Richard III by William Shakespeare

always use now, which is to cast the audience in a role for the soliloquy. For instance Iago couldn’t give a shit about what the audience thinks, and that’s their role. Hamlet wants friends, somebody to help him. Richard is the leader of the gang. It’s like he’s saying, “You wait till you see me do this. I’m going to do something so unexpected, like woo Lady Anne, and I will do it, I promise.” I think that’s part of the compensation theory too.
    The sheer quantity of “backstory” is a problem for the audience of this play, isn’t it? Did you have particular ways of dealing with that? There’s a venerable tradition, going back to Colley Cibber in the eighteenth century, of importing large chunks from Henry VI Part 3
.
    Alexander: I think
Richard III
stands alone well as a story even when detached from the three parts of
Henry VI
. There would perhaps be an argument for cutting large chunks, or indeed all, of the Queen Margaret scenes, as the play does need cutting anyway, but even in those the vividness of the psychological conflict carries its own explanatory narrative. He changed a lot as a writer between
Henry VI
and
Richard III
and it has a completely different feel from the earlier plays. It stands alone without great knowledge of the backstory.
Henry VI
1, 2, and 3 are Chronicle plays, almost pageantlike in their parade of incident.
Richard III
, on the other hand, is on the way to becoming a full-blown psychodrama of the type finally perfected with
Macbeth
a decade later. It doesn’t really feel like the fourth part of a tetralogy. But it is a strange hybrid in some ways with some scenes that verge on the ritualistic.
    Piper: The set was the same but the characters were now in a stylized modern dress. For those actors who were playing the same character as they had in
Henry VI Part 3
, I tried to create a look that reflected their period costumes in silhouette and color, yet were contemporary in feel. So, for example, Edward and Elizabeth end
Henry VI Part 3
in white coronation robes, and in
Richard III
they were both dressed in long cream coats. Some characters, like Margaret, we deliberately left in a broken-down version of their period look from
Henry VI
. As we had the same actress playing both the young, sexy Margaret in
Henry VI Part I
and the old Margaret in
Richard III
, it was a way of suggesting that she had aged, without applying prosthetics—she became a more stylized, mythic character. The great advantage of doing the tetralogy of plays together is that the backstory is so much clearer, and the audience have seen how Richard’s personality has been forged in the brutality of the Wars of the Roses. Margaret’s cycles of curses, and Richard’s hatred of her, have a greater resonance when you have seen her stab his father York in the back.
    What was the journey that you went on with regard to Richard’s relationship with Buckingham? That’s crucial, isn’t it?
    Alexander: Yes, it certainly is a central relationship. Our starting point was to make the audience believe it would last. Or
could
last. We have to believe in Richard’s capacity to generate a sense of security in someone who thinks of themselves as a friend. Most of his immediate male colleagues seem to regard him as loyal, honest, funny, and friendly. Most of them seem to actually like him as he is so effective at portraying himself as one of the blokes. A good egg. Only the women suspect him. Only the women ever refer to his deformity. From the assumption that Buckingham was an ambitious politician we wanted to go one stage further and have him regard Richard as not only trustworthy but innocent, and therefore potentially
gullible
. We imagined that it was at the back of Buckingham’s mind that he may be able to double-cross Richard in the future.
    Beale: In our production Buckingham was smooth, educated; a class political act with a class political brain. In a way he was the brains behind the operation. One of my