Richard III E-Book

William Shakespeare

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In the aftermath of civil war, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, resolves to claw his way to political power at any cost. A master of manipulation, subtle wit and beguiling charm, he orchestrates his unlawful ascent by spinning a ruthless web of deceit and betrayal. His staunch ambition has horrifying consequences when, finding himself utterly alone and steeped in dread, he is forced to answer for his bloody deeds. This official tie-in edition of Richard III was published alongside director Jamie Lloyd's new production for his Trafalgar Transformed season at the Trafalgar Studios, London, in 2014. It starred BAFTA Award-winning Martin Freeman as Richard III and Gina McKee as Queen Elizabeth. This volume includes the version of Shakespeare's text performed in the production, as well as additional material including an exclusive rehearsal diary and an interview with the director.

Leseprobe

William Shakespeare

RICHARD III

edited by Jamie Lloyd

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Interview with Jamie Lloyd

Rehearsal Diary

Production Details

Characters

RICHARD III

Copyright Information

Interview with Jamie Lloyd, director

Speaking to Richard Fitch

Why Richard III?

The hope is that every play in the Trafalgar Transformed season enters into a conversation beyond the theatre’s walls. For theatre to remain urgent and apposite, it should at least chime with our times. Richard III is one of the most political of Shakespeare’s plays and it feels as pertinent as ever. Not only that, but it speaks to multiple generations simultaneously, touching personal and familial concerns as well as the universal and the political.

If it speaks just as vividly now as it did when it was written, have you set it in its original environment?

At Trafalgar Transformed, we target first-time theatregoers through our £15 Mondays scheme. I’m sure many people would disagree with me, but, often, if you put actors in baggy tights and starched ruffs, it can alienate new audiences. Sometimes period productions can feel like they are of a completely alien world and, thus, the characters can be harder to identify with; they can hold younger audience members at arm’s length. The play’s imagined world of two rival factions and the machinations therein is absolutely at the core of our production, but we’ve created a more contemporary setting in order to make it more accessible.

You’ve set it in the 1970s, is that right?

It’s fair to say that the actors on stage will look like they’ve just stepped out of the 1970s, but this isn’t quite the seventies as we knew it. It is a dystopian vision, or rather an alternative British history, that incorporates many other references that have helped the actors to identify with their characters, from Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, to Dear Leader – Jang Jinsung’s terrifying account of life in North Korea. In the 1970s, Britain was scarred with political unrest, class warfare, social and cultural instability and a secretively plotted military coup, which is where our production begins. I didn’t want to set it arbitrarily in 2014 without a real reason for doing so. Things would have to be taken to a crazy extreme for the events of the play to happen on the streets of London today. However, for many people, the 1970s felt apocalyptic. It felt like an appropriately highly charged world that these characters could inhabit, whilst feeling recognisably modern.

The springboard was some research I stumbled upon after I joked to the designer that we should set it after the 1979 Winter of Discontent (the name borrowed from the opening line of this play, given to a particularly dismal period of social unrest). Apparently, the aristocracy, fuelled by a fear of the spread of Communism that was supposedly running rife in the trade unions, planned to oust the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. We imagine that such a coup has taken place after a bloody civil war with Edward installed as the new military leader, having killed Henry at the very beginning of the play. It is a setting that allows for the faction-fighting of the play to be keenly felt and creates an atmosphere of espionage and intrigue that turns the heat up on the action.

How has it been working with Martin Freeman and the cast he’s been leading?

Martin is a phenomenal actor and he leads a cast of exceptional, and exceptionally dedicated, actors. The rehearsal process has been truly inspiring from start to finish. The cast was incredibly forensic in the approach to the text without relinquishing a sense of freedom or falling into the trap of ‘singing’ or declaring the verse without a rooted, psychological understanding of every single word.

The first thing I do with the actors is to paraphrase every line into modern English in order to find the clearest, most interesting and most useful understanding of the text. This leads to some very entertaining, colloquial interpretations, but it really helps the actors to make the text their own. It is amazing how so many words have several meanings and therefore how easy it is to decipher a line of Shakespeare, but not get to the crux of what the character concerned is really saying. One or two instances of those in any scene can warp the true meaning and the play can start to run away from you. The cast (even the children) were brilliantly committed to this exercise and I hope the narrative will be very clear because we took that time early on.

You have directed a huge variety of work. How does directing a Shakespeare differ from directing a musical or a new play?

The starting point for any text-based director is to form an imaginative response to the words on the page. I think this applies to any form. A musical may force you to be more technically strict – often an actor has to say a line within a fixed amount of music, for example; there are specific boundaries to adhere to, which can allow less time for jazz-style riffing with the text. I think that the actors who are really great at acting through song in a musical are often the best with classical verse, and vice versa. They are both heightened forms of expression and the formality of the language needs to be explored. There should be less distinction between actors who specialise in musical theatre and those who only do straight drama. That’s why some members of our cast are actors from the musical world. A few of them have done little or no Shakespeare before, but have a natural instinct for verse-speaking because of their work in song. Ultimately, whether you’re working on a musical, a new play or a classic, the main objective is to tell the writer’s story in an engaging and dynamic way. As long as you tether every choice you make to the text, I don’t see anything wrong with being brave and adventurous in the way you tell that story.

This play is famous for most – and sometimes all – of the deaths taking place offstage. Why have you chosen to give most of the deaths stage time?

I hope our production has a sense of simmering tension beneath the surface. I’ve often heard people say that there’s no subtext in Shakespeare, which baffles me. In this play, most characters have a secret to hide and often there is a kind of volcanic emotion bubbling within them, which very rarely breaks out into a release. That creates an extraordinary tension. That’s the mark of a great play – subtext; a play that is full of what is unsaid, unexpressed, or bottled up. There’s a great emotional and psychological friction in that.

As part of our first Trafalgar Transformed season, I directed Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, which is full of subtext. In the scenes that explore 1950s covert homosexuality, the characters very rarely announce what they are really thinking or feeling. We’ve tried to explore that kind of idea in this production of Richard III, which gives it a sort of hushed intensity, I hope; a bit like a spy drama full of secrets and lies. Having said that, to reach inside the disturbed and horrifying mind of Richard Gloucester, I think you need to see more of the terror he inflicts, hence bringing those deaths on stage.

The play is, ultimately, about life under a dictator, so the idea is to give the audience some sense of the extraordinary violence that these monsters inflict and allow that audience to connect, viscerally, to something unsettling. We couldn’t do that without two key elements – the work of the best fight director in the country, Kate Waters, who approaches her work with great integrity, and the creators of the most authentic-looking fake blood – Pigs Might Fly. They both allow the violence in my productions to go to a whole new level of appropriate nastiness.

Would it be fair to say that many of your productions incorporate violence?

I don’t set out to find plays that, first and foremost, require lots of gore, but I suppose I do enjoy the challenge of making violence for the stage and, in particular, violence that seems just as graphic as the stuff we see regularly in TV shows, films and computer games. Audiences enjoy the thrill of it, but there is a seriousness in the exploration of this kind of cruelty. It is easy to objectify the real-life violence we see or hear about on the news. Deaths can so easily become, simply, cold statistics from a far-off land ravaged by war or scarred by a particular political regime. We hear about some terrible atrocity, then change the channel or make a cup of tea as if nothing has happened. We’re immune to the personal loss and devastation; we don’t feel the terror. The truth is that many people in other countries are living under a regime exactly like the one we see in this play. We have a duty to connect to that and confront audiences with that violence directly. I want audiences to have an immediate and raw response to that. The violence we create can often be very disturbing – but these are carefully choreographed stage fights using blood made out of sugar syrup. We’re very privileged to be staging this violence rather than living through it in reality, but we can’t forget that this kind of terror is faced by millions, in the real world, every single second. People don’t realise how long it takes to strangle someone, or just how bloody a single flesh wound can be. I think it is important to take as long as it actually takes to do these deeds on stage and not cut them short, and when you really go for the truth of it, it can be simultaneously exciting and harrowing to watch.

Rehearsal Diary

Richard Fitch, associate director

Day 1 (Week 1)

Day one of rehearsals for Richard III shows no signs of us easing into the play. After a meet and greet which was sponsored by sunshine through the expansive Jerwood [rehearsal room] windows, and included the entire company and everyone from Jamie Lloyd Productions, Jamie and Soutra Gilmour [designer] unveiled the model box for the set of the production. They also spent some time explaining what Trafalgar Transformed actually means in relation to the space in Studio 1. What Soutra, Jamie et al have done with the old Whitehall Theatre is pretty remarkable. The stage floor has been raised by over two metres so where the performers’ heads once were is now where their feet are. They’ve also extended the stage by four metres, meaning the audience will be closer than ever to all the action and now not just on one side of the stage, but two. ‘It’s a wide traverse stage but you have to treat it as if you’re in the round,’ says Jamie. Sightlines will be even more important than usual, then.