Teacher: Vicente Forés
Course: Filología Inglesa
I
William Shakespeare, Richard III (adapted by
Chema Cardeña)
Directed by Chema
Cardeña
Juan Carlos Garés as
“Richard”
Amparo Vayá as “Reina
Elisabeth”
Carol Linuesa as “Buckingham”
Vicente Pastor as “Ratcliff”
Esther López as “Lady Anne”
Ismael Carretero as
“Clarence/Richmond”
Chema Cerdeña as
“Hastings”
Laura Useleti as “Reina
Margaret”
Alfonso
Tadeo as “Regidor en Escena”
L’Altre
Espai, Jueves 3 de Noviembre de
2005
In this play,
there are many characters, but the most important of them are Richard,
Ratcliff, Queen Elisabeth and Buckingham. The principal character is
Richard of
Gloucester, he is middle-aged, he is deformed and bad-looking and he has a
strong loud voice; Richard is a hateful person who has looked how his
brothers
have become very important people in their society, and he decides to
begin a
campaign to get the throne of England where he will pursuit and murder
all the
obstacles he find with the help of his alliances and treasons,
speacially with
Ratcliff and Buckingham; Ratcliff is a young man, he is well-dressed, not
bad-looking, but he is a very sinister man; he is a murderer, he is
allied with
Richard in his campaign to get his own profit; he will murder Clarence
in his
bath (and others), and he will be betrayed by people he thought were his
allies; Buckingham is a young man too, he is well-dressed and handsome,
he has
a soft voice that affirms the fact that he is a very charismatic person;
he is
an aristocratic who follows his own profit making and breaking alliances
with
many people, specially with Richard; Queen Elisableth is a young girl,
she is
very well-dressed (she is a queen) and pretty, she has a lovely voice,
but she
speaks with the agony of knowing the identity of her husband’s murderer
(Richard); she is always sad, but she won’t lose the strength to revenge
herself on Richard III (she has been engaged to him).
In the
play, the
stage is always changing: the lights have a lot of importace in this
play, they
are restrictly distributed around the stage making important visual effects
like the ilumination of the principal characters and the soft light of the
secondary ones, the horizontal lights of the plato, etc. We enter into a
dark
world with well-dressed (but very old-fashioned dresses) people, with many
illustrative decorations which are appearing and disappearing like a big
throne
(the throne of England), an enormous cross, the bath of Clarence’s
murder with
the bloody water, etc.
There are many
different scenes (the stage is always changing). We can see some great
scenes
like the excellent monologues of Richard (the interpretation of Juan Carlos
Garés was excellent) about his situation and his plans of future, the
scene of
the murder of Clarence at his bath, with the most negative reaction from the
masculine public, according to the nude body of Clarence (like the moment in
“Gestas de Papá Ubú” when Memnón wore a tanga in the battle), with a final
dialogue between the assassin (Ratcliff, with the excellent
interpretation of
Vicente Pastor) and the victim (Clarence), the curse that makes Queen
Margaret
to “the traitors of England”, or the fantastic dialogues of Buckingham (with
the excellent interpretation of Carol Linuesa, who was interpreting a
masculin
character).
This was a
great
play, an excellent adaptation of William Shakespeare’s playwright “Richard
III”.