How do you reconcile the play with the historical Richard III, whose remains were recently discovered? He very clearly makes the wrong ones and suffers the ultimate downfall for that. Oh, what other choice did he have?’ Of course he had choices. I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, he’s just a victim of this cruel world. Audiences don't necessarily side with him but they revel in his villainy! I also don't want to burden Freudian analysis onto him and make him more understandable. There’s such humour in other moments where Richard relishes his plans. You can’t pantomime with the daggers and the looks, because that gets really dull. As an actor you have to flesh out your character. In Richard III he gives a speech about how he’s going to go and kill the king, Henry, and how this ties into his feelings about himself as a disabled man. That was our way into humanising him.ĭo you see Richard III as a villain or as an antihero? His deep-seated anger and hurt leads to his ambition and everything we know of him. In Shakespeare’s story, Richard is fostered at a distance from the Kennedy-like family of perfect specimens. In medieval England if you were not born perfect, you were often drowned at birth. Richard tells the audience about how wrong he feels in his body, about being dejected and overlooked, and about being unable to be part of a royal courtly life with the Plantagenets. In terms of tackling the real historical figure versus the fictionalised version in Shakespeare, I think we’re smart enough as audiences that the two can coexist.
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