In modern productions Richard is also often associated with childishness, exhibiting the selfish amorality of a young child who only sees his own needs. This might be the arrested development of a man of war in a domestic, social world. Anton Lesser (1988) described how in the first half of the play Richard "is entirely concerned with getting":
"I want that, I want that" and then "I've got it, I've got it ... Oh, I'm bored now." So I decided to rush to the throne with a scream of possessive delight and leap into it ... they all go and just leave him sitting there on his own in a throne that is miles too big for him, his legs dangling down like a little child's, quite unable to reach the floor. The pathos of that image is important at this pivotal point in the play, the wild excitement of leaping into that seat followed in a second or two by the loneliness and stillness of the little figure dwarfed by it.32
In Sean Holmes' 2003 production childhood became an essential theme and part of the scenic design, even extending to the throne, which looked like an outsized high chair:
[A] rocking-horse became connected with the young Duke of York, Richard's namesake ... it provided a link with Richard's own childhood ... on a horse, even a rocking horse, he is freed of his deformity and becomes big and grown-up and cured of his illness ... at the end, the rocking horse would reappear when ... the ghosts were revealed, young York now riding it with terrible energy, and Richard's cry "My kingdom for a horse" taking on a disturbing sense of the need to escape again into childhood innocence.33
The production also featured inclusion of an unscripted character, "a page, a young boy in his own image ... a frequent, silent presence near Richard, his only companion."34
In 1970 Norman Rodway's performance verged on that of the naughty adolescent. When sealing Hastings' fate at the council meeting, he "fairly shrieks with delight as he jumps away from Hastings, leaving him holding what's supposed to be a withered arm."35 As reviewer D. A. N. Jones put it:
We are in a haunted nursery, with a toy-box full of sharp swords and real skulls ... Richard, himself puerile, likes playing with children; he has a dressing-up box, with wigs and rusty armor, which he uses when stage-managing his coups. There's a fascinating sequence, while he is awaiting news from the Lord Mayor, when he simply fidgets and makes faces, like a bored and repulsive toddler.36
The other side of Richard is the side he shows to the audience, the actor, the comedian, the arch-manipulator. By use of humor Richard gets the audience on his side, so that, in the first half of the play, when he commits some hideous act, the audience cannot help but laugh with him. This humor is of the blackest kind, also making the audience complicit, a fact that, if the production is done well, they should later regret. This black comedy, "pushing the extremes of horror and farce,"37 is very modern and in tune with contemporary tastes, the technique having been adopted by many directors of horror films.*
3. Richard the showman--Henry Goodman, 2003.
Many productions have emphasized Richard the self-conscious actor. In 2003 Henry Goodman emerged through a traditional red curtain for his soliloquy and was picked out by a spotlight. Goodman's intention was to
make absolutely clear ... that Richard has to dress up for this new summer of opportunity ... And it sickens him ... In performance, I became so debonair and deft as the opening character, audiences thought I was playing an actor who strips off his clothes and plays Richard--but that is never what I intended.38
Observer critic Susannah Clapp described the effect:
Cock-eyed, hobble-legged, leering with scorn, Henry Goodman gives us Richard III as angry showman. As he nuzzles into Queen Anne's breast, he rolls a knowing eye at the audience ... From the beginning, Sean Holmes's Edwardian production underlines the idea of Richard as the mapic trickster ... He delivers the winter of discontent speech as a rapid music-hall turn, garishly snickering and capering.39
The horror of the violence onstage is often relieved by moments of nervous laughter. On the line about dogs barking at him, Goodman's Richard "limps into the wings and stabs some poor yelping cur to death."40 The beheading of Hastings has provided ample opportunity for "horrid laughter." In 1995 David Troughton explained how:
During the mock siege of London, Hastings's severed head ... covered in a white, blooded cloth, is brought on by Ratcliffe, invariably causing a laugh of revulsion from the audience as it is hurled into the air, landing on stage with a heavy thud. This is perfectly in keeping with the humorous charade that Richard is perpetrating, and indeed, I heighten the moment by stabbing my knife through it, then presenting the skewered head to the Mayor of London. More laughter follows. The blade, however, gets stuck and only comes free with a struggle ... which heightens the audience's gleeful horror.41
In 2003, Hastings' head was accidentally trodden and tripped over by Richard. Likewise, in Bill Alexander's 1984 production the head of Hastings was thrown from one character to another like a rugby ball, testing the Mayor's loyalty to Richard when he is obliged to join in the game:
When the head was tossed about, the audience froze; but seconds later they were thawed by laughter ... He was, flat-out, a man obsessed with power, a man who wanted to attain the throne as quickly as possible, and a man who wanted to have fun along the way ... and he demands that we engage in it with him.42
Simon Russell Beale (1992) was so repulsive in appearance that when he came onto the stage, the sound of barking dogs heralded his entrance. The historian David Starkey, doubling as a theater reviewer, gave a good account:
He is wearing Doc Martens, dark pegtop trousers, a long scruffy coat and an open-necked shirt.... This is Richard the alternative comedian ... The head is shaven; the eyes pop; the lips stretch hungrily; the body distends like an air-cushion with a spring inside ... The effect is grotesque and horribly funny; pure slapstick, when Richard squashes a dish of strawberries on his forehead to simulate a wound to persuade the Lord Mayor of the reality of the plot against him.43
The idea of Richard as "jester" or comedian was built into the costume design of the 1992 production, with David Troughton donning an "Elizabethan-looking doublet together with very odd short culottes," giving Richard "a mischievous 'Mr. Punch' feel ... not only was he a joker, he was an evil joker, bent on mass destruction for his own ends which made him very dangerous indeed--the funny man in red whom no-one suspects ... smiling as he stabs his victims in the back."44
Cursing Women
Richard's lack of understanding with regard to women proves his downfall. Actor Henry Goodman noted that "there is a real misogyny about Richard as he fantasizes about love but is incapable of giving or receiving it. In his deformity he reasons ... that love is something he will never receive because of the world's love of beauty."45
The cursing of Richard by his mother is often performed as the moment which undoes him, shakes him out of his bravura, unsettles him and seals his fate. For David Troughton's Richard, the twisted relationship between mother and son was central to the character. His hatred of the world was derived from the Duchess of York's complete absence of love for him. For his meeting with his mother in the fourth act he placed himself, with great awkwardness, on the ground, his head in her lap. Wanting her blessing he received only her curse. Director Steven Pimlott identified it as "a peculiarly terrible scene, a mother cursing her child in a way that is unique in Shakespeare." Open-mouthed with horror (Troughton was influenced by Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream), Richard "hurled himself away from her and toward the crown which he had placed on the ground."46
Anton Lesser described the devastating effect the mother's curse had on his Richard:
She needs to express the horror at what she has given birth to ... to make it terminal. "I shall never speak to thee again." ... In our production Richard's response was punctuated by his rhythmically wounding himself in the hand with his dagger. The idea I wanted to express was that he feels he must hurt, must mutilate himself because if he doesn't he will kill his mother in his rage at what, in his eyes, she h
as been responsible for.47
The curse on Alan Howard's Richard (1980) created a mental disturbance from which he never recovered: "His mother's curse leaves him so shattered that he plays the next scene with Elizabeth in earnest, as though he might really find in her a new mother. From then on he is on the edge of madness."48
The duchess' lack of motherly love has an impact on how Richard relates to other women in the play. The "wooing" scene of Lady Anne reveals much but, often heavily cut in performance, is a particularly difficult scene to make convincing. Actor Anton Lesser explains:
Richard must not be seen by Anne to be "acting." The more she is confused about how genuine his feelings are, the more unbalancing it will be for her ... Richard bases his strategy on attack: everything she accuses him of he accepts, with the proviso that everything he has done he has done for her. He makes her, quite specifically, an "accessory" ... producing a sense of guilt ... she is forced into the belief that it was her body, her physicality, all that she as a devout Christian is trying to rise above, which provoked his behaviour. The idea we were aiming for was that guilt about her own sexuality, rather than any particular attraction toward his, is what governs her behaviour here.49
Lisa Stevenson, who played Lady Anne in 2003, found a truth to the scene through this guilt, and through the belief in the centrality of cursing to the structure of the play:
A lot of women suffer from guilt when they're grieving ... So when Richard comes along and tells Anne that it is her fault that her husband and father-in-law died, she was so vulnerable that on some weird level she believed it. I think that's why she doesn't kill him ... I had an idea for the play that the sickness might be pregnancy-related ... when she returns as a ghost, she says "thy wife, that wretched Anne ... That never slept a quiet hour with thee." I think Richard has been raping her and I think that it's been horrific ... Her prophecy about Richard's marriage comes true: "If ever he have wife, let her be made ... miserable." And she says "If ever he have child, abortive be it Prodigious and untimely brought to life." I had an idea that I was going to know that I was pregnant and the baby (Richard's baby) was going to have died in my womb, but still be there, which would lead to terrible blood poisoning.50
In other productions Lady Anne has been portrayed as slightly more resistant and knowing than the text suggests. Although Aislin McGuckin (2000) put up "a particularly dignified resistance to his wooing," she seemed "grimly aware that in doing so she has signed her own death warrant."51 Annabel Apsion as Lady Anne in 1992 "calls his bluff to the extent of actually nicking his proffered breast with his sword. For a split second, Richard is disoriented by the drawn blood, but then his cold, appraising eyes flick back to Anne, keenly monitoring how this upset may work to his advantage."52
However, there have also been productions where Lady Anne's desperate state has made her a more willing conquest. Of Terry Hands' 1980 production one critic wrote:
"Did you not kill this King?" "I grant ye." I have never heard this cheeky exchange without it raising a laugh until last night when it was lost in the high-speed passionate crescendo between [Alan] Howard and Sinead Cusack, which is played toward her capitulation with the drive of an orgasm.53
Lady Anne (Sinead Cusack) ... throws off her black gown at the moment of her submission to reveal a warm red dress beneath.54
For his production in 1970 Hands' direction suggested that
her attraction is a kind of kinkiness ... One moment she is self-righteously whacking him over the back with a large cross, in a naive attempt to exorcise him; the next, she is giggling and dabbling lips with him, notwithstanding the corpse of her husband nearby. The hand-maiden of the Lord is abruptly revealed as the Devil's concubine.55
In 1984 and 2001 Queen Elizabeth became the prime target of Richard's misogynistic rage. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer of Michael Boyd's production (2001) commented:
His wooing of her--as mother-in-law, rather than as wife ... seems almost more of a showdown than the one soon to ensue on Bosworth Field ... At first traumatized into shaking incoherence by her husband's death, she discovers reserves of strength and eloquence that make her, theatrically, Richard's most potent antagonist. As a tall, intelligent, determined woman of non-royal birth, she embodies all that Richard finds most threatening.56
In 1984 the tussle between the two of them was played as more physical than verbal. The critic Chris Hassel wrote in the Shakespeare Quarterly that
[Antony] Sher is brutal with Elizabeth from the start. He forces her face to him with his sceptre. He pulls her around by the bodice to make her face him again on the throne. Once he throws her to the ground. But she is not without her own weapons against this intimidation. She has those withering words of irony ... also ... a venomous kiss for Richard at the end, from which he recoils as from an adder's sting.57
Like a primeval spirit conjured by both grief past and grief to come, Margaret emerges as the embodiment of female revenge. Her curses on the court prophesy the play's events and, almost too late, the distressed wives and mothers desire knowledge of her powers in order to stop Richard. Margaret's evocation of ancient tribalism is often emphasized in modern productions by representations of witchcraft. In 2001, Fiona Bell, who also played Queen Margaret in the three parts of Henry VI, carried the bones of her dead son around with her in a sack, taking them out and arranging them as a human skeleton when conjuring her curses on the court. Penny Downie, who played Margaret in 1988, explained how
one could see her as this ageless figure of moral nemesis, who brings on to the stage the entire Wars of the Roses and who has herself been purified by suffering to play this final moral role ... People have to hear the curse if it is to work ... Like an aborigine pointing the bone--you have to believe you are going to die if you are going to die. And the fact is that they all do believe in these curses, none more so than Richard.58
In 1992, Cherry Morris as Margaret "intoned from a chalk circle,"59 and appeared at the death of each of Richard's victims:
The almost ritual manner in which all of Margaret's prophetic curses are fulfilled is brought out by the simple but powerful way [Sam] Mendes has her stand aloft each time in one of the doors of the back-screen and reintone the curse over the last speeches of Richard's various victims.60
At the battle of Bosworth Field, when Richard was on the point of victory, the appearance of Margaret "mesmerises him and seals his doom."61
Providence and the Supernatural
It is interesting that Shakespeare doesn't write "The Battle," as he does in other History plays. He writes 12 or 14 pages on the night before the Battle of Bosworth and about a page on the battle. Which means that, in a way, Richard's battle is lost the night before it has begun.62
Traditional religious imagery of good and evil often permeates modern productions, making powerful statements on the nature of providence. For Adrian Noble's 1988 production Anton Lesser described how:
The goblet in which Ratcliffe brought the wine ... has something of symbolic potency for Richard in his dream, so that the cup of wine becomes the communion cup, the blood of Christ ... here is a symbol of retribution, deliverance, sin, forgiveness, ceremony, final judgement ... when he snaps back into consciousness, and realizes it was all a dream, the power of all those curses hits him: "I shall despair"--and die. The impact of that was increased, we felt, by having Richard also hear what is said to Richmond ... During [the soliloquy that follows the dream] he continues verbally the action of stabbing himself, which in our production, had followed his mother's curse. He pins himself like a butterfly to a board ... he cannot escape the truth ... It is as though a veil has been taken away from Richard; he has been in a state of deep illusion, not just through the dream but through his life, and the curtain has now been drawn back and he looks in the mirror and sees every line on his own face--like the picture of Dorian Gray.63
David Troughton described something similar in his 1995 rendition of the role:
Alone at last, R
ichard attempts a final reconciliation with the audience and God. I take both the bread and the wine and set up a simple altar on the rubble-strewn stage, using my cross-handled dagger as a primitive crucifix. But instead of finding a restored friendship and possible redemption in this act of the Last Sacrament, on drinking the blood of Christ I conjure up a manifestation of the audience's hatred; the ghosts of all Richard's past victims who sit beside him at a large oblong table, surrounding the beatific Richmond, praying for Richard's defeat and the future King Henry's success. The image of Jesus and his disciples looms large but this time it is Richard, the devil, and not Richmond, the Son of God, who has certainly had his Last Supper.64
This approach has continuity with William Hogarth's famous painting of David Garrick at the same moment, in which the crucifix is prominent.
The Ghosts are also effective representatives of the force of providence. In 1984 they emerged from behind four large tombs which dominated the gothic set:
Each ghost holds a single candle. Smoke swirls around their feet ... Some, of course, have been buried there since Tewkesbury. Each prophesies with the stillness of truth; each remains on stage as the others appear. Occasionally all echo key words of prayer and prophecy, like participants in a supernatural ritual.65
Michael Boyd in 2001, and again when his production was revived and adapted in 2006-08, populated his stage with the ghosts of the dead, "emphasising the mad futility of the endless cycle of revenge killings, which only ends with the arrival of the future Henry VII at the end of Richard III."66 The Shakespearean scholar Barbara Hodgdon provides an excellent account:
At Richard Ill's coronation ... the huge upstage doors opened, revealing a procession of ghostly victims ... Among them ... was Margaret, leading her dead son, and then Henry VI, robed in white, entered to prostrate himself on the floor, hands outstretched as though crucified. Last of all was York, and it was he who proclaimed "God save King Richard, of that name the third!" echoed by the others ... the line between the dead and the living began to blur: apparitions all, caught momentarily in the "bottled spider's" web ... [Following the battle and Richard's demise]... With Richard's body lying alone on stage, all drew back: standing in the exits and aisles, they watched him rise ... and prepare to leave. But as he turned upstage to go, the doors of the fortress opened: there stood Henry VI, all in white. For an instant, the two faced one another, double faces of kingship: Richard, symptomatic of the tyranny of the individual ... Henry, his complete opposite ... Richard's mantra--"I am myself alone"--seemed to apply equally to them both.67