Arthur Hughes is the first disabled actor to play Shakespeare’s supervillain for the RSC. While the text ties the “rudely stamp’d” character’s evil nature to his “deformity”, Gregory Doran’s production goes some way to correcting that false equivalence. This Richard is an ambitious amoralist, not exaggeratedly hunched and limping in the Laurence Olivier mould.
As the rapacious Duke of Gloucester, Hughes is a handsome, swaggering sociopath aware of his effect on the trembling Lady Anne (Rosie Sheehy, excellent) whom he woos by the grave of Henry VI, her father-in-law whom he killed along with her husband. He is aware, too, of how he bewitches his posse on his machiavellian rise to power.
Hughes’s Richard is every bit the schemer, dead-eyed and unmoved by the body count he leaves on the way to the throne, but he also has a smarmy mischief about him, delivering news of another dispatched victim in a breezy tone of voice and eking comic asides out of his character’s darkness.
It gives a strange note to his villainy. He does not always seem vicious enough, even when he is giving orders to kill former allies.
There is comedy further afield. The two murderers (Conor Glean and Joeravar Sangha) contracted to kill the Duke of Clarence (Ben Hall) resemble a double act, and it brings entertainment but mitigates the play’s sense of terror.
As the second longest play in Shakespeare’s canon, and among his darkest, the production comes to feel somewhat relentless in an overextended first half (almost two hours), which offers plenty of action but little menace.
Episodes of brilliance eventually arrive: when Richard reveals his anger beneath the dissembling and Hughes’s eyes flash dangerously; when the eerie figure of Queen Margaret (Minnie Gale) screechingly delivers her curse (with her wine-red dress and weeping white-blond hair, she looks like a Shakespearean Sadako); and when the anxious Queen Elizabeth (Kirsty Bushell) is turned away from the tower where her sons will be smothered to death. There are also compelling performances from Claire Benedict as Richard’s mother and Micah Balfour as Lord Hastings, especially when he is betrayed and sent to the block.
This production shines in its aesthetics and stagecraft, which has a magisterial splendour. The stage has dark red walls, suggesting both umbilical and murderous blood. Stephen Brimson Lewis’s set shimmers with striking colours, with a single column at the back on which coloured light is projected.
Matt Daw’s lighting is sensational, with a scintillating play of shadow and silhouette, and so is the celestial sound of a boy treble, Oliver Cooper, who stands at a balcony singing angelically while Richard’s devilry takes place.
The more traditional staging of the first half is followed by the shorter and far punchier second, with the show morphing into a thoroughly modern production. The last few scenes crank up the drama with a rush of effects, including hand-held camerawork. Richard’s horse at the Battle of Bosworth is choreographed out of the zombie-like bodies of his dead victims. It is visually awesome and gives a sinister new resonance to his refrain “a kingdom for a horse.”
It is a shame the visceral power of the play comes so late but these climactic moments bring the full force of the drama’s eeriness and emanate Richard’s fear and desperation.
At the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 8 October
