The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Richard III comes to Perth Theatre
Perth Theatre, March 17-31
A good piece of Shakespeare should never alienate the converted or be offputting to potential new audiences. As Richard III prepares to do his Machiavellian thing at Perth Theatre, it’s something that the venue’s artistic director Lu Kemp believes in with a passion.
“A big thing for me is that I want people who have never seen Shakespeare before or who have no prior knowledge of this story to enjoy it as a piece. We certainly engage with the poetry and language of it but ultimately we are after clarity.”
A thriller with plenty of humour upon its pages, Richard III is the secondlongest play in the Shakespeare canon after Hamlet, but that hasn’t stopped generations of directors putting their particular spin on the work and a long list of renowned actors delivering their own take on the monarch.
Everyone from Al Pacino to Kenneth Branagh and Kevin Spacey to John Wilkes Booth ( the actor who assassinated Abraham Lincoln) have taken on this very juicy part.
“The reason that Kevin Spacey is interesting here is because, for its first two series, House Of Cards used the exact same structure that takes Richard to getting crowned,” notes Kemp.
“And that direct addressing by the main character to the audience is the same in both.”
The ultimate anti-hero, Richard III has the audience eating out of his palm from the very beginning and keeps us there until his crimes become too much for us to stomach.
He closes in on the crown he so covets with nothing and nobody (not even his own siblings) getting in the way of his vaulting ambition.
“We love him while we hate him,” admits Kemp. “We really enjoy his audacity and the choices he makes.
“Morality holds us back from making those kinds of choices in real life, whereas Richard is a man who initially is without conscience so we go on that trip with him. Then there is a moment when he breaks faith with the audience and they break faith with him, and it all shifts.”
As ever with a fresh Shakespeare adaptation, the temptation is to look for its modern relevance. With Richard making very overt power plays, it taps into our fears about the people who lead many nations and organisations today.
“We are in a world that is quite chaotic and we’re seeing canny players taking power because of that instability,” agrees Kemp.
“It’s absolutely something that we recognise, and one of the reasons that Shakespeare is still as popular and performed as it is today is that there’s so much in it that it can change with the times.”