The most dominant characteristic of the Sher portrayal was his use of crutches to give Richard an extraordinary mobility: “huge black arachnid-legs which flew him across the stage in giant leaps, and which he used as extension limbs to fight off attackers, beat lackeys and, in one famous moment, lift Lady Anne’s skirt and probe between her legs.”22 Dressed entirely in black throughout most of the production he appeared for the opening soliloquy like a black spider emerging through the finely wrought gothic screen which covered the stage, from the tombs of the dead, which lay behind in darkness. The Sunday Times critic described the effect:
The opening lines are spoken quietly, almost didactically; but with “But I, that am not framed for sportive tricks” [1.1.14], Sher advances menacingly on the audience, his body swinging like a missile on the adeptly manipulated callipers that support it, his hump displayed with a kind of inverted pride … we are spellbound by a sense of fiendish energy and huge physical strength.23
2. Bottled spider with calipers—Antony Sher, 1984.
Simon Russell Beale (1992) admitted: “I haven’t the physical dexterity to play him as a spider, as Tony Sher did. I’m the ‘bunch-backed toad.’ ”24 This was another performance much admired by the critics:
He supremely shows physical self-hatred rebounding into social revenge … Shrouded in ankle-length cloaks hiding who knows what deformities, small flat head rocking with reptilian cunning on a roll of neck fat, he outdoes even Queen Margaret’s catalogue of bestial comparisons.25
We are first aware of him not as a body, however, but as an undefined threat, a sinister creaking noise as he paces about shrouded in darkness.26
A stick is heard tapping across the stage, the lights go up, and there he is with his scrubbed skull, pink jowls and vast hump: a depraved blend of Mr. Punch and A. A. Milne’s Piglet, gloating over the havoc he will wreak.27
Many actors have found Richard’s deformity a pitiable circumstance, motivating his decision to “prove a villain” and take the path of evil. Like Iago, he despises the beauty in other people’s lives that makes him seem ugly by comparison. Unlike Iago, he is outwardly marked and this sets him apart: “I am myself alone.” Deformity lay at the center of Alan Howard’s performance in 1980. This is how various newspaper critics described the performance:
Howard’s Gloucester is not an unfathomable monster; still less a scourge of God visited upon a sacrilegious land. He is a cripple getting even with those who have the use of their legs … Besides the surgical boot, Mr. Howard is encumbered with a chain round the left thigh which he has to tug to get the leg moving.28
His dangling right arm seems to contain a built-in dagger ever ready to point at people’s throats.29
Where all recent Richards have limped and scuttled efficiently round the stage, this one is uncomfortable, liable to stumble, often in pain … while Buckingham talks to the citizens, he practices a straight walk with slow agonized concentration, a performance he repeats at his coronation.… As this Richard’s preoccupation with his grotesque body grows, so does his suspicious isolation from those around him. When Buckingham lightly says that he would play the orator “as if the fee were for myself,” he eyes him with real suspicion … This is no Mr. Punch, but the bitter self-hating Richard of an earlier tradition.30
David Troughton, who played Richard in the manner of a sinister clown in Steven Pimlott’s 1995 production, was helped in his performance by relating Richard’s deformity to a genuine medical condition:
According to history, Richard had come into the world feet first, a breach birth … As Richard was dragged out by his feet, one of his hips might have been displaced causing extreme discomfort all his life. As he grew up, because of the pain of walking, a severe limp would develop, forcing his spine to grow crooked, giving the appearance of one shoulder being higher than the other … His arm could also have been deformed at birth or through an illness such as polio. In pain all his life? What an insight into a character. Here was one very simple explanation for Richard’s malevolence.31
In modern productions Richard is also often associated with childishness, exhibiting the selfish amorality of a young child who only sees his own needs. This might be the arrested development of a man of war in a domestic, social world. Anton Lesser (1988) described how in the first half of the play Richard “is entirely concerned with getting”:
“I want that, I want that” and then “I’ve got it, I’ve got it … Oh, I’m bored now.” So I decided to rush to the throne with a scream of possessive delight and leap into it … they all go and just leave him sitting there on his own in a throne that is miles too big for him, his legs dangling down like a little child’s, quite unable to reach the floor. The pathos of that image is important at this pivotal point in the play, the wild excitement of leaping into that seat followed in a second or two by the loneliness and stillness of the little figure dwarfed by it.32
In Sean Holmes’ 2003 production childhood became an essential theme and part of the scenic design, even extending to the throne, which looked like an outsized high chair:
[A] rocking-horse became connected with the young Duke of York, Richard’s namesake … it provided a link with Richard’s own childhood … on a horse, even a rocking horse, he is freed of his deformity and becomes big and grown-up and cured of his illness … at the end, the rocking horse would reappear when … the ghosts were revealed, young York now riding it with terrible energy, and Richard’s cry “My kingdom for a horse” taking on a disturbing sense of the need to escape again into childhood innocence.33
The production also featured inclusion of an unscripted character, “a page, a young boy in his own image … a frequent, silent presence near Richard, his only companion.”34
In 1970 Norman Rodway’s performance verged on that of the naughty adolescent. When sealing Hastings’ fate at the council meeting, he “fairly shrieks with delight as he jumps away from Hastings, leaving him holding what’s supposed to be a withered arm.”35 As reviewer D. A. N. Jones put it:
We are in a haunted nursery, with a toy-box full of sharp swords and real skulls … Richard, himself puerile, likes playing with children; he has a dressing-up box, with wigs and rusty armor, which he uses when stage-managing his coups. There’s a fascinating sequence, while he is awaiting news from the Lord Mayor, when he simply fidgets and makes faces, like a bored and repulsive toddler.36
The other side of Richard is the side he shows to the audience, the actor, the comedian, the arch-manipulator. By use of humor Richard gets the audience on his side, so that, in the first half of the play, when he commits some hideous act, the audience cannot help but laugh with him. This humor is of the blackest kind, also making the audience complicit, a fact that, if the production is done well, they should later regret. This black comedy, “pushing the extremes of horror and farce,”37 is very modern and in tune with contemporary tastes, the technique having been adopted by many directors of horror films.*
3. Richard the showman—Henry Goodman, 2003.
Many productions have emphasized Richard the self-conscious actor. In 2003 Henry Goodman emerged through a traditional red curtain for his soliloquy and was picked out by a spotlight. Goodman’s intention was to
make absolutely clear … that Richard has to dress up for this new summer of opportunity … And it sickens him … In performance, I became so debonair and deft as the opening character, audiences thought I was playing an actor who strips off his clothes and plays Richard—but that is never what I intended.38
Observer critic Susannah Clapp described the effect:
Cock-eyed, hobble-legged, leering with scorn, Henry Goodman gives us Richard III as angry showman. As he nuzzles into Queen Anne’s breast, he rolls a knowing eye at the audience … From the beginning, Sean Holmes’s Edwardian production underlines the idea of Richard as the mapic trickster … He delivers the winter of discontent speech as a rapid music-hall turn,
garishly snickering and capering.39
The horror of the violence onstage is often relieved by moments of nervous laughter. On the line about dogs barking at him, Goodman’s Richard “limps into the wings and stabs some poor yelping cur to death.”40 The beheading of Hastings has provided ample opportunity for “horrid laughter.” In 1995 David Troughton explained how:
During the mock siege of London, Hastings’s severed head … covered in a white, blooded cloth, is brought on by Ratcliffe, invariably causing a laugh of revulsion from the audience as it is hurled into the air, landing on stage with a heavy thud. This is perfectly in keeping with the humorous charade that Richard is perpetrating, and indeed, I heighten the moment by stabbing my knife through it, then presenting the skewered head to the Mayor of London. More laughter follows. The blade, however, gets stuck and only comes free with a struggle … which heightens the audience’s gleeful horror.41
In 2003, Hastings’ head was accidentally trodden and tripped over by Richard. Likewise, in Bill Alexander’s 1984 production the head of Hastings was thrown from one character to another like a rugby ball, testing the Mayor’s loyalty to Richard when he is obliged to join in the game:
When the head was tossed about, the audience froze; but seconds later they were thawed by laughter … He was, flat-out, a man obsessed with power, a man who wanted to attain the throne as quickly as possible, and a man who wanted to have fun along the way … and he demands that we engage in it with him.42
Simon Russell Beale (1992) was so repulsive in appearance that when he came onto the stage, the sound of barking dogs heralded his entrance. The historian David Starkey, doubling as a theater reviewer, gave a good account:
He is wearing Doc Martens, dark pegtop trousers, a long scruffy coat and an open-necked shirt.… This is Richard the alternative comedian … The head is shaven; the eyes pop; the lips stretch hungrily; the body distends like an air-cushion with a spring inside … The effect is grotesque and horribly funny; pure slapstick, when Richard squashes a dish of strawberries on his forehead to simulate a wound to persuade the Lord Mayor of the reality of the plot against him.43
The idea of Richard as “jester” or comedian was built into the costume design of the 1992 production, with David Troughton donning an “Elizabethan-looking doublet together with very odd short culottes,” giving Richard “a mischievous ‘Mr. Punch’ feel … not only was he a joker, he was an evil joker, bent on mass destruction for his own ends which made him very dangerous indeed—the funny man in red whom no-one suspects … smiling as he stabs his victims in the back.”44
Cursing Women
Richard’s lack of understanding with regard to women proves his downfall. Actor Henry Goodman noted that “there is a real misogyny about Richard as he fantasizes about love but is incapable of giving or receiving it. In his deformity he reasons … that love is something he will never receive because of the world’s love of beauty.”45
The cursing of Richard by his mother is often performed as the moment which undoes him, shakes him out of his bravura, unsettles him and seals his fate. For David Troughton’s Richard, the twisted relationship between mother and son was central to the character. His hatred of the world was derived from the Duchess of York’s complete absence of love for him. For his meeting with his mother in the fourth act he placed himself, with great awkwardness, on the ground, his head in her lap. Wanting her blessing he received only her curse. Director Steven Pimlott identified it as “a peculiarly terrible scene, a mother cursing her child in a way that is unique in Shakespeare.” Open-mouthed with horror (Troughton was influenced by Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream), Richard “hurled himself away from her and toward the crown which he had placed on the ground.”46
Anton Lesser described the devastating effect the mother’s curse had on his Richard:
She needs to express the horror at what she has given birth to … to make it terminal. “I shall never speak to thee again.” … In our production Richard’s response was punctuated by his rhythmically wounding himself in the hand with his dagger. The idea I wanted to express was that he feels he must hurt, must mutilate himself because if he doesn’t he will kill his mother in his rage at what, in his eyes, she has been responsible for.47
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.”48
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.49
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.50
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.”51 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.”52
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.53
Lady Anne (Sinead Cusack) … throws off her black gown at the moment of her submission to reveal a warm red dress beneath.54
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.55
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.56
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.57
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