Usually the most inclusive of London’s major theatres, the Globe was criticised when it announced its non-disabled artistic director Michelle Terry would play Shakespeare’s only disabled protagonist.
Surprise, surprise, Terry leads an all-female or gender fluid cast in a production from which Richard III’s physical impairments, and all textual reference to them, have been removed.
This is a thoughtful provocation to the all-male Globe productions of the distant and recent past, and to the implication that Richard’s psychopathy is expressed in his body. Terry, sometimes sporting a sculpted, prosthetic masculine torso, is horrifyingly compelling in the lead.
Unfortunately, Elle While’s production is shouty and unfocused. It also strains too hard for contemporary relevance, putting misogynistic and autocratic Trumpisms in Richard’s sassy mouth.
Who needs them? The parallels speak for themselves. Terry has great rapport with an audience and wraps herself with relish around the character’s murderous charm.
With shaggy peroxide pageboy hair, a bantam strut and a manic eye, her Richard is half confrontational comedian, half pub bully. He’s always up in people’s faces, belittling them with mockery, daring them to defy him. He’s into control and dominance, bored as soon as he’s won.
In the most chilling example of mind games, he mixes poison and passes it to his defeated wife Ann (Katie Erich), casually telling a servant she “might die”.
In love only with himself, he graduates from malcontent black to gold trousers and marabou-trimmed leather as he kills his way toward kingship, his codpiece becoming bejewelled then savagely spiked. (Gender is slippery here but Richard is a ‘he’ throughout.)
No one in the ensemble comes close to Terry, alas. The lines are too often gabbled. The casting underscores how the female characters are abused and belittled, without throwing much light on the traditionally male ones, apart from Richard. The production has a macabre momentum, but a ponderous one.
Some scenes, like the death of Clarence and those with the princes of the tower, are allowed to run on interminably. Bizarrely, “my kingdom for a horse” is cut along with the play’s ableist language.
The question remains whether Richard’s disability is as intrinsic to his character as Othello’s blackness and Shylock’s Jewishness, and whether his part should be cast “authentically” as those roles now are.
Certainly, disabled actors should be able to play villains as well as heroes and all points in between, and Richard III has been partially reclaimed from non-disabled actors this century (not least by Kathryn Hunter at the Globe in 2003).
But it strikes me as interesting and useful at least once to remove the notion that evil and physical impairment go hand in hand in this play, whether as cause or effect. Especially at this address, and with a performer as thoughtful and sensitive as Terry. It’s just a shame the overall result isn’t better.
