SIMON HEFFER HINTERLAND

I’ve warmed to Laurence Olivier’s ‘Richard III’ – but it is still impossibly camp

Sadly, I am of the generation that knew all the parodies of Laurence Olivier playing Richard III before I saw his film of the play, which made it hard to take seriously. I watched the film, made in 1955 and directed by Olivier, the other day for the first time in about 40 years. I was relieved to find it less ridiculous than I had before, yet what I had not then been alert to, but now yells out of the screen, is just how impossibly camp it is.

Shot in Technicolor, with lavish costumes and props, it has shaped the ideas of millions about what England in the late Middle Ages looked like.

The cast is awesome: Sir Ralph Richardson plays the Duke of Buckingham and Sir John Gielgud is Clarence, who ends up in the prescribed butt of Malmsey after being cracked on the head by his murderers. A fourth theatrical knight, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, plays Edward IV, and a host of great British actors make up the rest of the cast: Claire Bloom (with whom Olivier had an affair during filming, having talked his wife, Vivien Leigh, out of having a role) is Lady Anne, her husband and father already murdered by Richard, but who somehow ends up marrying him; Stanley Baker ends the film with Richard’s crown on his head, as the

Earl of Richmond, who then becomes Henry VII; and stalwarts such as Clive Morton, Esmond Knight, John Laurie, Michael Gough and Patrick

Troughton pepper the minor roles.

Olivier had already played a rather straightforward Henry V (1944) and a somewhat absurd Hamlet (1948), a role for which he was then too old. (His hopes of raising the money to make a cinematic Macbeth never came to fulfilment.) Yet his Richard III had far more lukewarm reviews than either of them. Olivier’s much-parodied delivery is certainly striking, its staccato rasp perfect for someone that the playwright had wished to exude evil and unpleasantness. It is especially powerful, or ridiculous – depending upon one’s point of view – during his soliloquies, when he leans into the camera and takes the audience slyly and shamelessly into his confidence. The other three knights do not ham it up quite so much, but Gielgud teeters on the edge.

Where a critic as literal-minded as I am comes unstuck is at the Battle of Bosworth. Leicestershire itself was too built up for the scenes to be filmed there, so Olivier settled on a vast open space just outside Madrid, against a backdrop of mountains that one will not see driving down the A14. Why did he not film it in southern Ireland, as he had Henry V?

I am not an idolater of Shakespeare. Yet I liked the film more than when I saw it decades ago. Shakespeare himself took such liberties with the facts that no fiddling around with them