Richard III

by William Shakespeare

seen by live streaming from the Almeida Theatre on 21 July 2016

Rupert Goold directs Ralph Fiennes as the eponymous king, with Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Margaret, Finbar Lynch as Buckingham and Aislín McGuckin as Queen Elizabeth. The set is designed by Hildegard Bechtler.

The play opens with a forensic excavation of a pit or grave, taking place while the audience enters. This is, it transpires, the famous exhumation of King Richard's remains from under a car park in Leicester in 2012. As the news broadcast of the DNA confirmation of the skeleton's identity fades, the play begins. The grave remains constantly visible, usually through a perspex floor; but it is occasionally used as the receptacle for executed or murdered victims of the king, before he himself is finally killed in it during the battle at Bosworth Field.

Clearly the acting space is fluid, since Bosworth is not in the middle of Leicester; and Lord Rivers is executed in Pomfret, and Buckingham elsewhere. But the bare wall at the back of the Almeida, atmospherically lit to utilise the shadows cast by the uneven brickwork, provides a suitably generic setting for all the play's locations. Sometimes the skulls of Richard's victims are on display like so many trophies, but at other times the crown is spotlit on a plinth, or a curtain of chain links provides a barrier behind which certain shapes or characters can be silhouetted.

The costuming also is fluid. Modern suits with dark shirts (but no ties) for the men, and dark clothes for the women, except for Queen Margaret who is in a greyish boiler suit, give a dour and almost timeless impression. But while Lord Hastings in particular uses a mobile phone to text news and views, and some of the executioners use guns and rifles, the soldiers in the final battle between Richard and Richmond are dressed in armour and wield swords. 

The sheer energy of the production renders all these design decisions perfectly plausible, as we are watching a study in evil and paranoia rather than an historical reconstruction. Ralph Fiennes's Richard is contorted with a hump and a limp, and a horribly diseased right arm, but his personality remains overwhelming even as he seduces Anne, the widow of the young Lancastrian prince he has murdered (in an earlier play) and later batters the sensibilities of the widowed Queen Elizabeth after having arranged the murder of her sons the Princes in the Tower. In this production, the scene ends in a grotesque rape of the Queen; after she has left the stage, Richard almost screams a contemptuous "Women!" which reveals appalling self-loathing as much as misogyny. His ambition, which the audience is invited to approve (even if with horrified laughter) at the beginning, slides by degrees into monstrosity. The nobles around him find out too late and most become his victims; the women around him know all too well but are powerless to do anything but invoke curses and to bewail their lot. The crisis can, in the end, only be resolved by the death of the king.

The power of the play, especially as envisaged in this production, outweighs considerations of historical accuracy. It may well be an exaggerated portrait of the real king, but it remains a compelling insight into ruthless ambition, and the character of Richard remains a source of fascination. The juxtaposition of the ferocious career of the king with the painstaking excavation of the car park in our own time adds a sobering twist to a familiar tale.