Here’s a headline which literally stopped me in my tracks — twice. See if you can see where:
Actress cast as Richard III? I thought casting men as women went out in the seventeenth century, but since when did casting women as men become a thing? (As an aside, how will Dickless III play the seduction of Lady Anne in Act I Scene 2 without the audience breaking into uncontrollable laughter?)
And no, by all means play the hunchbacked king as a non-impaired man, which will make the “poisonous bunch-backed toad” line (among many other such insults in the play) completely meaningless. Fucking hell; why not just play Richard III as a frog, and have done with it?
Then again, this is Britishland, home of The Bard, where I once walked out of a dreadful performance of Macbeth (at the Barbican Theatre, by the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the halfway point.
So anything’s possible. Expect to see a guest appearance by Willy Wonka or David Beckham in footballer kit during the final battle scene, where “Richard” utters the immortal line:
“A purse! A purse! My queendom for a purse!”
Dear me. The formerly Great Britain is but dust on the seas. This I might expect from small dungeon bound playwright below Edinburgh castle during tourist season, but not the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Lost I say! Nowadays it is indeed “My kingdom for some quid” eh? Long suffer Charlie III, may he soon begone.
This is all God’s punishment for failing to suppress The Beatles.
.
Make that “the Rolling Stones”, and you’ve got my vote.
Funny – I think about Richard III a lot these days as our monuments are being torn down and we celebrate black (fictional) history month.
The play was an Elizabethan era rewriting of history. Shakespeare knew which bums to kiss so he depicted the guy who’s crown Elizabeth’s grandfather usurped as a monster. Turns out his spine was a bit bent, but he was still England’s last warrior-king and cut his way to within a few feet of Henry before being killed.
I abhor these adaptations of the works of Shakespeare. I want the traditional dialogue, sets and costumes.
It’s called acting, FFS! Does anyone interviewed for that article think that Bela Lugosi or Frank Langella had the “lived experience” of being a vampire in order to portray Dracula on stage?!? If they stage Oedipus Rex, will the actor (actress?) portraying Oedipus actually gouge out their eyes in the last act, then? Lord, I hope multiple parallel universes exist, so that I can be reassured that there’s a sane universe out there where this nonsense isn’t happening.
That whole kerfluffle was nauseating, on the part of both sides. The cripples union doesn’t believe in acting, and the wokes would have no qualms rewriting the script to where Richard was actually a superwoman in disguise, not a tough disabled guy fighting above his weight.
One of these days the wokes are going to poke someone in their cultural eye, as they love to do, and lose a hand doing it.
I will cheer.
Actresses have been playing Hamlet for some decades, often quite well…or so I’m told. Maybe her interpretation of Richard won’t be conventional, but I wouldn’t discard it out of hand. If she try’s to portray all the twisted aspects as internal, and can pull it off, it might be interesting.
It’s people like you wot causes unrest.
I sure HOPE so.
But probably not in the people I’d most like to.
Is the actress black? Why not?
If I may offer a contrarian opinion: Linda Hunt played the part of Billy Kwan in “The Year of Living Dangerously” – a politically shaky film, to be sure, but she played it well enough to win multiple awards.
In point of fact, when I think of that film, her performance is the only thing I really remember.