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Theatre Review A believable and sadly recognisable world

GORDON PARSONS recommends a play that has, for the first time, a disabled actor in the role of Shakespeare’s consummate villain

Richard III
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon

ALONG with Hamlet, Richard III has understandably always been a must-play role for leading actors.

Modern productions have often treated the play as the final chapter in the Bard’s epic slaughterfest Wars of the Roses sextet of plays. This is captured here by a dominating upstage cenotaph.

Gregory Doran’s final production as artistic director of the RSC has been heralded as the first to have a disabled actor in the role of Shakespeare’s consummate villain. All attention is inevitably on Arthur Hughes, whose dysplasia has resulted in a deformed right arm.

In fact, whereas previous famous Richards like Olivier’s hunchback or Antony Sher’s bottled spider have focused attention on Richard’s distorted physique, here this is not the problem. Indeed, when showing the effects of witchcraft on his body to the council the he demonstrates his good arm.

A youthful Hughes plays throughout as a psychopathic child, delighting in his own theatrical skill as he manipulates his list of victims with lightning mood changes.

That is, until, having achieved his prize, the throne, he frightens himself with a realisation of the inevitable danger of his isolated position.

Doran sensibly lets Hughes run the show up to this point, knowing audiences will delight along with Richard in the antics of this malicious reprobate as he wreaks havoc in this political playground.

As Richard’s self-confidence falters, the production as a whole becomes more interesting.

It is a Doran master-touch when Edward’s widowed Queen kisses Richard, the murderer of her two young sons in the Tower and now responding to his demand that she should persuade her daughter to marry him.

This gesture of hatred mixed with a recognition of the loveless world he inhabits confuses a man-child alien to human contact.

In the final scenes before his anything but heroic downfall, the ghost of his victims visiting him in a pre-battle nightmare deliver their message — “despair and die” — almost physically smothering him.

Bernard Shaw, no great Shakespeare enthusiast, saw Richard III as essentially a “one-man show,” with no room for more than one real part.

Here, however, Jamie Wilkes’s Buckingham as Richard’s “stage director” on his path to power, along with Minnie Gale’s Queen Margaret, Kirsty Bushell’s Queen Elizabeth and Claire Benedict’s Duchess of York lamenting a litany of slaughtered sons at the hands of a monster who can gaily excuse himself — “Men shall deal unadvisedly sometimes” — create a believable and sadly recognisable world.

Runs until October 8 2022. Box office: rsc.org.uk.

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