Richard III
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

Richard III (Aldwych) is another of Alan Howard’s player-kings, able to assume any role except that of the clean-limbed. He succeeds with Richard Pasco’s Clarence by making him partner in a double-act; at other times his dissimulations are so blatant you wonder he takes anybody in. 

Neither Mr. Howard’s performance nor Terry Hands’s production run out of energy or, much out of invention, but the play is left stranded before its close. Half the laughs earned by Joe Melia’s Second Murderer are inspired, half regrettable. It is a relief to find, in Derek Godfrey as Buckingham, an actor who can get his laughs on and with the text. 

That text is not sacred, but the changes Mr. Hands has made, here and in Richard III, seem to me impoverishments. Permit me to go into detail. In Richard III the Queen’s proposal that Richard be sent overseas with her is greeted by Northumberland with the line ‘that were some love but little policy.’ At the Aldwych, Richard appropriates the last three words. This tells us that he has a bitingly realistic sense of political humour, but we know that already from the deposition scene; we are deprived of Northumberland’s only avowal of his own nature, one he never dared to make while Richard was still nominally king. 

In Richard III, Tyrrel, who has just announced the murder of the Princes in the Tower, is dispatched with an invitation to return and tell the take in full; here is followed off by two of Richard’s cronies who are obviously going to kill him. We trade this new insight into Richard the lip-licking sadist for the platitude of the dictator who lets nobody out of his employ alive. Before Bosworth Richard is brought a threatening note, which in Mr. Hands’s production is changed to a merely insulting one aimed at his henchmen. The actor loses the chance to show the king faltering and recovering his nerve; the audience discover that he runs an unpopular administration, which with half his country in arms against him can hardly be news. 

With subtlety so suspected, it is hardly surprising that the production’s excitement runs down The Hands-Howard collaboration (black-avised designs by Farrah) has been long and often rewarding; but they bring out the overkill in each other. This year they have done their best work apart.