Like a primeval spirit conjured by both grief past and grief to come, Margaret emerges as the embodiment of female revenge. Her curses on the court prophesy the play’s events and, almost too late, the distressed wives and mothers desire knowledge of her powers in order to stop Richard. Margaret’s evocation of ancient tribalism is often emphasized in modern productions by representations of witchcraft. In 2001, Fiona Bell, who also played Queen Margaret in the three parts of Henry VI, carried the bones of her dead son around with her in a sack, taking them out and arranging them as a human skeleton when conjuring her curses on the court. Penny Downie, who played Margaret in 1988, explained how
one could see her as this ageless figure of moral nemesis, who brings on to the stage the entire Wars of the Roses and who has herself been purified by suffering to play this final moral role … People have to hear the curse if it is to work … Like an aborigine pointing the bone—you have to believe you are going to die if you are going to die. And the fact is that they all do believe in these curses, none more so than Richard.58
In 1992, Cherry Morris as Margaret “intoned from a chalk circle,”59 and appeared at the death of each of Richard’s victims:
The almost ritual manner in which all of Margaret’s prophetic curses are fulfilled is brought out by the simple but powerful way [Sam] Mendes has her stand aloft each time in one of the doors of the back-screen and reintone the curse over the last speeches of Richard’s various victims.60
At the battle of Bosworth Field, when Richard was on the point of victory, the appearance of Margaret “mesmerises him and seals his doom.”61
Providence and the Supernatural
It is interesting that Shakespeare doesn’t write “The Battle,” as he does in other History plays. He writes 12 or 14 pages on the night before the Battle of Bosworth and about a page on the battle. Which means that, in a way, Richard’s battle is lost the night before it has begun.62
Traditional religious imagery of good and evil often permeates modern productions, making powerful statements on the nature of providence. For Adrian Noble’s 1988 production Anton Lesser described how:
The goblet in which Ratcliffe brought the wine … has something of symbolic potency for Richard in his dream, so that the cup of wine becomes the communion cup, the blood of Christ … here is a symbol of retribution, deliverance, sin, forgiveness, ceremony, final judgement … when he snaps back into consciousness, and realizes it was all a dream, the power of all those curses hits him: “I shall despair”—and die. The impact of that was increased, we felt, by having Richard also hear what is said to Richmond … During [the soliloquy that follows the dream] he continues verbally the action of stabbing himself, which in our production, had followed his mother’s curse. He pins himself like a butterfly to a board … he cannot escape the truth … It is as though a veil has been taken away from Richard; he has been in a state of deep illusion, not just through the dream but through his life, and the curtain has now been drawn back and he looks in the mirror and sees every line on his own face—like the picture of Dorian Gray.63
David Troughton described something similar in his 1995 rendition of the role:
Alone at last, Richard attempts a final reconciliation with the audience and God. I take both the bread and the wine and set up a simple altar on the rubble-strewn stage, using my cross-handled dagger as a primitive crucifix. But instead of finding a restored friendship and possible redemption in this act of the Last Sacrament, on drinking the blood of Christ I conjure up a manifestation of the audience’s hatred; the ghosts of all Richard’s past victims who sit beside him at a large oblong table, surrounding the beatific Richmond, praying for Richard’s defeat and the future King Henry’s success. The image of Jesus and his disciples looms large but this time it is Richard, the devil, and not Richmond, the Son of God, who has certainly had his Last Supper.64
This approach has continuity with William Hogarth’s famous painting of David Garrick at the same moment, in which the crucifix is prominent.
The Ghosts are also effective representatives of the force of providence. In 1984 they emerged from behind four large tombs which dominated the gothic set:
Each ghost holds a single candle. Smoke swirls around their feet … Some, of course, have been buried there since Tewkesbury. Each prophesies with the stillness of truth; each remains on stage as the others appear. Occasionally all echo key words of prayer and prophecy, like participants in a supernatural ritual.65
Michael Boyd in 2001, and again when his production was revived and adapted in 2006–08, populated his stage with the ghosts of the dead, “emphasising the mad futility of the endless cycle of revenge killings, which only ends with the arrival of the future Henry VII at the end of Richard III.”66 The Shakespearean scholar Barbara Hodgdon provides an excellent account:
At Richard Ill’s coronation … the huge upstage doors opened, revealing a procession of ghostly victims … Among them … was Margaret, leading her dead son, and then Henry VI, robed in white, entered to prostrate himself on the floor, hands outstretched as though crucified. Last of all was York, and it was he who proclaimed “God save King Richard, of that name the third!” echoed by the others … the line between the dead and the living began to blur: apparitions all, caught momentarily in the “bottled spider’s” web … [Following the battle and Richard’s demise]… With Richard’s body lying alone on stage, all drew back: standing in the exits and aisles, they watched him rise … and prepare to leave. But as he turned upstage to go, the doors of the fortress opened: there stood Henry VI, all in white. For an instant, the two faced one another, double faces of kingship: Richard, symptomatic of the tyranny of the individual … Henry, his complete opposite … Richard’s mantra—“I am myself alone”—seemed to apply equally to them both.67
The Ghosts almost always appear in the final battle in order to oversee the working out of the curse, and sometimes to actively assist in Richard’s execution. In 1980, Terry Hands “pull[ed] out all the stops at the end with the ghosts of all Richard’s victims lining up at Bosworth and crowding round him in clusters while Richmond puts the sword in … it certainly gives you the sense that England has been purged of evil.”68 In 1998:
Instead of visiting Richard in a dream in his tent on the eve of Bosworth, the ghosts of his casualties wait to intervene and distract him with counsels of despair in his climactic sword fight with Jo Stone-Fewing’s squeaky-clean Richmond. The spectres of the young princes jump with demonic playfulness on Richard’s shoulder and pop up between his legs. The transpositions give graphic emphasis to the idea that it is the recognition of what he has done, rather than Richmond that defeats him.69
Terry Hands’ first (1970) production omitted the final battle, and instead Richard was “encircled by ghosts of his murdered victims, who perform a dance of death”70 and then lead him off stage.
In 1995 the Ghosts of Richard’s victims had occupied a specific area of the stage during the production. At the end of the play the battle again was omitted and Richard was not murdered but, aware of the inevitability of his death, put down his sword and made his way to the Ghosts’ area, watched by them from above. After Richmond’s final speech he gave him a slow ironic handclap.
ACTOR, DIRECTOR, AND DESIGNER: SIMON RUSSELL BEALE (RICHARD, 1992), BILL ALEXANDER (DIRECTOR, 1984), AND TOM PIPER (DESIGNER, 2006)
The Actor: Simon Russell Beale, born in 1961, studied at Cambridge University. He came to prominence as a Shakespearean actor with the RSC in the early 1990s, when he played Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, Ariel in The Tempest, and Richard III in the production discussed here, which toured the country in an intimate, mobile auditorium set up in sports halls in towns that generally lacked access to professional theater. All three productions were directed by Sam Mendes, with whom Beale has continued to work in Shakespearean and other classical roles, including Iago at London’s National Theatre and Malvolio at Mend
es’ Donmar Warehouse. Also a notable Hamlet at the National, he is especially admired for the intelligence of his verse-speaking.
The Director: Bill Alexander, born in 1948, trained as a theater director at the Bristol Old Vic. He joined the RSC as an assistant director in 1977 and then became a resident director in 1980. His reputation was strongly established through three productions starring Sir Antony Sher: Tartuffe and a play about its author Molière, and then the Richard III of 1984, which he talks about here. The experience of being in this famous production, which transferred to London’s Barbican Theatre in 1985 and then toured internationally the following year, was recorded by Sher in his book The Year of the King. From 1992 to 2000, Bill Alexander was artistic director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.
The Designer: Tom Piper was appointed Royal Shakespeare Company associate designer in 2003. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, before training at the Slade School of Art. He has designed productions from pantomime to opera, staged in every kind of theater including the Royal National Theatre, Abbey Theatre Dublin, Lyric Hammersmith Studio, and the Royal Albert Hall. His sets are characterized by striking uncluttered designs which allow imaginative use of the stage space. Materials tend to be stylish but undecorated: wood, metal, plain colored cloth. He designed RSC artistic director Michael Boyd’s tetralogy of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III in both their small-scale versions in the intimate Swan Theatre (2000) and their larger-scale reincarnation in the Stratford Courtyard Theatre and the London Roundhouse (2006–08).
In terms of Shakespeare’s vision of the Wars of the Roses and the eventual resolution at Bosworth Field, with Henry Richmond becoming king and inaugurating the Tudor dynasty, the world of the play is very medieval, very fifteenth century. At the same time, the rise and fall of a tyrant is a perennial historical theme, and there have been very successful productions set in, say, 1930s Germany or the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein. What sort of a setting did you and your designer choose, and why?
Alexander: We chose a medieval setting. Our starting point was the relationship between this early play of Shakespeare’s and the great cycles of mystery and miracle plays that were fading memories during the writer’s youth. Richard seemed to me a direct descendant of the Vice figure in these plays—wicked yet beguiling; fascinating, seductive, and deadly. At least this is his starting point, but his tragedy is to develop a conscience, or at least a terrifying sense of self-consciousness that also forms a bridge from the ritualistic, allegorical past to the emergent psychologically realistic present that Shakespeare was helping to create. The set was modeled on the interior of the chapter house in Worcester Cathedral, linking the play to the roots of medieval religious drama. The central character’s mental progress from mythical mask of evil to vulnerable self-awareness for me shaped the play. Analogies with figures such as Hitler or Saddam seemed pointlessly superficial, nor did I want to lose the significance of the actual historical moment—late medieval to early modern and its relevance to now.
4. Tom Piper’s set design for Michael Boyd’s history cycle at Stratford-upon-Avon: a bare platform with a cylindrical metallic tower behind. Entrances could be made through the clanging doors or down ladders and ropes. Ghosts and overhearers could appear in the recess above the doors.
Piper: The designer works with the director through discussions, sketches, and models to create the world of the play—an environment in which the actors can tell the story dressed in clothes that reflect their nature, wealth, and status within that world. That world may alter over time as characters and their situations change. With a Shakespeare play especially, where so much of the sense of location is given by the language, the design needs only to be suggestive and does not have to slavishly create a real location. As Richard III moves swiftly from street to tower to court to battle, the set design needs to be a springboard for the imagination of the audience, to transport them instantly from place to place. The director then works with the actors through rehearsal to discover the meaning of the text, and how best to tell the story in the created world.
I tend to believe that there are broadly three periods in which you can set a play: the period it is set in, the time it was written, or now. Any other time setting risks adding another layer of interpretation; for example, seeing the play set in 1930s Germany has all the layers of our twenty-first-century interpretation of that time and place imposed on a play written in the sixteenth century.
Our production was in effect Henry VI Part 4, as it played on the back of the earlier trilogy and, for practical changeover reasons between one play and the next, had to be played in the same basic environment. Those Henry VI plays were definitely medieval in feel, with clothes influenced by medieval references. But at the end of Henry VI Part 3 King Edward calls for an end to bloodshed—the dawning of a glorious summer is promised and the past will be left behind. So for Richard III we decided to break with the past and create a contemporary world influenced by, but not directly copying, Eastern European political situations.
Where did you start with Richard, from a physical/stylistic point of view? With prosthetics? With changing attitudes to bodily difference (we no longer regard physical disability as a sign of divine disapproval …)? Or perhaps with the play’s imagery: he’s variously described as a spider, boar, wolf, and “poisonous bunch-backed toad”?
Alexander: In the first week of rehearsal Tony Sher (who played Richard) and I were taken to the Wardrobe Department to find that all previous humps had been lined up for our inspection, and we were invited to choose between Ian Holm’s hump, Alan Howard’s lump, Norman Rodway’s hump, etc. etc. We politely said we’d like our own hump. In fact there were three humps used in performance; one worn for the majority of scenes; one under the armor for the battle with a specially designed slit for Richmond’s sword as he ritualistically plunged it deep into Richard’s back as he knelt praying; and a third hump (very detailed and realistic, and very expensive!) as he and Lady Anne knelt, backs to the audience, during their wedding, stripped naked to the waist as was the custom. I inserted the wedding ceremony, which is not in the play, asking our composer Guy Woolfenden to write a dramatic piece of wedding music closely modeled on Carmina Burana. He never stopped worrying about being sued by Carl Orff!
Beale: Unusually for me I was very keen to get a visual image for him early on. I’m not usually concerned that early on about how I look, but in this case I did want to get an image of him. I suppose that’s the nature of the part because you’ve got to face the question of his disability. I didn’t actually use so much of the spider, boar, wolf, toad imagery as the nature of his job. I had this idea that he should look like a retired American footballer. A soldier who had gone to seed. It was his job before that was important for me—that he should look massive and muscled, old muscle. I had a body suit with a hump put in, as a lot of Richards do, and gradually realized that it was looking like a toad. We just happened to slip into one of the images for him, which was quite interesting. And it was picked up on by people that I looked like a toad. But it came from his work as a soldier rather than anything from the imagery of the play. I knew that we were going to do a broadsword fight—although it wasn’t a period production in the design sense, they fought with broadswords at the end—so I wanted the heavy look of someone who was used to wielding a broadsword, with huge shoulders. The hump just became a continuation of those muscles on his back.
Piper: The starting point really had to be with the actor (Jonathan Slinger) and how he wanted to approach the part, rather than imposing any ideas of how he might be disabled. Jonathan was keen to explore a journey in the character through his route from third son of York to eventual king. There is a brilliant monologue in Henry VI Part 3, where Richard first talks to the audience directly, in which he accepts his disabilities, which up to that point he has been keen to cover up, and starts almost to celebrate his deformity. We began by assuming that the young Richard would not have had any special clothes made, but
at the same time would try to be quite dandyish and youthful, thrilled by the violence around him. He sported a wolfish fur coat over a basic black robe, which did come from the bottled spider line, and a wig to cover a large birthmark over his temple. At the end of the monologue he ripped off the wig, exposing the vivid stain: “I am myself alone.” I did some research into spinal deformities and we created a hump that would be appropriate. It is dangerous to actually build up a foot to create a limp, so the limping and the withered arm are created through Jonathan’s movement. In Richard III he was in a contemporary black suit and polo neck (a reference to [Russian president] Putin), with a leg brace strapped over his trousers.
And psychologically? “Since I cannot prove a lover … I am determinèd to prove a villain” sounds like a “compensation” theory of character, doesn’t it? In defense of my client, m’lud, he may be a serial killer but you see he was a misfit as a child … that sort of thing?—or emphatically not?
Beale: That was inevitably part of the psychological makeup, although I suspect that compensation behavior, which is what I probably did alight on, was as much to do with his relationship with his parents. I remember being very keen that in Richard’s mind his father was an adored figure, a hero figure. We ignored the Henry VI plays, but I just had the image of him as having had a relationship with a strong and powerful father who didn’t acknowledge his disabilities, but treated him as an equal with his other sons. That is in contrast of course with his mother. The scene when she lambasts him was about her revealing, consciously or unconsciously, what she has always felt about him, and what he, consciously or unconsciously, perhaps unconsciously, knew that she thought about him. It was a question of him realizing that she has always regarded him as some sort of diseased, malformed creature, as opposed to his brothers, and his father never thought that. That was what was going through my mind. He was hurt by it, but it wasn’t unexpected. It just confirmed what he’d always thought about his mother. So I think it was as much to do with the mother and the father as with him compensating for being deformed, although that is obviously an element of it. It’s a bit of simple bravado at the beginning. “I can do this, you just watch me.” I remember during another production the director Roger Michell saying something to me that I always use now, which is to cast the audience in a role for the soliloquy. For instance Iago couldn’t give a shit about what the audience thinks, and that’s their role. Hamlet wants friends, somebody to help him. Richard is the leader of the gang. It’s like he’s saying, “You wait till you see me do this. I’m going to do something so unexpected, like woo Lady Anne, and I will do it, I promise.” I think that’s part of the compensation theory too.
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