‘Richard III’- Part 1 - Shakespeare’s Globe - Thursday 19th July 2012

(Rated 4/5 )

Ok, dear readers, no Shakespeare’s Richard III is NOT one of his 2-parters. However, my energy is restricted, such that I’m not sure I will be able to write all I want to say on Mark Rylance and The Globe company’s interpretation of this in one go. Yesterday involved a fair amount of moving around and it was all a bit too much for this body of mine. That plus the strange weather we’re having – just passably warmish then very cold wind and rain… lots of rain – it’s playing havoc with my ex-broken parts…

So enough moaning. We were very fortunate with the weather in the end last night. No rain and not too cold. So thankfully not Richard III within The Tempest!

And here I am complaining about my restricted body whilst Mark Rylance keeps putting his well-able body under the strain of being disabled – his Richard with a limp refreshingly different to the one he used for Jerusalem, and all hunched up and small compared to that other role for which he puffed himself up and became so famous and rightly highly-celebrated. And from the word go Mark injected his supreme talent into Richard. He was a funny Richard, even a strangely gentle psychopath, sensitive and gloriously charmingly manipulative, then dangerously brutal – making this a black comedy version, yet still dramatic and somehow not farcical. He was believable in his transitions from one way of being to the other, and had us really thinking about why and how this character – and I say character given the real Richard III had such bad press and was not a psychopath – became who and how he did.

As far as I recall I have only seen this play once before. That time it was Kevin Spacey playing an apparently far more serious and unsympathetic persona and I didn’t understand the plot, lost track of the Queens and felt bored. We were too high up to really see facial expressions though and when Kevin’s face loomed large on a screen it did get a lot more interesting and the charming psychopath was well visible. I looked up the plot before I went this time. In essence Richard kills lots of people to get the crown, and is then killed himself. The End. And when he is not on stage, for me it is a pretty boring play. What makes it interesting, or not, is how the actor chooses to embody Richard. And then how he interacts with the other characters…

In this production everyone is played by men, back to the tradition of Shakespeare’s time. And I was actually surprised that I was having to remind myself of that when the Queens – as in royal not gay; though they may be that too! – were performing. They were all superb, but particularly Samuel Barnett as Queen Elizabeth.

And once the play has ended and the epilogue has kindly informed us what happens next in the ‘real’ history, the original tradition of dancing and prancing around is also revived within the replica of Shakespeare’s own Globe Theatre and up gets Mark as himself and joins in. We are all reassured this was only a play and nobody is actually dead!

Richard III – Review by TheRestrictedReviewer © 2012

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