Richard III
Comédie Française, Royal shakespeare company: World Theatre Season
The Observer

A pleasant nostalgia suffused the Aldwych Theatre last week. Richard III had returned, speaking French, but still looking remarkably English. The voice was the voice of the Comédie Française , taking part in the World Theatre Season, but the trappings—including director Terry Hands—were those of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was a taking combination.

Against spare settings, apparently composed of steel and wire-wool, troops of soldiers marched, sinisterly dressed to blend in with the surroundings. Sometimes they stopped to plant banners in the stage. French actors do not seem to take easily to this piece of elementary Shakespearean drill; some of the banners were seen to wobble.

Fun though it is to see these new dogs taught to play our old tricks, the evening had more to offer. For though Mr. Hands has retained the characteristic look of a Stratford history production, he has altogether changed its emphasis. We have been trained to look at these plays as primarily political; their hero has been England. A French company must find another centre of interest and Comédie has given the play back to its protagonist. Richard’s himself again.

So is Terry Hands. His recent English work has been clotted and contorted; striving to turn drama into ritual, he has produced a kind of solemn puppetry. But his ‘Richard’ is genuinely larger than life, a macabre game manoeuvred with fluency across the vast spaces of Farrah’s open set. The moves are frequently electric. When the viciously squabbling nobles turn on old Queen Margaret, they converge and threaten to push her almost into the front stalls. Richard himself has a long, crab-like exit, walking, backwards, up through an infinite depth of stage. 

Doing the play in English, I imagine that Mr. Hands would approach it with greater formality; it is one of Shakespeare’s earliest, written in thumpingly regular iambic. Translation has actually loosened it up; ‘quelle chance pour le roi du ciel’; strikes me as an admirably economic exchange for ‘The better for the king of heaven that hath him.’

When formality is essential, the French troupe are naturally poised to present it; their complement of weeping queens could hardly be bettered. Denise Gence is particularly fine as Margaret, a crazed relic of the Wars of the Roses, prostrating herself with painful humility before Jacques Caron’s courtly Buckingham.

He, however, remains unflappable, thus eventually ensuring his own downfall. Robert Hirsch as Richard plays off him a good deal, making use of him, joshing him, envying his poise, finally hating him. M. Hirsch’s Richard is not lacking in glamour. Facially he is a smiling fallen angel and his hypnotic wooing of the Lady Anne is quite credible, but resentment of his own deformity consumes him.

A searing sequence has been added to the play in which he tries desperately to straighten his back, having first compelled his followers to turn theirs. Then he embarks on his cajolery of the Lord Mayor. Cajolery is perhaps hardly the right word; Richard’s real power resides in the armed thugs who surround him. But he enjoys assuming a mask of piety, switching rapidly in and out of character; he is a truly a Player King.

Witty and dangerous through M. Hirsch’s performs is its brilliance is too lightweight to sustain this very long play through to the end, and the production’s terms of reference to not encourage us to taken an great interest in the usurper’s downfall. Richmond is a cipher who doesn’t even get to do his own killing; instead Richard is surrounded, overcome and dragged off by the ghosts of his former victims.

By this time he is wearing, rather puzzlingly, a horse’s head. ‘Mon royaume pour un cheval,’ he has just proclaimed with great insistence, so perhaps some bizarre poetic justice is at work. Still, thirty disappointing minutes at the close seems a small price to pay for three of the most entertaining hours yet offered in a World Theatre Season.