CROOKBACK DICK REIMAGINED
Saving Richard III from Shakespeare’s calumny seems to have a particular appeal to women: probably because around his accession in the 1480s there surged both female ambition and female victimhood . Both are stunningly present even in Shakespeare’s story of his murders and infanticide , which was basically a 16c court conspiracy-theory to solidify the dubious legitimacy of the Tudors. Josephine Tey wrote the brilliant detective story “The Daughter of Time”, debunking that theory and making a hero of the King. Then Philippa Langley, an ardent Ricardian, discovered his skeleton twelve years ago beneath a council car park in Leicester, and put paid to the hunchback story (mere scoliosis, hardly crippled at all) . Now comes Philippa Gregory, a distinguished historical novelist (her Boleyn girl is at Chichester shortly). She was among the entranced crowd at the royal funeral in 2015, and resloved to make a new play of his life.
Which, she honestly admits, cannot ever be the whole truth. The result is no classic, but interesting and – thanks to Katie Posner’s imaginative direction and a rather wonderful in-the-round disc design of stairs and trenches by Richard Kent – often very fine to look at. Smoke rises, firelight burns, hooded figures process and chant, and Gregory’s determination to get inside the medieval mind does at times produce a useful spookiness. Talking of curses and witches the narrator – Tom Kanji’s lecturing “Historian” – at one point usefully remarks “This is the sort of thing they thought when they were thinking that kind of thing”. Fair enough. It wouldn’t be the same without the rhetorical Shakespearian reference to an unseen world, and indeed once or twice Richard quotes Macbeth directly.
There’s an awkwardness, though , in the fact that the Historian figure at first doesn’t seem aware of how much has been pretty well debunked already (the murder of the young princes, the hunchback, the incestuous marriage to his niece). And a more terrible clunking awkwardness when – just as it becomes clear how many other suspects there are for the Princes’ murders, including an order from the terrifyingly Margaret Beaufort – the historian starts talking about how it’s hard to focus on these two when so many other children die as in small boats “on a darkening sea”. We know this. We know that she is trying to tell the story in two periods and that ours is far from perfect. But it grates, makes you feel as if you’re at school assembly.
Aside from that, the storytelling is good , the characters sharp (plenty of neat doubling) and the experience becomes better in the second half (the first risks confusion, despite a wonderfully cheeky rap-type sequence when all the characters explain which of their in-laws or relatives they have had killed). But once Richard is crowned, and embarking on his wish to create a free and peaceful land, the excitement does rise. And it is quite funny when Laura Smithers’ genuinely threatening matriarchal Margaret, determined to get her “1-32nd royal” son Henry on the throne, barks “I will never obey a man” “She doesn’t mean it!” squawks the Historian in his white suit and Burberry, anxiously mansplaining that ‘medieval women” accepted being second best.
And so it wends on to the end on Bosworth Field, a battle beautifully staged despite a mere cast of 8, and there is majesty in the moment when “the Tudor dragon comes out of the sun” and the last Plantagenet is the last English King to fight and die in battle. But if part of the aim was to make us fall in love with Richard as a person, it doesn’t quite get there. Kyle Row is a solid performer, but plays it a bit thuggish, a bit unsympathetic despite the King’s virtues. And the script does not catch fire to help him.
theatreroyal.org to 27 April
rating three
theatreCat 