Richard III (31 page)

How did you approach the technical problem of the scene with the Ghosts the night before the battle? It seems to require some theatrical equivalent of a cinematic split-screen effect—that maybe worked especially well on the wide, shallow stage of the Elizabethan Rose. How did you make it work in your space?

Alexander:
The fact that the whole of the action was set in a cathedral made it fairly obvious that by parking Richard and his tent stage-right and Richmond and his tent stage-left simultaneously, we were in the setting of a medieval Mystery Play with heaven on one side and hell’s mouth on the other. In fact, in a way, it was the culminating image of the whole scenic concept.

Piper:
We were working in a thrust stage so it made it very easy to divide the space with Richmond asleep downstage and Richard mid-stage. The Ghosts entered in a steady stream from double doors in the upstage tower, which dominated the space. Thus they encountered Richard first and then went on to Richmond, before exiting through the audience.

And for all the blood, the murders, the choreographed onstage fighting: I suppose there’s a basic choice between “stylization” (slow motion battles, red silk for blood) and “realism” (the clash of metal, lashings of mud and Kensington Gore): where did you aim to find yourselves on that spectrum?

Piper:
We were fairly realistic, and as it was contemporary we used guns, including a very brutal shot to the head in Pomfret. The mumming to the Mayor was a mock terrorist attack and Hastings’ head
was delivered in a clear plastic bag. The fights, however, were stylized, especially the final section in Bosworth, which involved all the Ghosts as abstract combatants. The final encounter between Richmond and Richard took place on a swiveling set of metal steps with Richard trapped at the top, firing rapidly to try and hit the whirling Richmond as he spun them around.

Most of Shakespeare’s history plays are ensemble pieces, but Richard is a huge solo part—he speaks a third of the entire play and has more than three times as many lines as anybody else. The role was clearly written to showcase the rising star of Richard Burbage. For a director, there must be an unusually difficult task of balancing the work that must be done with Richard and with the rest of the cast. Are there enough rewards for the other actors?

Alexander:
Yes. Buckingham, Anne, Clarence, and Margaret are all good parts, but it’s a very valid point; the play is unbalanced in that sense. It’s one of the reasons it needs careful cutting. Tony was always saying that Shakespeare learns later in his career how to give the central actors decent rests with large sections of the action in which they don’t appear. Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Antony, Cleopatra, Coriolanus, etc., all have a significant amount of time offstage. The physical demands on the actor playing Richard are huge, and if one sees it as a star vehicle then you certainly need a star who is a modest soul and a company person. A vain and self-centered actor would be death to company spirit—rather as Richard is death to those who try to support him.

Which murder did your Richard enjoy the most? And the least?

Beale:
I’ve answered that about the least with the princes. I don’t think he ever enjoys a murder to be honest. I think he thinks killing Clarence is quite funny. He never does the deed himself anyway, and it’s a more functional thing, getting rid of people who are in the way. I think he quite enjoys terrifying Hastings. I think he enjoys the terror in people’s faces, but as for the killing, I think that’s entirely functional.

Would you say it was physically the most demanding part you’ve ever played? Quite apart from the hunchback, the limp or whatever, he speaks one-third of the play, three times as much as anyone else, and doesn’t really get that extended fourth act feet-up-in-the-dressing-room-before-the-big-climax that even Hamlet and Lear are allowed. And then to go so quickly from the nightmare speech to the battle itself … how did you survive?!

Beale:
Well, I didn’t survive. It was physically exhausting, but I don’t know whether it is any more exhausting than Hamlet, or indeed Iago, which probably takes as much as Richard. I remember Sam [Mendes, the director] saying to me beforehand, “You must be careful, it’s a ball breaker.” Although I had prosthetics on my back and a raised shoe, inevitably I fed my body into the prosthetic. I did a run at The Other Place and then a twelve-week tour and I came to London and on the very first night I slipped my disc so badly I couldn’t move, and then had to have an operation. It was quite a serious injury and I was out for about three months. Funnily enough one of the best performances I think I gave of it was a week after I’d slipped the disc and I refused to admit that I was that badly injured, although I literally couldn’t walk! I had to stay on all fours in the wings and then pull myself up and get onto the stage and I did one performance, which was almost completely stationary, with people moved around me, and we didn’t do the fight obviously, I just fell over! But I was so angry that I think in a way it was one of the best performances that I gave of it.

Sir Richard Eyre was artistic director of Britain’s National Theatre from 1987 to 1997, where his Shakespearean productions included
Hamlet
with Daniel Day-Lewis and
King Lear
with Ian Holm. His 1990 production of
Richard III
,
with Ian McKellen in the title role, toured the world and its transposition of the play to a world suggestive of 1930s Fascism inspired the McKellen film version of 1996. Eyre reflects here on the play’s enduring political power
.

I came to know tyranny at first hand through visiting Romania. Over a period of nearly thirty years I watched their dictator, Ceaušescu, graduate from being a malign clown to a psychotic ogre. His
folies de grandeur
consisted of razing villages to the ground in order to rehouse peasants in tower blocks, sweeping aside boulevards because the streets from his residence to his office were insufficiently straight, building miles of preposterously baroque apartment blocks which echoed in concrete the lines of Securitate men standing beneath them, and led the eye toward a gigantic palace which made Stalin’s taste in architecture look restrained. They ran out of marble to clad the walls and the floors, and had to invent a process to make a synthetic substitute out of marble dust; and there was never enough gold for all the door handles of the hundreds of rooms, or the taps of the scores of bathrooms. It was a palace of Oz, built for a demented wizard, costing the lives of hundreds of building workers who, numbed by cold, fell from the flimsy scaffolding and were brushed away like rubble, to be laid out in a room reserved solely for the coffins of the expendable workforce. There was a photograph of Ceaušescu that showed only one ear, and there’s a Romanian saying that to have one ear is to be mad. So another ear was painstakingly painted on the official photograph. Such are the ways of great men.

The language of demagoguery in modern times has a remarkable consistency: Ceauescu, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and Bokassa shared a predilection for large banners, demonstrations and military choreography, and the same architectural virus; totalitarianism consistently distorts proportion by eliminating human scale. Mass becomes the only consideration in architecture, armies, and death. The rise of a dictator and the accompanying political thuggery are the main topics of Shakespeare’s
Richard III
, which could be said to be a handbook for tyrants—and for their victims. I directed the play with Ian McKellen as Richard in 1990 for the National Theatre and took it to its spiritual home in Bucharest early in 1991.

We have to keep rediscovering ways of doing Shakespeare’s plays. They don’t have absolute meanings. There is no fixed, frozen way of doing them. Nobody can mine a Shakespeare play and discover a “solution.” And to pretend that there are fixed canons of style, fashion, and taste is to ignore history. When there is talk of “classical acting,”
what is often meant is an acting style that instead of revealing the truth of a text for the present day, reveals the bombast of yesterday.

How do we present the plays in a way that is true to their own terms, and at the same time bring them alive for a contemporary audience? It’s very much easier to achieve this in a small space, and it’s no coincidence that most successful Shakespeare productions of recent years have been done in theaters seating a couple of hundred people at most, where the potency of the language isn’t dissipated by the exigencies of voice projection, and the problems of presentation—finding a physical world for the play—become negligible. It’s hard at one end of the spectrum to avoid latching on to a visual conceit which tidies up the landscape of a Shakespeare play, and. at the other end of the spectrum, to avoid imposing unity through a rigorously enforced discipline of verse-speaking. Verse-speaking should be like jazz: never on the beat, but before, after, or across it.

The life of the plays is in the language, not alongside it, or underneath it. Feelings and thoughts are released at the moment of speech. An Elizabethan audience would have responded to the pulse, the rhythms, the shapes, sounds, and above all meanings, within the consistent ten-syllable, five-stress lines of blank verse. They were an audience who listened. To a large extent we’ve lost that priority; nowadays we see before we hear. Verse drama places demands on the audience, but a greater demand still on the actors, habituated by naturalistic speech, and to private, introspective, emotional displays. “You should be able to feel the language,” says the poet and dramatist Tony Harrison. “To taste it, to conscript the whole body as well as the mind and the mouth to savour it.”

For a director, working with a designer can often be the most satisfying and enjoyable part of a production. You advance slowly, day by day, in a kind of amiable dialectic, helped by sketches, anecdotes, photographs, and reference books. The play starts as a tone—of voice, or color, and a shape as formless as the shadow of a sheet on a washing line; through reading and discussion and illustration, it acquires a clear and palpable shape. When I started working on
Richard III
with Ian McKellen and the designer, Bob Crowley, I had no definite plan about the setting. We never sought to establish literal equivalents between medieval and modern tyrants. We worked sim
ply, day by day, reading the play aloud to each other, and refusing to jump to conclusions.

Some actors start with trying to establish the details of how the character will look, some with how they will think or feel. It was said of Olivier that he started with the shoes; with Ian McKellen it’s the face and the voice. I have a postcard he sent me when we were working on
Richard III
—a droll cartoon of a severe face, recognizable as his own, with sharply receding hair, an arrow pointing to a patch of alopecia; at the throat is a military collar, above the shoulder the tip of a small hump. He is a systematic, fastidious, and exacting actor; each word is picked up and examined for its possible meanings, which are weighed, assessed, discarded, or incorporated. In rehearsals he is infinitely self-aware, often cripplingly so. His waking, and perhaps sleeping, dreams are of how he will appear onstage—his position, his spatial relationships with the other actors. But in performance that inhibition drops away like a cripple’s crutches and he is pure performer. All the detail that has been so exhaustively documented becomes a part of an animate whole. In sport, in a great performance, there must always be an element of risk, of danger. The same must be true of the theater. I wouldn’t say there is not a good or even effective actor without this characteristic, but there is certainly no celebrated one.

As Ian, Bob, and I talked, a story emerged: Richard’s occupation’s gone. He’s a successful soldier who, in the face of great odds, has welded a life together in which he has a purpose, an identity as a military man. His opening speech describes his depression at the conclusion of war, his bitterness at the effeminacy of peace. He’s a man raging with unconsummated energy, needing a world to “bustle” in. This hunger to fill the vacuum left by battle is the driving force of the play. It has a deep resonance for me. When I made
Tumbledown
, a film about the Falklands War, I saw this sense of unfulfilled appetite at first hand in people who had fought in the war and were unable to come to terms with peace. The experience of battle is a profound distillation of fear, danger, and exhilaration; nothing in peacetime will ever match it, and those who are affected by it are as traumatized as those who have been wounded, who at least have the visible signs of
trauma to show for it. Soldiers are licensed to break the ultimate taboo against killing; some of them get the habit.

Richard has had to fight against many odds; he is the youngest son, coming after two very strong, dominant, assertive brothers—and he is deformed, “unfinished.” His eldest brother, Edward, is a profligate, and the spectacle of his brother’s success with women is a sharp thorn in his flesh. The age, no less than today, worshipped physical prowess, and Richard is accustomed, though certainly not inured, to pejorative terms like “bunch-backed toad”; he has heard them all his life. We know that he is deformed, but the text repeatedly tells us he is a successful professional soldier. We have to reconcile the two demands of the text. Olivier’s interpretation has become central to the mythology of the play, but the deformity that he depicts has never seemed to me plausibly compatible with what Shakespeare wrote. Ian McKellen played Richard with a small hump, he had chronic alopecia, and he was paralyzed down one side of his body. These three handicaps taken together were sufficient to account for all the abuse he attracts and [yet he could] still serve as a professional soldier. Experience shows that even slight deformities are enough to inspire repulsion; modern reactions to disability haven’t changed very much in this respect.