Unearthing Richard III—why dictators never sleep easy

It was inevitable, I suppose, that a new production of Shakespeare’s Richard III would allude to the famous discovery in a Leicester car park in 2013. Director Rupert Goold begins his production at the Almeida in North London with men in forensic gear digging up England’s most infamous king—his skull brought up from the grave looking like a sinister Yorick. Then comes a further trophy, the curved spine that so disappointed the Richard III society, which were convinced the king’s disability was Tudor propaganda. I couldn’t help thinking of the warning on Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones.” We had disturbed Richard’s spirit, and our punishment was to be made complicit with his evil, as Ralph Fiennes took us into his confidence in the famous opening monologue, “Now is the winter of our discontent, / made glorious summer by this sun of York…”

There’s a good argument that Richard III, written in about 1591, was the first of Shakespeare’s plays to show his genius. Yet it still has flaws: it’s far too long for one thing, and is always cut in performance—as it was here, sometimes well and sometimes not so well. The scene where Richard woos Lady Anne after killing her father and husband is a brilliant idea but unconvincing on stage. (Here Fiennes, playing Richard as a crabbed psychopath rather than a smooth-talking Machievel in the tradition of Laurence Olivier, does his best but cannot rescue the scene.) There are far too many characters; and the appearance of Richard’s arch-rival Richmond, the rather bland future Henry VII, is too late in the play to make their rivalry interesting.

Where Shakespeare excels is in taking us into the uneasy mind of a dictator. “Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,” says Richard, in lines originally spoken in Henry VI Part Three, but which Goold has transferred into this production. There are, by my count, 30 separate references to sleep—or the lack of it—in the play. Richard says it was Anne's beauty, “which did haunt me in my sleep.” Once he has done away with her, though, his disingenuous words will be turned back on him: he will be unable to sleep, tormented by his victims. Old Queen Margaret (here played disappointingly by Vanessa Redgrave with dramatically inert staging) curses Richard: “No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine, / Unless it be whilst some tormenting dream.” This is a play full of memories of an older, medieval world, filled with portents and prophesies. But just like Richard’s crook-back appearance, the link between those prophecies and the plot is not magical but psychological. Richard revels in his own evil during the day, but it haunts him at night.

This claustrophobic production plays down the cartoonish humour of the play—so wonderfully in evidence in Mark Rylance’s Globe performance in 2012—and plays up the darkness. A massive crown looms over the stage, reflecting Richard’s large ambition but also the threat of the king’s power over his subjects. In a well-wrought interpretation, when Richard is crowned, he struggles with the weight of his robes and holds the sceptre uncomfortably with his withered hand. Once Fiennes settles into his throne, he casts off the ceremonial accoutrements to reveal his old black outfit. He has no interest in playing the king; for him it's all about naked power.

Shakespeare’s source for the play was a history written by Thomas More between 1512 and 1519. More, of course, had his head chopped off by Henry VIII, the father of Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare’s Queen ran an extensive spy network through the kingdom and beyond, searching for plots (real and imagined) against her. It’s naive to ask how Shakespeare managed to convey this atmosphere of a dictatorship: he was living under one.

Where he, and this production, impresses is in showing that to gain and maintain power you need to be a great actor and canny stage manager. At the Tower of London, the Lords gather to plan the coronation of the young prince Edward. But the lord protector, Richard, is late—“I have been long a sleeper,” he apologises when he finally comes in. (Richard is often late in the play, drawing attention to himself through his interruptions.) He gets the Bishop of Ely out of the room by asking him to fetch strawberries from his garden in Holborn—a wonderfully disconcerting touch. Hastings, played superbly by James Garnon as a perpetual optimist unaware of his impending doom, is outwitted and then beheaded on stage. The other lords quickly fall into line. With the help of Buckingham, Richard presents himself to the populace as the unwilling king. “Alas, why would you heap these cares on me?” he cries, more truthfully than he realises. As king, he falters badly. He ends up alone on the battlefield—even his horse abandons him—to face his doom. The archeologists in Leicester concluded that after he was killed, Richard was stabbed multiple times as a form of humiliation, something the production dramatises in a visceral moment.

When Ian McKellen played Richard III in the 1990s, he imagined him as a British Hitler. But McKellen was too jaunty to be genuinely scary. Here Fiennes reminded me of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In 1979, shortly after becoming President, Saddam shored up his power with a public purge of his enemies. Calmly smoking a Cuban cigar, he had the names of alleged conspirators in the audience read out and dragged to death. The filmed footage was then spread though the country. Fast-forward 25 years and Saddam was on trial, ranting with self-pity and restless incoherence. You could almost feel sorry for him—as you do with Richard when he wakes from his dream before the Battle of Bosworth in a scene beautifully played by Fiennes, and finds he is losing his sense of self. “Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am: / Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why: / Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?” This is what ambitious killers never realise (but Shakespeare did): once you kill, you become a murderer, and the person you once were is destroyed. Dictators are tragic figures, though that must be little comfort to their victims, like the two princes in the tower, whose graves still remain unknown.

Richard III continues at the Almeida until August 6th. It will be broadcast live in cinemas on 21st July