The 2024 Globe production of Richard III, directed by Elle While, is an electrically dynamic and highly entertaining staging. It features an almost all female gender-blind casting, starring Michelle Terry[1] in the title role. This production adopts an original interpretation with respect to Richard’s “deformed” body: contrary to Edward Hall’s[2] description of Richard’s physical misshapenness and Shakespeare’s appropriation of the idea, Terry does not sport a hunched back or insist on the physical deformity but rather focuses on the idea of an inward crookedness, an inner, invisible ‘deformity’ that makes him so easily “determinèd to prove a villain” (1.1.30).
Michelle Terry plays on Richard’s exacerbated egotism, illustrating his sardonic manipulations in a seizing manner through her blunt shifting from a deceitful schemer (in his asides) to a self-centered ingenu. However, Terry’s Richard uncovers from the start the tyrant strain, thus levelling the progressive transition from the cynically playful stage Machiavel to the hardened tyrant stance – when compared to former interpretations like Laurence Olivier’s in his own production and Ron Cook in Jane Howell’s.
Terry’s rendering of a domination obsessed masculinity is extremely vivid through her commanding, hardened and croaky tone and sometimes shrill (when annoyed) voice, but also by means of her visual attire: first a ruffled blouse and leather jacket, later on changed into a silicone muscled torso, her costumes always adorned with a prominent codpiece. This is paired with masculine suggestive body gesturing: her/his frequent ‘Elvis-Pelvis’ crotch-thrusting towards her different partners. Terry’s murderous “braggart” (MV) stance is contrasted with Helen Schlesinger’s more temperate interpretation of Buckingham, Richard’s partner in crime.
The staging affected several cuts with respect to Shakespeare’s original text and some surprising additions. Richard’s opening monologue in Richard III is cut short and continued with lines of his soliloquy from 2 scenes of 3Henry VI (3Henry VI 3.2, 5.6). Several lines mostly pertaining to conscience-related issues were left out, like Clarence’s nightmarish dream heavily weighing on his conscience, Brackenbury’s line “an outward honor for an inward toil” or Richard’s line “O coward conscience, how doth thou afflict me”, and even Richard’s last well known line “My kingdom for a horse”.
However, in an attempt to respond to the present day audience’s expectations and in an effort to update Shakespeare’s megalomaniac, the performance is studded with aural and visual aspects of contemporary bearing clearly sounding some of Donald Trump’s well known patterns. For instance, Terry paraphrases Trump samples like “make America (England) great again”, or, in the scene of Richard’s withered arm, transforms “witch” and “witchcraft” into “witch-hunt”. Or crude ones, like “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” while groping his/her fellow actors. Also, the citizen-actors march across the stage sporting the unmistakable red “Trump” caps. And last but not least, the allusion to Trump’s fuming anti-immigrant rhetoric using references to contemporary issues of immigrants in Calais. Critics like Stephen Greenblatt had already explored, in 2016, the “psychopathology” that Shakespeare illustrates in Richard, a “weird, obsessive determination to reach a goal that looked impossibly far off, a position for which he had no reasonable expectation, no proper qualification and absolutely no aptitude” – likening it to the case of American politician Donald Trump. But the relevance of the comparison is even more significant today, with the American election looming (and DT still taking part in it).
Elle While has definitely staged a Richard with all the ingredients to satisfy both classical and more updated expectations. The play delivers a gripping picture of limitless male corruption and destructive power played by a female cast – the contrast epitomized in a line imported from an aside in 3H6 and introduced into Richard’s opening monologue “he[3] loves the breeder better than the male” (3Henry VI 2.1.42) that resounds the opposed keywords of the play in a histrionic complete reversal of the early modern theatrical practices of female roles played by male actors, perhaps in a sort of cynic feminist performative artistic revenge.
Elisabeth Szanto (Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle).
[1] Actress and artistic director of the Globe who had already played another masculine role, Hamlet, in the 2018 Globe production.
[2] Edward Hall describes Richard of Gloucester as “litle of stature eiuill featured of limnes, croke backed, the left shulder muche Higher then the righte, harde fauoured of visage”, in The vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre [and] Yorke, beeyng long in continual discension for the croune of this noble realme with all the actes done in bothe the tymes of the princes, bothe of the one linage and of the other, beginnyng at the tyme of kyng Henry the fowerth, the first aucthor of this deuision, and so successiuely proceadyng to the reigne of the high and prudent prince kyng Henry the eight, the vndubitate flower and very heire of both the sayd linages.[Londini :: In officina Richardi Graftoni typis impress.], 1548.