Psycho super-villain? No, he’s more of a naughty boy

Richard III (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon) Verdict: Not so tricky Dicky ★★★II

NOW is the winter of our shameful historical discrimination made glorious summer by this Royal Shakespeare Company production, which has cast disabled actor Arthur Hughes as the Bard’s childkilling villain Richard III.

For even though Shakespeare wasn’t in equal opportunities mode when he wrote his slanderous portrait of the medieval monarch, it is now officially unthinkable for a nondisabled actor to play the role.

The great performances of yore by actors from Laurence Olivier to Antony Sher (the late husband of the show’s director here, Gregory Doran) must now be consigned to the museum of cultural embarrassment.

And yet, the longer I watched the RSC’s ‘groundbreaking’ production, the less significant Richard’s disability became. The play boasts a fiendishly complicated plot in which Richard seduces the woman whose husband he has just murdered, has his own brother butchered, and turns on the two children he has interred in the Tower of London.

This is quite a charge sheet to lay at the door of a man’s disability. If Shakespeare had written the play today he would be destroyed on social media. What stands out is not so much Richard’s scoliosis, but that he’s a raging psychopath, from whom I’m happy to be separated by six centuries. Hughes, below, gives it his all. The actor, who has radial dysplasia, which has left him with a short right arm, is determined to prove himself a villain. But his default personality is not so much scheming monster as slightly naughty boy. He could surely be a trickier Dicky when sparring with other actors — including the seduction of Rosie Sheehy, as Lady Anne; and Kirsty Bushell, as the queen whose children he has had killed. Yet both women could have eaten him for breakfast. There are better parts out there for Hughes and I see no reason why he should be typecast in disabled roles.