And the development of Richard's language, especially in soliloquy? Is there a huge change as the play unfolds, beginning from the astonishing confidence of the opening monologue and culminating in the fragmentation of the nightmare before the battle?
Alexander: Absolutely. The language reflects the change from theatrical and impish self-confidence to terrified self-awareness. It also reflects a change in his relationship with the audience, from confiding in a huge crowd of assumed admirers to a deserted man, bereft of an audience, with no one to talk to but himself; trying to find the feedback that once sustained him but finding only his own echo.
Beale: He doesn't soliloquize after his crowning, except for that last battle scene. He starts with this fantastic bravado, this fantastic relationship with the audience, and as soon as he's crowned and especially, and this in my mind is the turning point for Richard, after the murder of the children, from then on he simply does not. He has a line after the Elizabeth scene, which is almost muttered to himself. I think it is always fascinating with Shakespeare when people stop soliloquizing. Hamlet stops after the boat. He doesn't need his friends in the audience anymore. He's gone to a different place. Iago stops simply because things get too busy. He can barely speak to us in the first place because he is spinning a whole load of lies that he doesn't believe either. Richard stops because the crown is not what he expected it to be and he doesn't know how to cope with that. And then you have the death of the children. He can kill grown-ups in this play. Most grown-ups seem prepared to kill any other grown-up, they all seem to be on that level of ruthlessness, but you don't kill children. Even the Murderer says this is beyond the pale. I had this package brought on, which I'd based on [the soap opera] Coronation Street actually. When Stan Ogden died, Hilda Ogden got his glasses and his remaining bits and bobs, the last bit of him if you like, in a brown paper packet delivered to her house and she opened it over the credits with no music. It was a fantastically moving performance. I wanted to do something like that. In our production Richard received a brown paper packet with the boys' pajamas in it and he smelled the pajamas, which smelled of talc and children. That I think is the moment when he switches off. He has no desire or need to communicate anymore to people outside the play. And so consequently that last soliloquy at Bosworth is fiendishly difficult and also comes at slightly the wrong time. I can understand why people cut it because that late on is the last moment you want a soliloquy. It's a completely different beast.
6. Jonathan Slinger as Richard in Michael Boyd's production.
Richard loves playacting, doesn't he? As in the scene with the prayer-book. Presumably that dramatic self-consciousness is one of the keys to his charisma in the theater?
Alexander: Richard loves acting because he has fully absorbed the idea that one may smile and smile and be a villain. It seems amusing and hilarious to him how easy it is to dupe people, to experience up close their vanity leading directly to their gullibility. This dramatic self-consciousness makes him charismatic to audiences because he realizes they are more entertained by audacious, immoral, and downright wicked behavior than they would be by someone spouting pieties and lecturing them on goodness or the art of sanctity. I wanted Tony to think of the audience as one thousand selves, or an audience of Richard fans, near clones needing only that particular soliloquy to be perfect clones: not talking to himself but to a mass of near-selves close to the perfect him. But it withers to horrifying loneliness with "I am I" and "When I die no man will pity me." Charisma is nothing without love.
Beale: Less so than the question implies. He wasn't a very good playactor in the religious scene in my version. I think he can don a persona, as he does with Anne, but I don't think the Richard that I played was particularly conscious of playacting. He just adapted himself to the situation that he was in and the objective that he needed to achieve. I think he believes things from the moment he has said them. I don't remember playacting being particularly important. He liked his relationship with the audience. He liked being able to achieve something in public view, which I suppose is playacting in a way. He liked the audience to see how the cogs were moving.
The initial setup of the wooing of Lady Anne seems unpromising: Richard has stabbed her first husband (Edward Prince of Wales) to death in Henry VI Part 3 and now he's courting her over the corpse of her father-in-law (Henry VI), whom he's also killed. And yet he wins her over. Did your rehearsal process reveal the secret of his success?
Alexander: He makes her believe he loves her and, despite everything, she's moved by that. He makes her believe he's a good man and misunderstood. Besides, these are dangerous times and she needs a powerful protector.
Beale: No! I don't think I ever cracked that one. I know Annabelle Apsion, who played Lady Anne, felt uncomfortable a lot of the time, both when I played it and when Ciaran Hinds took over from me after I slipped a disc in my back. I don't know what the secret of it is. It was always the scene that was the most difficult for me. It doesn't play to my particular strengths. If I were a sexier actor perhaps it would, but I couldn't really use that part of the man's armory in my dealings with her. I also think there is some mystery there, that I'm sure a lot of Richards have unlocked, but that I found very hard indeed. I was in Milton Keynes [a commuter town in the English Midlands] and somebody suggested playing it extremely slowly, against all the technical rules, which perhaps we should have tried. But I can't pretend I ever got that one.
The women eventually play a big part in bringing Richard down: there's a definite shift in the power structure when his mother (the Duchess of York) and sister-in-law (Queen Elizabeth) gang up on him in the fourth act. Did that feel like a turning point to you?
Alexander: The trinity of women, Anne, Margaret, and Elizabeth, are a very, very potent presence in the play, so you have no choice but to make them a strong focus in any production. The fact that they all initially see through him in a way the men apparently don't offers him an intriguing challenge the men don't present. He defeats Margaret simply by giving voice to what all the men feel. He turns Anne by the brilliance of his acting and survives the encounter with Elizabeth through pure determination, although you can feel the strain that he has put himself under gradually taking effect.
Beale: The most important scene in the whole play was for me the one with Elizabeth. I had this feeling that it is Richard at his most genuine and desperate, and that is why it doesn't work for him. This is a man who is tired, he's older, kingship isn't as much fun as he thought it would be. He's on the road, halfway through the campaign, and he meets a woman who is the key to stability and he genuinely wants it. And when he says about marrying her daughter, "It cannot be avoided but by this; / It will not be avoided but by this," it is absolutely a genuine statement. There is no other answer that he can see out of the mess that they have got themselves into. What she does is something that he's never thought about, which is to talk about grief. And to say, "Do you realize that there are parents up and down this country who are weeping for their dead children, and children who are weeping for their dead parents? And that it is you who have done that." I don't think Richard has ever thought about the personal consequences of killing somebody, it has never occurred to him. He has a moment after killing the children, realizing that he has stepped over a line, but I don't think he stops to consider how their mother feels. I think he genuinely finds it disturbing that he is responsible for mass misery, because I don't think it had ever occurred to him before. He just wanted the crown because he felt he needed and deserved it, but I don't think he realizes that in doing so he has made a whole country miserable. And in our version, as I think in most productions, he doesn't win the argument with Elizabeth at all, but he has that funny little line at the end of it: "Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!" He tries to fool himself into believing that he's been dealing with a stupid and weak woman, rather than the full-length soliloquy "Was ever woman in this humour wooed?" which is somebody who has succeeded and is at the top of hi
s deceptive powers. This is the genuine Richard laying his heart on the line, what little heart he has at any rate, and is faced with something that is implacably stronger than that, which is a mother's grief. I think it is the absolute turning point for Richard. He essentially dies. I don't think he's amoral. Iago I think is amoral, a very small and mean man, without a sense of beauty or love or life. But I think Richard does have a sense of these things. He is a moral man, brought up with moral codes, but they have been distorted beyond recognition. Otherwise he couldn't wake up before Bosworth. Otherwise he wouldn't stop eating. At the end of scenes there's quite a lot about food, people arranging to meet after dinner, "I saw good strawberries in your garden there." And then just before Bosworth he no longer wants to eat or drink, and I think the people around him think "Oh my God!" when he's lost his appetite. I mentioned this to a Shakespeare scholar when I did it and they told me there had just been a production in Lyon entirely based on that!
How did you approach the technical problem of the scene with the Ghosts the night before the battle? It seems to require some theatrical equivalent of a cinematic split-screen effect--that maybe worked especially well on the wide, shallow stage of the Elizabethan Rose. How did you make it work in your space?
Alexander: The fact that the whole of the action was set in a cathedral made it fairly obvious that by parking Richard and his tent stage-right and Richmond and his tent stage-left simultaneously, we were in the setting of a medieval Mystery Play with heaven on one side and hell's mouth on the other. In fact, in a way, it was the culminating image of the whole scenic concept.
Piper: We were working in a thrust stage so it made it very easy to divide the space with Richmond asleep downstage and Richard mid-stage. The Ghosts entered in a steady stream from double doors in the upstage tower, which dominated the space. Thus they encountered Richard first and then went on to Richmond, before exiting through the audience.
And for all the blood, the murders, the choreographed onstage fighting: I suppose there's a basic choice between "stylization" (slow motion battles, red silk for blood) and "realism" (the clash of metal, lashings of mud and Kensington Gore): where did you aim to find yourselves on that spectrum?
Piper: We were fairly realistic, and as it was contemporary we used guns, including a very brutal shot to the head in Pomfret. The mumming to the Mayor was a mock terrorist attack and Hastings' head was delivered in a clear plastic bag. The fights, however, were stylized, especially the final section in Bosworth, which involved all the Ghosts as abstract combatants. The final encounter between Richmond and Richard took place on a swiveling set of metal steps with Richard trapped at the top, firing rapidly to try and hit the whirling Richmond as he spun them around.
Most of Shakespeare's history plays are ensemble pieces, but Richard is a huge solo part--he speaks a third of the entire play and has more than three times as many lines as anybody else. The role was clearly written to showcase the rising star of Richard Burbage. For a director, there must be an unusually difficult task of balancing the work that must be done with Richard and with the rest of the cast. Are there enough rewards for the other actors?
Alexander: Yes. Buckingham, Anne, Clarence, and Margaret are all good parts, but it's a very valid point; the play is unbalanced in that sense. It's one of the reasons it needs careful cutting. Tony was always saying that Shakespeare learns later in his career how to give the central actors decent rests with large sections of the action in which they don't appear. Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Antony, Cleopatra, Coriolanus, etc., all have a significant amount of time offstage. The physical demands on the actor playing Richard are huge, and if one sees it as a star vehicle then you certainly need a star who is a modest soul and a company person. A vain and self-centered actor would be death to company spirit--rather as Richard is death to those who try to support him.
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, Ceausescu, 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 Ceausescu 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, w
hich 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.