Richard III

by William Shakespeare

  The sheer quantity of “backstory” is a problem for the audience of this play, isn’t it? Did you have particular ways of dealing with that? There’s a venerable tradition, going back to Colley Cibber in the eighteenth century, of importing large chunks from Henry VI Part 3.

  Alexander: I think Richard III stands alone well as a story even when detached from the three parts of Henry VI. There would perhaps be an argument for cutting large chunks, or indeed all, of the Queen Margaret scenes, as the play does need cutting anyway, but even in those the vividness of the psychological conflict carries its own explanatory narrative. He changed a lot as a writer between Henry VI and Richard III and it has a completely different feel from the earlier plays. It stands alone without great knowledge of the backstory. Henry VI 1, 2, and 3 are Chronicle plays, almost pageantlike in their parade of incident. Richard III, on the other hand, is on the way to becoming a full-blown psychodrama of the type finally perfected with Macbeth a decade later. It doesn’t really feel like the fourth part of a tetralogy. But it is a strange hybrid in some ways with some scenes that verge on the ritualistic.

  Piper: The set was the same but the characters were now in a stylized modern dress. For those actors who were playing the same character as they had in Henry VI Part 3, I tried to create a look that reflected their period costumes in silhouette and color, yet were contemporary in feel. So, for example, Edward and Elizabeth end Henry VI Part 3 in white coronation robes, and in Richard III they were both dressed in long cream coats. Some characters, like Margaret, we deliberately left in a broken-down version of their period look from Henry VI. As we had the same actress playing both the young, sexy Margaret in Henry VI Part I and the old Margaret in Richard III, it was a way of suggesting that she had aged, without applying prosthetics—she became a more stylized, mythic character. The great advantage of doing the tetralogy of plays together is that the backstory is so much clearer, and the audience have seen how Richard’s personality has been forged in the brutality of the Wars of the Roses. Margaret’s cycles of curses, and Richard’s hatred of her, have a greater resonance when you have seen her stab his father York in the back.

  What was the journey that you went on with regard to Richard’s relationship with Buckingham? That’s crucial, isn’t it?

  Alexander: Yes, it certainly is a central relationship. Our starting point was to make the audience believe it would last. Or could last. We have to believe in Richard’s capacity to generate a sense of security in someone who thinks of themselves as a friend. Most of his immediate male colleagues seem to regard him as loyal, honest, funny, and friendly. Most of them seem to actually like him as he is so effective at portraying himself as one of the blokes. A good egg. Only the women suspect him. Only the women ever refer to his deformity. From the assumption that Buckingham was an ambitious politician we wanted to go one stage further and have him regard Richard as not only trustworthy but innocent, and therefore potentially gullible. We imagined that it was at the back of Buckingham’s mind that he may be able to double-cross Richard in the future.

  Beale: In our production Buckingham was smooth, educated; a class political act with a class political brain. In a way he was the brains behind the operation. One of my favorite moments in the play was the scene when the princes return to London. I was waiting there with balloons for them, and the Prince of Wales says of the Tower, “Did Julius Caesar build that place, my lord?” Buckingham answers, but in our version “my lord” went to me. Richard gave a face to suggest “I don’t know and I care less.” Buckingham had to step in and reply. In other words, Richard’s political instinct was to do with a deep-seated psychological need to prove himself, but with no real political sophistication behind it. It was just brute desire. Whereas Buckingham was much more subtle. He has the idea of pretending to be religious, he’s the PR man, he can spin. Of course what is so fantastic about it is that in the end brute force wins.

  5. Simon Russell Beale (right) as a sinisterly jovial Richard with balloons for the princes.

  When I was crowned, I was very keen that Richard should want to make it a fabulous occasion. Originally I wore very obvious makeup, because I’d read that George VI had to wear makeup and that these were very staged events. The makeup was cut eventually, but Richard was dressed in a glorious, very long blue cloak and as he went toward the throne he got tangled in the cloak and fell. The sheer biting humiliation of that sent him into a fury. The person he reached for was Buckingham, and quite precisely, because he had to rely on Buckingham to help him up, that meant that he had to go. That was the immediate psychological reaction to having been humiliated in front of everybody—that he would have to get rid of the man who helped him. That was a mini-version of the bigger version, which is that he had to be got rid of anyway as he’d served his purpose and become too dangerous. There is a part of Buckingham’s psychology which is that help is humiliation in the political sphere.

  And the development of Richard’s language, especially in soliloquy? Is there a huge change as the play unfolds, beginning from the astonishing confidence of the opening monologue and culminating in the fragmentation of the nightmare before the battle?

  Alexander: Absolutely. The language reflects the change from theatrical and impish self-confidence to terrified self-awareness. It also reflects a change in his relationship with the audience, from confiding in a huge crowd of assumed admirers to a deserted man, bereft of an audience, with no one to talk to but himself; trying to find the feedback that once sustained him but finding only his own echo.

  Beale: He doesn’t soliloquize after his crowning, except for that last battle scene. He starts with this fantastic bravado, this fantastic relationship with the audience, and as soon as he’s crowned and especially, and this in my mind is the turning point for Richard, after the murder of the children, from then on he simply does not. He has a line after the Elizabeth scene, which is almost muttered to himself. I think it is always fascinating with Shakespeare when people stop soliloquizing. Hamlet stops after the boat. He doesn’t need his friends in the audience anymore. He’s gone to a different place. Iago stops simply because things get too busy. He can barely speak to us in the first place because he is spinning a whole load of lies that he doesn’t believe either. Richard stops because the crown is not what he expected it to be and he doesn’t know how to cope with that. And then you have the death of the children. He can kill grown-ups in this play. Most grown-ups seem prepared to kill any other grown-up, they all seem to be on that level of ruthlessness, but you don’t kill children. Even the Murderer says this is beyond the pale. I had this package brought on, which I’d based on [the soap opera] Coronation Street actually. When Stan Ogden died, Hilda Ogden got his glasses and his remaining bits and bobs, the last bit of him if you like, in a brown paper packet delivered to her house and she opened it over the credits with no music. It was a fantastically moving performance. I wanted to do something like that. In our production Richard received a brown paper packet with the boys’ pajamas in it and he smelled the pajamas, which smelled of talc and children. That I think is the moment when he switches off. He has no desire or need to communicate anymore to people outside the play. And so consequently that last soliloquy at Bosworth is fiendishly difficult and also comes at slightly the wrong time. I can understand why people cut it because that late on is the last moment you want a soliloquy. It’s a completely different beast.

  6. Jonathan Slinger as Richard in Michael Boyd’s production.

  Richard loves playacting, doesn’t he? As in the scene with the prayer-book. Presumably that dramatic self-consciousness is one of the keys to his charisma in the theater?

  Alexander: Richard loves acting because he has fully absorbed the idea that one may smile and smile and be a villain. It seems amusing and hilarious to him how easy it is to dupe people, to experience up close their vanity leading directly to their gullibility. This dramatic self-consciousness makes him charismatic to audiences because he realizes they are more entertai
ned by audacious, immoral, and downright wicked behavior than they would be by someone spouting pieties and lecturing them on goodness or the art of sanctity. I wanted Tony to think of the audience as one thousand selves, or an audience of Richard fans, near clones needing only that particular soliloquy to be perfect clones: not talking to himself but to a mass of near-selves close to the perfect him. But it withers to horrifying loneliness with “I am I” and “When I die no man will pity me.” Charisma is nothing without love.

  Beale: Less so than the question implies. He wasn’t a very good playactor in the religious scene in my version. I think he can don a persona, as he does with Anne, but I don’t think the Richard that I played was particularly conscious of playacting. He just adapted himself to the situation that he was in and the objective that he needed to achieve. I think he believes things from the moment he has said them. I don’t remember playacting being particularly important. He liked his relationship with the audience. He liked being able to achieve something in public view, which I suppose is playacting in a way. He liked the audience to see how the cogs were moving.

  The initial setup of the wooing of Lady Anne seems unpromising: Richard has stabbed her first husband (Edward Prince of Wales) to death in Henry VI Part 3 and now he’s courting her over the corpse of her father-in-law (Henry VI), whom he’s also killed. And yet he wins her over. Did your rehearsal process reveal the secret of his success?

  Alexander: He makes her believe he loves her and, despite everything, she’s moved by that. He makes her believe he’s a good man and misunderstood. Besides, these are dangerous times and she needs a powerful protector.

  Beale: No! I don’t think I ever cracked that one. I know Annabelle Apsion, who played Lady Anne, felt uncomfortable a lot of the time, both when I played it and when Ciaran Hinds took over from me after I slipped a disc in my back. I don’t know what the secret of it is. It was always the scene that was the most difficult for me. It doesn’t play to my particular strengths. If I were a sexier actor perhaps it would, but I couldn’t really use that part of the man’s armory in my dealings with her. I also think there is some mystery there, that I’m sure a lot of Richards have unlocked, but that I found very hard indeed. I was in Milton Keynes [a commuter town in the English Midlands] and somebody suggested playing it extremely slowly, against all the technical rules, which perhaps we should have tried. But I can’t pretend I ever got that one.

  The women eventually play a big part in bringing Richard down: there’s a definite shift in the power structure when his mother (the Duchess of York) and sister-in-law (Queen Elizabeth) gang up on him in the fourth act. Did that feel like a turning point to you?

  Alexander: The trinity of women, Anne, Margaret, and Elizabeth, are a very, very potent presence in the play, so you have no choice but to make them a strong focus in any production. The fact that they all initially see through him in a way the men apparently don’t offers him an intriguing challenge the men don’t present. He defeats Margaret simply by giving voice to what all the men feel. He turns Anne by the brilliance of his acting and survives the encounter with Elizabeth through pure determination, although you can feel the strain that he has put himself under gradually taking effect.

  Beale: The most important scene in the whole play was for me the one with Elizabeth. I had this feeling that it is Richard at his most genuine and desperate, and that is why it doesn’t work for him. This is a man who is tired, he’s older, kingship isn’t as much fun as he thought it would be. He’s on the road, halfway through the campaign, and he meets a woman who is the key to stability and he genuinely wants it. And when he says about marrying her daughter, “It cannot be avoided but by this; / It will not be avoided but by this,” it is absolutely a genuine statement. There is no other answer that he can see out of the mess that they have got themselves into. What she does is something that he’s never thought about, which is to talk about grief. And to say, “Do you realize that there are parents up and down this country who are weeping for their dead children, and children who are weeping for their dead parents? And that it is you who have done that.” I don’t think Richard has ever thought about the personal consequences of killing somebody, it has never occurred to him. He has a moment after killing the children, realizing that he has stepped over a line, but I don’t think he stops to consider how their mother feels. I think he genuinely finds it disturbing that he is responsible for mass misery, because I don’t think it had ever occurred to him before. He just wanted the crown because he felt he needed and deserved it, but I don’t think he realizes that in doing so he has made a whole country miserable. And in our version, as I think in most productions, he doesn’t win the argument with Elizabeth at all, but he has that funny little line at the end of it: “Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!” He tries to fool himself into believing that he’s been dealing with a stupid and weak woman, rather than the full-length soliloquy “Was ever woman in this humour wooed?” which is somebody who has succeeded and is at the top of his deceptive powers. This is the genuine Richard laying his heart on the line, what little heart he has at any rate, and is faced with something that is implacably stronger than that, which is a mother’s grief. I think it is the absolute turning point for Richard. He essentially dies. I don’t think he’s amoral. Iago I think is amoral, a very small and mean man, without a sense of beauty or love or life. But I think Richard does have a sense of these things. He is a moral man, brought up with moral codes, but they have been distorted beyond recognition. Otherwise he couldn’t wake up before Bosworth. Otherwise he wouldn’t stop eating. At the end of scenes there’s quite a lot about food, people arranging to meet after dinner, “I saw good strawberries in your garden there.” And then just before Bosworth he no longer wants to eat or drink, and I think the people around him think “Oh my God!” when he’s lost his appetite. I mentioned this to a Shakespeare scholar when I did it and they told me there had just been a production in Lyon entirely based on that!

  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 ri
sing 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.