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Richard III
Roundhouse Spring 2008

Michael Boyd's admirable and exciting project of the Royal Shakespeare Company doing all eight Shakespearean history plays together with the same group of actors ends, alas, with a bit of a whimper rather than a bang.

Richard III is likely to be the most popular of the eight plays, and should be the easiest to do well. But some directorial decisions work against it. It doesn't fail - it's too good a play for anyone to completely mess up - but it is far from being as successful as it should.

One directorial error will particularly disturb those who come to this play from the earlier ones in the cycle.

One of the major strengths of this project, after all, has been the opportunity to follow the larger arc of the stories that transcend individual plays - to see, for example, how the forceful Queen Margaret of the Henry VI plays becomes the half-mad harridan of this one or, for that matter, to see the young Richard before he becomes the hero of his own play.

And director Boyd emphasised that continuity by casting the same actors in the roles from play to play, and by bringing back earlier characters as silent ghosts to haunt the later action.

But, while all the other plays in the cycle were done in period, Richard III is abruptly transformed into modern dress. The same actor we saw yesterday as the young Richard in doublet and hose is now wearing a suit; the battles that were fought with swords are replaced by commandos with machine guns.

Whatever 'relevance' or 'immediacy' the director and designer Tom Piper thought the change would bring is outweighed by the damage done to the unity and continuity of the whole.

But even for those who haven't been to the other plays, surely the imagined benefits of modern dress have long since been proven illusionary.

You don't have to be a purist to feel the gap when people talk of swords and brandish pistols, when Richard's foes are executed Mafia-style with a silenced gunshot to the back of the head, when his troops descend from a heard-but-not-seen helicopter overhead or when proof that the princes in the Tower are dead comes in the killer's digital camera.

And when the nightmare scene finds Richard writhing about in his Marks and Spencer underpants, something of the majesty and power of Shakespeare's drama has surely been lost.

The other serious directorial error lies in the characterisation of Richard. You can see in my review of the Henry VI plays that I had my doubts about Jonathan Slinger's portrayal of the young Richard as a bit of a buffoon and wondered then how it would carry into this play.

Well, the answer is very badly. Slinger continues to present Richard as comically clumsy and effeminate. His limp is a girlish skip, his laugh like the internalised giggle of a drunk, his attempts at jokes fall flat as often as not.

Yes, Richard does have a comic side, but it is the mordant wit of a superior malevolent intellect, not the inept clowning of a dolt. There is malevolence aplenty in this Richard, but there is no real menace - and without that, there is no play.

There isn't even much sense of Richard's power. The famous scene of wooing the Lady Anne despite her murderous hatred gives no evidence of his magnetism or sexual power. Hannah Barrie makes Anne just seem worn out by his relentlessness so she stops fighting, not won over in any way.

And in the parallel scene later with Queen Elizabeth, Ann Ogbomo makes her clearly the stronger fighter, so we don't believe for a moment that he wins.

It is partly because Richard is so weak that Richard Cordery (surely the unsung hero of the entire cycle, scoring in all his roles) makes Buckingham seem more than ever the dominant partner in their plotting or that Lex Shrapnel can make such an impression as Henry Tudor, who doesn't even appear until the last act.

Katy Stephens carries some of the strength we saw in the younger Margaret into her scenes of mad cursing here, and Maureen Beattie easily holds the moral high ground as Richard's mother.

But, while I would normally recommend any production of Richard III to a Shakespearean neophyte, this is one you can comfortably skip.

Gerald Berkowitz

For our reviews of other plays in the cycle, click on each title: Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V , Henry VI

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Review - Richard III - RSC Roundhouse 2008