Richard III (29 page)

The Designer: Tom Piper
was appointed Royal Shakespeare Company associate designer in 2003. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, before training at the Slade School of Art. He has designed productions from pantomime to opera, staged in every kind of theater including the Royal National Theatre, Abbey Theatre Dublin, Lyric Hammersmith Studio, and the Royal Albert Hall. His sets are characterized by striking uncluttered designs which allow imaginative use of the stage space. Materials tend to be stylish but undecorated: wood, metal, plain colored cloth. He designed RSC artistic director Michael Boyd’s tetralogy of the three parts of
Henry VI
and
Richard III
in both their small-scale versions in the intimate Swan Theatre (2000) and their larger-scale reincarnation in the Stratford Courtyard Theatre and the London Roundhouse (2006–08).

In terms of Shakespeare’s vision of the Wars of the Roses and the eventual resolution at Bosworth Field, with Henry Richmond becoming king and inaugurating the Tudor dynasty, the world of the play is very medieval, very fifteenth century. At the same time, the rise and fall of a tyrant is a perennial historical theme, and there have been very successful productions set in, say, 1930s Germany or the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein. What sort of a setting did you and your designer choose, and why?

Alexander:
We chose a medieval setting. Our starting point was the relationship between this early play of Shakespeare’s and the great cycles of mystery and miracle plays that were fading memories during the writer’s youth. Richard seemed to me a direct descendant of the Vice figure in these plays—wicked yet beguiling; fascinating, seductive, and deadly. At least this is his starting point, but his tragedy is to develop a conscience, or at least a terrifying sense of self-consciousness that also forms a bridge from the ritualistic, allegorical past to the emergent psychologically realistic present that Shakespeare was helping to create. The set was modeled on the interior of the chapter house in Worcester Cathedral, linking the play to the roots of medieval religious drama. The central character’s mental progress from mythical mask of evil to vulnerable self-awareness for me shaped the play. Analogies with figures such as Hitler or Saddam seemed pointlessly superficial, nor did I want to lose the significance of the
actual
historical moment—late medieval to early modern and
its
relevance to now.

4.
Tom Piper’s set design for Michael Boyd’s history cycle at Stratford-upon-Avon: a bare platform with a cylindrical metallic tower behind. Entrances could be made through the clanging doors or down ladders and ropes. Ghosts and overhearers could appear in the recess above the doors.

Piper:
The designer works with the director through discussions, sketches, and models to create the world of the play—an environment in which the actors can tell the story dressed in clothes that reflect their nature, wealth, and status within that world. That world may alter over time as characters and their situations change. With a Shakespeare play especially, where so much of the sense of location is given by the language, the design needs only to be suggestive and does not have to slavishly create a real location. As
Richard III
moves swiftly from street to tower to court to battle, the set design needs to be a springboard for the imagination of the audience, to
transport them instantly from place to place. The director then works with the actors through rehearsal to discover the meaning of the text, and how best to tell the story in the created world.

I tend to believe that there are broadly three periods in which you can set a play: the period it is set in, the time it was written, or now. Any other time setting risks adding another layer of interpretation; for example, seeing the play set in 1930s Germany has all the layers of our twenty-first-century interpretation of that time and place imposed on a play written in the sixteenth century.

Our production was in effect
Henry VI Part 4
, as it played on the back of the earlier trilogy and, for practical changeover reasons between one play and the next, had to be played in the same basic environment. Those
Henry VI
plays were definitely medieval in feel, with clothes influenced by medieval references. But at the end of
Henry VI Part 3
King Edward calls for an end to bloodshed—the dawning of a glorious summer is promised and the past will be left behind. So for
Richard III
we decided to break with the past and create a contemporary world influenced by, but not directly copying, Eastern European political situations.

Where did you start with Richard, from a physical/stylistic point of view? With prosthetics? With changing attitudes to bodily difference (we no longer regard physical disability as a sign of divine disapproval …)? Or perhaps with the play’s imagery: he’s variously described as a spider, boar, wolf, and “poisonous bunch-backed toad”?

Alexander:
In the first week of rehearsal Tony Sher (who played Richard) and I were taken to the Wardrobe Department to find that all previous humps had been lined up for our inspection, and we were invited to choose between Ian Holm’s hump, Alan Howard’s lump, Norman Rodway’s hump, etc. etc. We politely said we’d like our own hump. In fact there were three humps used in performance; one worn for the majority of scenes; one under the armor for the battle with a specially designed slit for Richmond’s sword as he ritualistically plunged it deep into Richard’s back as he knelt praying; and a third hump (very detailed and realistic, and very expensive!) as he
and Lady Anne knelt, backs to the audience, during their wedding, stripped naked to the waist as was the custom. I inserted the wedding ceremony, which is not in the play, asking our composer Guy Woolfenden to write a dramatic piece of wedding music closely modeled on
Carmina Burana
. He never stopped worrying about being sued by Carl Orff!

Beale:
Unusually for me I was very keen to get a visual image for him early on. I’m not usually concerned that early on about how I look, but in this case I did want to get an image of him. I suppose that’s the nature of the part because you’ve got to face the question of his disability. I didn’t actually use so much of the spider, boar, wolf, toad imagery as the nature of his job. I had this idea that he should look like a retired American footballer. A soldier who had gone to seed. It was his job before that was important for me—that he should look massive and muscled, old muscle. I had a body suit with a hump put in, as a lot of Richards do, and gradually realized that it was looking like a toad. We just happened to slip into one of the images for him, which was quite interesting. And it was picked up on by people that I looked like a toad. But it came from his work as a soldier rather than anything from the imagery of the play. I knew that we were going to do a broadsword fight—although it wasn’t a period production in the design sense, they fought with broadswords at the end—so I wanted the heavy look of someone who was used to wielding a broadsword, with huge shoulders. The hump just became a continuation of those muscles on his back.

Piper:
The starting point really had to be with the actor (Jonathan Slinger) and how he wanted to approach the part, rather than imposing any ideas of how he might be disabled. Jonathan was keen to explore a journey in the character through his route from third son of York to eventual king. There is a brilliant monologue in
Henry VI Part 3
, where Richard first talks to the audience directly, in which he accepts his disabilities, which up to that point he has been keen to cover up, and starts almost to celebrate his deformity. We began by assuming that the young Richard would not have had any special clothes made, but at the same time would try to be quite dandyish and youthful, thrilled by the violence around him. He
sported a wolfish fur coat over a basic black robe, which did come from the bottled spider line, and a wig to cover a large birthmark over his temple. At the end of the monologue he ripped off the wig, exposing the vivid stain: “I am myself alone.” I did some research into spinal deformities and we created a hump that would be appropriate. It is dangerous to actually build up a foot to create a limp, so the limping and the withered arm are created through Jonathan’s movement. In
Richard III
he was in a contemporary black suit and polo neck (a reference to [Russian president] Putin), with a leg brace strapped over his trousers.

And psychologically? “Since I cannot prove a lover … I am determinèd to prove a villain” sounds like a “compensation” theory of character, doesn’t it? In defense of my client, m’lud, he may be a serial killer but you see he was a misfit as a child … that sort of thing?—or emphatically not?

Beale:
That was inevitably part of the psychological makeup, although I suspect that compensation behavior, which is what I probably did alight on, was as much to do with his relationship with his parents. I remember being very keen that in Richard’s mind his father was an adored figure, a hero figure. We ignored the
Henry VI
plays, but I just had the image of him as having had a relationship with a strong and powerful father who didn’t acknowledge his disabilities, but treated him as an equal with his other sons. That is in contrast of course with his mother. The scene when she lambasts him was about her revealing, consciously or unconsciously, what she has always felt about him, and what he, consciously or unconsciously, perhaps unconsciously, knew that she thought about him. It was a question of him realizing that she has always regarded him as some sort of diseased, malformed creature, as opposed to his brothers, and his father never thought that. That was what was going through my mind. He was hurt by it, but it wasn’t unexpected. It just confirmed what he’d always thought about his mother. So I think it was as much to do with the mother and the father as with him compensating for being deformed, although that is obviously an element of it. It’s a bit of simple bravado at the beginning. “I can do this, you just watch me.” I
remember during another production the director Roger Michell saying something to me that I 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.