Richard III

by William Shakespeare

  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.

  RICHARD AND TYRANNY: REFLECTIONS BY RICHARD EYRE

  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 docu
mented 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.

  It is clear that Richard has been rejected from birth by his mother; she says so unequivocally to Clarence’s children, and her words of contempt spoken to her son in front of his troops confirm this. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that Shakespeare is attempting to give some history, some causality, to Richard’s evil.

  The design of the production emerged empirically. We started with an empty model box, and put minimal elements into it—rows of overhead lamps to create a series of institutionalized public areas, a world of prisons and cabinet rooms and hospital corridors; palaces and areas of ceremonial display, set off against candlelit areas of private pain. We drew some parallels with the rise of Hitler, but these were forced by Hitler himself; his rise shadows that of Richard astonishingly closely, as [Bertolt] Brecht showed in [his play] The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Specific elements of Hitler’s ascent to power, or [Sir Oswald] Mosley’s to notoriety, were echoes that bounced off a time less sounding board. The play is set in a mythological landscape, even if it draws on an apparently historically precise period; I say “apparently” because Shakespeare treats historical incident with little reference to fact—incidents are conflated, characters meet whose paths never crossed, Tudor myths prevail.

  Tyrants always invent their own ritual, synthetic ceremonies borrowed from previous generations in order to dignify the present and suggest an unbroken continuum with old traditions. Hitler played up all the themes of historical restitution. Napoleon, the little man from Corsica, designed the preposterous Byzantine ceremony which is represented in David’s painting. Most of the English ritual, our so-called time-honored ritual, is not very old either. The order of the last British Coronation, in 1953, had been almost wholly invented by Queen Victoria. Putting Richard in medieval costume in the Coronation, as we did, was a way of showing how tyrants, the authors of the Thousand Year Reich, would have us believe that medievalism and modern time coexist; the past is consistently made to serve the needs of the present.

  Richard III is so much a one-man show in our acting tradition that the miseries visited on woman by the male appetite for power tend to be ignored or obscured. The female characters are as strong as in any of Shakespeare’s plays. The legacy of men’s cruelty is swept up by women who have been educated by the experience of grief. They have caused pain to Richard and they are taught by him to suffer: Elizabeth—proud, arrogant, and abusive of him—loses her brother and her sons; the Duchess of York—sealed in her own self-importance, openly contemptuous of her son—loses another son and grandchildren at his hands; Lady Anne—blinded by her grief and her hatred and seduced by him—loses her self-respect and, finally, her life. Only Queen Margaret needs no education at his hands; “Teach me how to curse my enemies,” says Elizabeth to her. Their models in our times are only too obvious: the women who wait in Chile and in Argentina for news of their sons who have “disappeared,” and the mothers I saw in Romania shortly after the Revolution, putting candles and flowers in the streets on the spots where their sons had been killed. The play is called The Tragedy of Richard III, and it is the tragedy of the women that is being told.

  The crude villain of melodrama has managed to overrule a play of considerable political subtlety. Richard does not appear in an untainted Eden; his England is the world of realpolitik. Clarence and Edward have both committed crimes in the civil wars, Clarence even admitting his guilt to the Keeper; Queen Elizabeth’s family are greedy parvenus; Buckingham, Stanley, and Ely are all morally ambiguous. At the beginning of the play Clarence has just been capriciously arrested; such behavior may be exceptional and outrageous, but not unprecedented. What right have any of the characters to call Richard a villain?

  Hastings, the prime minister, is a politician’s politician, expedient, and amoral—when he is told of the impending execution of his political enemies, he can’t fault this transparent abuse of justice; within minutes he is himself under sentence of execution. “The rest that love me, rise and follow me,” says Richard, and at this point self-preservation takes over from courage, morality, or political expediency. We all hope that we will never have to face this choice; it takes formidable courage to say “No” when the consequence is imprisonment or worse, and where there is a crying need for reform, it’s easy enough to agree that minor infringements of liberty are a small price to pay for the benefit of an able leader. We are comfortably insulated in our unchallenged, liberal, all-too-English assumptions.

  The play ends with the triumph of Richmond—a young man, almost a boy, in the hands of mature soldier-politicians who are promoting him. It is essential for their purposes that he succeed, and he is equally determined to show that he can succeed. I set his first entrance against a backdrop of a peaceful country village, in Devon in fact, near where I was born, the England of “summer fields and fruitful vines.” If I were asked what I thought Richmond was fighting for, it would be this idealized picture of England. It was more than a metaphor for me; it was a heartland.

  When I took my production of Richard III to Romania a year after their Revolution, familiar landmarks in Bucharest were obscured entirely by the snow and the people were unrecognizably changed from the years of oppression. Though some claimed that nothing had altered, the mere fact of being able to say this openly contradicted what they were saying. A stagehand said he wasn’t at all frightened of being killed in the Revolution; after all, better to be dead than how it was. A small pixielike woman was helping at the theater; she was slightly retarded but had some English. “Are you happy? I am happy” was her refrain. Like many others she was homeless, and lived in the theater, where at lea
st she could get hot water. Outside it was often one hour of hot water a day.

  At the end of the last performance I went onstage with the actors and made a speech, starting through an interpreter. She was shouted off: “English! English!” they chanted and I continued in English. I told them the production had come to its spiritual home, that this sort of cultural exchange was the only true diplomacy, and thanked them for their hospitality. They didn’t want us to go, clapping rhythmically and incessantly, but we walked offstage slowly, blinking back tears. As we left the stage a man walked up to us and handed a note and a bouquet to one of the actors. The note read: “Nobody can play Sir William Shakespeare’s plays better than his English people. I’ve seen with your remarkable help that somewhere in England Sir William Shakespeare is still alive. Thank you. Signed: a Simple Man.”

  * In Man Bites Dog (Belgium. 1992. dir. Remy Belvaux) and The Last Horror Movie (UK. 2003. dir. Julian Richards), the serial killer, like Richard, talks to the audience directly about his actions, plots, and feelings (or lack of them) about what he does, often comically. These films, including others such as Funny Games (Austria, 1997. dir. Michael Haneke), act as an indictment against media violence and the viewers' ability to watch violent acts without appropriate emotion. Ultimately, they shock the audience back into a sense of their own humanity. As with Richard III there is a breaking point between the audience and the protagonist where laughter dies and creeping horror takes hold, not least because of their earlier complicity through humor.