anne has been portrayed as slightly more resistant and knowing than the text suggests. Although Aislin McGuckin (2000) put up “a particularly dignified resistance to his wooing,” she seemed “grimly aware that in doing so she has signed her own death warrant.”
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Annabel Apsion as Lady Anne in 1992 “calls his bluff to the extent of actually nicking his proffered breast
with his sword. For a split second, Richard is disoriented by the drawn blood, but then his cold, appraising eyes flick back to Anne, keenly monitoring how this upset may work to his advantage.”
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However, there have also been productions where Lady Anne’s desperate state has made her a more willing conquest. Of Terry Hands’ 1980 production one critic wrote:
“Did you not kill this King?” “I grant ye.” I have never heard this cheeky exchange without it raising a laugh until last night when it was lost in the high-speed passionate crescendo between [Alan] Howard and Sinead Cusack, which is played toward her capitulation with the drive of an orgasm.
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Lady Anne (Sinead Cusack) … throws off her black gown at the moment of her submission to reveal a warm red dress beneath.
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For his production in 1970 Hands’ direction suggested that
her attraction is a kind of kinkiness … One moment she is self-righteously whacking him over the back with a large cross, in a naïve attempt to exorcise him; the next, she is giggling and dabbling lips with him, notwithstanding the corpse of her husband nearby. The hand-maiden of the Lord is abruptly revealed as the Devil’s concubine.
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In 1984 and 2001 Queen Elizabeth became the prime target of Richard’s misogynistic rage. The
Times Literary Supplement
reviewer of Michael Boyd’s production (2001) commented:
His wooing of her—as mother-in-law, rather than as wife … seems almost more of a showdown than the one soon to ensue on Bosworth Field … At first traumatized into shaking incoherence by her husband’s death, she discovers reserves of strength and eloquence that make her, theatrically, Richard’s most potent antagonist. As a tall, intelligent, determined woman of non-royal birth, she embodies all that Richard finds most threatening.
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In 1984 the tussle between the two of them was played as more physical than verbal. The critic Chris Hassel wrote in the
Shakespeare Quarterly
that
[Antony] Sher is brutal with Elizabeth from the start. He forces her face to him with his sceptre. He pulls her around by the bodice to make her face him again on the throne. Once he throws her to the ground. But she is not without her own weapons against this intimidation. She has those withering words of irony … also … a venomous kiss for Richard at the end, from which he recoils as from an adder’s sting.
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Like a primeval spirit conjured by both grief past and grief to come, Margaret emerges as the embodiment of female revenge. Her curses on the court prophesy the play’s events and, almost too late, the distressed wives and mothers desire knowledge of her powers in order to stop Richard. Margaret’s evocation of ancient tribalism is often emphasized in modern productions by representations of witchcraft. In 2001, Fiona Bell, who also played Queen Margaret in the three parts of
Henry VI
, carried the bones of her dead son around with her in a sack, taking them out and arranging them as a human skeleton when conjuring her curses on the court. Penny Downie, who played Margaret in 1988, explained how
one could see her as this ageless figure of moral nemesis, who brings on to the stage the entire Wars of the Roses and who has herself been purified by suffering to play this final moral role … People have to hear the curse if it is to work … Like an aborigine pointing the bone—you have to believe you are going to die if you are going to die. And the fact is that they all do believe in these curses, none more so than Richard.
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In 1992, Cherry Morris as Margaret “intoned from a chalk circle,”
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and appeared at the death of each of Richard’s victims:
The almost ritual manner in which all of Margaret’s prophetic curses are fulfilled is brought out by the simple but powerful
way [Sam] Mendes has her stand aloft each time in one of the doors of the back-screen and reintone the curse over the last speeches of Richard’s various victims.
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At the battle of Bosworth Field, when Richard was on the point of victory, the appearance of Margaret “mesmerises him and seals his doom.”
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It is interesting that Shakespeare doesn’t write “The Battle,” as he does in other History plays. He writes 12 or 14 pages on the night before the Battle of Bosworth and about a page on the battle. Which means that, in a way, Richard’s battle is lost the night before it has begun.
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Traditional religious imagery of good and evil often permeates modern productions, making powerful statements on the nature of providence. For Adrian Noble’s 1988 production Anton Lesser described how:
The goblet in which Ratcliffe brought the wine … has something of symbolic potency for Richard in his dream, so that the cup of wine becomes the communion cup, the blood of Christ … here is a symbol of retribution, deliverance, sin, forgiveness, ceremony, final judgement … when he snaps back into consciousness, and realizes it was all a dream, the power of all those curses hits him: “I shall despair”—and die. The impact of that was increased, we felt, by having Richard also hear what is said to Richmond … During [the soliloquy that follows the dream] he continues verbally the action of stabbing himself, which in our production, had followed his mother’s curse. He pins himself like a butterfly to a board … he cannot escape the truth … It is as though a veil has been taken away from Richard; he has been in a state of deep illusion, not just through the dream but through his life, and the curtain has now been drawn back and he looks in the mirror and sees every line on his own face—like the picture of Dorian Gray.
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David Troughton described something similar in his 1995 rendition of the role:
Alone at last, Richard attempts a final reconciliation with the audience and God. I take both the bread and the wine and set up a simple altar on the rubble-strewn stage, using my cross-handled dagger as a primitive crucifix. But instead of finding a restored friendship and possible redemption in this act of the Last Sacrament, on drinking the blood of Christ I conjure up a manifestation of the audience’s hatred; the ghosts of all Richard’s past victims who sit beside him at a large oblong table, surrounding the beatific Richmond, praying for Richard’s defeat and the future King Henry’s success. The image of Jesus and his disciples looms large but this time it is Richard, the devil, and not Richmond, the Son of God, who has certainly had his Last Supper.
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This approach has continuity with William Hogarth’s famous painting of David Garrick at the same moment, in which the crucifix is prominent.
The Ghosts are also effective representatives of the force of providence. In 1984 they emerged from behind four large tombs which dominated the gothic set:
Each ghost holds a single candle. Smoke swirls around their feet … Some, of course, have been buried there since Tewkesbury. Each prophesies with the stillness of truth; each remains on stage as the others appear. Occasionally all echo key words of prayer and prophecy, like participants in a supernatural ritual.
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Michael Boyd in 2001, and again when his production was revived and adapted in 2006–08, populated his stage with the ghosts of the dead, “emphasising the mad futility of the endless cycle of revenge killings, which only ends with the arrival of the future Henry VII at the end of Richard III.”
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The Shakespearean scholar Barbara Hodgdon provides an excellent account:
At Richard Ill’s coronation … the huge upstage doors opened, revealing a procession of ghostly victims … Among them … was Margaret, leading her dead son, and then Henry VI, robed in white, entered to prostrate himself on the floor, hands outstretched as though crucified. Last of all was York, and it was he who proclaimed “God save King Richard, of that name the third!” echoed by the others … the line between the dead and the living began to blur: apparitions all, caught momentarily in the “bottled spider’s” web … [Following the battle and Richard’s demise]… With Richard’s body lying alone on stage, all drew back: standing in the exits and aisles, they watched him rise … and prepare to leave. But as he turned upstage to go, the doors of the fortress opened: there stood Henry VI, all in white. For an instant, the two faced one another, double faces of kingship: Richard, symptomatic of the tyranny of the individual … Henry, his complete opposite … Richard’s mantra—“I am myself alone”—seemed to apply equally to them both.
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The Ghosts almost always appear in the final battle in order to oversee the working out of the curse, and sometimes to actively assist in Richard’s execution. In 1980, Terry Hands “pull[ed] out all the stops at the end with the ghosts of all Richard’s victims lining up at Bosworth and crowding round him in clusters while Richmond puts the sword in … it certainly gives you the sense that England has been purged of evil.”
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In 1998:
Instead of visiting Richard in a dream in his tent on the eve of Bosworth, the ghosts of his casualties wait to intervene and distract him with counsels of despair in his climactic sword fight with Jo Stone-Fewing’s squeaky-clean Richmond. The spectres of the young princes jump with demonic playfulness on Richard’s shoulder and pop up between his legs. The transpositions give graphic emphasis to the idea that it is the recognition of what he has done, rather than Richmond that defeats him.
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Terry Hands’ first (1970) production omitted the final battle, and instead Richard was “encircled by ghosts of his murdered victims, who perform a dance of death”
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and then lead him off stage.
In 1995 the Ghosts of Richard’s victims had occupied a specific area of the stage during the production. At the end of the play the battle again was omitted and Richard was not murdered but, aware of the inevitability of his death, put down his sword and made his way to the Ghosts’ area, watched by them from above. After Richmond’s final speech he gave him a slow ironic handclap.
The Actor: Simon Russell Beale
, born in 1961, studied at Cambridge University. He came to prominence as a Shakespearean actor with the RSC in the early 1990s, when he played Thersites in
Troilus and Cressida
, Ariel in
The Tempest
, and Richard III in the production discussed here, which toured the country in an intimate, mobile auditorium set up in sports halls in towns that generally lacked access to professional theater. All three productions were directed by Sam Mendes, with whom Beale has continued to work in Shakespearean and other classical roles, including Iago at London’s National Theatre and Malvolio at Mendes’ Donmar Warehouse. Also a notable Hamlet at the National, he is especially admired for the intelligence of his verse-speaking.
The Director: Bill Alexander
, born in 1948, trained as a theater director at the Bristol Old Vic. He joined the RSC as an assistant director in 1977 and then became a resident director in 1980. His reputation was strongly established through three productions starring Sir Antony Sher:
Tartuffe
and a play about its author Molière, and then the
Richard III
of 1984, which he talks about here. The experience of being in this famous production, which transferred to London’s Barbican Theatre in 1985 and then toured internationally the following year, was recorded by Sher in his book
The Year of the King
.
From 1992 to 2000, Bill Alexander was artistic director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.