English and American Richards, Edwards, and Henries

"Welcome, all you Will-loving R3 fans, to the Ritz at Swindon, where tonight (drum roll), for your DELECTATION, for your GRATIFICATION, for your EDIFICATION, we will perform Will's Richard III, for the audience, to the audience, BY THE AUDIENCE!" This audience-participation Richard III is fictitious. In Jasper Fforde's comic detective novel The Eyre Affair, Shakespeare's play has the cult status of The Rocky Horror Show. Spectators go in order to take part; they ask in unison, "When is the winter of our discontent?" so that Richard can answer, "Now is the winter of our discontent." As the narrator says, "It was a good show; the audience made it even better."¹

Those who were in London in the summer of 2003 may well feel that they actually saw this Richard III. Both the RSC production in Stratford (dir. Sean Holmes) and the one at Shakespeare's Globe in London (dir. Barry Kyle) were remarkably like the one Fforde describes. Henry Goodman's Richard made his entrance from between the curtains, in a spotlight, dressed in top hat and tails, and he even performed a bit of a dance to illustrate capering in a lady's chamber. The lights and sound effects seemed to be under his control, and when he heard a dog barking at him, he made a quick trip into the wings to dispatch it. I think I even recall hearing a drumroll. The Globe, committed to "original practices," did not update the play to the music-hall era, but its Richard (Kathryn Hunter) made plenty of semi-aggressive contact with the spectators, while the production fully exploited the opportunities for drafting them into minor roles, as in the scene with the Mayor of London and its citizens.

When I thought later about the productions of Shakespeare's histories that I had seen in the 2003-2004 season, I realized that this kind of frank theatricality and playing to the audience had characterized nearly every one of them. All plays about war and power, the main subjects of the histories, become instantly relevant in wartime; and it was clear that the directors of these productions expected audiences to recognize this relevance. At the same time, the theater itself largely upstaged its own subject matter. The Globe, of course, easily achieved an enthusiastic response to Hunter's Richard—vulgar, humorous, mercurial—and its extensive use of doubling ensured a focus on the versatility (or lack of it) in the other actors. We were not being asked to think about tyranny in the fifteenth or twenty-first century. In the scene with the mayor, some spectators may simply have enjoyed shouting their support for Richard (as performer rather than politician), but others were well aware that they were being asked to endorse something frightful; still others seemed pleasurably intrigued by the ambivalence of their own reactions. At Stratford it looked at first as if the RSC, after years of denigrating the Globe style, had finally decided to emulate it. In early performances Goodman's attempts to get a reaction from his audience led him to breach the stage barrier and grab someone's program to see what was on ("Mmm, Shakespeare!" he announced, in mock admiration). But the physical shape of the main stage at Stratford and the kind of audience it attracts worked against any real response except embarrassment. In retrospect, I wondered whether the production might not in fact be doing something subtler, deconstructing the proscenium-arch theatrical tradition into which it was inserting itself. At various points it offered homage to Colley Cibber (some of whose lines it kept), to the Victorian stage, and (of course) both to Olivier's Richard and to his success as The Entertainer. Richard's page—a small Richard-clone, with a hump and club foot, who was present at the end to offer the crown to Richmond—was a reminder that, whatever happens in the staging...