“RIII”

    William Shakespeare, “Ricardo III”, Arden Productions,

      Chema Cardeña’s adaptation.

    Cast:

       -Richard:  Juan Carlos Garés

       -Reina Elizabeth: Amparo Vayá

       -Buckingham: Carol Linuesa

       -Ratcliff: Vicente Pastor

       -Lady Anne: Esther López

       -Clarence/Richmond: Ismael Carretero

       -Hastings: Chema Cardeña

       -Reina Margaret: Laura Useleti

       -Regidor en escena: Alfonso Tadeo

    04 in November in 2005, L’altre Espai (C/ Platero Suárez, 11)

 

    Characters:

     -Richard: He is an ambitious, egoist, corrupt, envious, vigorous, jealous and mean person. He has a horrible physical aspect. He has a deformed body with an useless arm. He is an hunchback man and walks limping.

     -Elizabeth Queen: She feels and shows herself in a different way in two different moments of the play. First she is nice, but, when she suffer the pain in the soul, she try to liberate it with an strong and aggressive language. 

     -Buckingham: strong army man, interested, corrupt, intelligent.

     -Ratcliff: servant of Richard. Bloodthirsty, corrupt, loyal, submissive.

     -Lady Anne: innocent, sweet, submissive, sensitive.

     -Clarence: brother of Richard.

     -Richmond: rival of Richard

     -Margaret Queen: She is a old dethroned, aggressive with the language and painful woman. Her movements are slow and she needs a stick to walk, however she has force enough to say conjures to the rest of the characters and “bad saying” them. She is always carrying a book which symbolizes the Bible.

 

Plot

         The play RIII, by William Shakespeare, develops the way in which Richard of  Gloucerster, the main character, takes the throne of England away from his brothers who are enjoying it after a long civil war.

         The play begins with an intriguing and strong music in an empty stage while several lights focus, in an individual way, the different characters who are placed at the bottom of the stage. At the same time, Richard appears in scene saying an introductory monologue. With this monologue, the characters are going holding that empty space and they are little to little going developing the plot.

         First Richard revels, after he is going ascending and, at the end, he falls.

         To get his objective, Richard uses different strategies. He manipulates, with all kind of puns, the rest of the characters:

-he uses the weakness of Lady Anne. He gets married her after persuading her in the weaker, pitied and painful moment of her life because of the murder of her husband. She’ll accept Richard in spite of being he who killed her husband.

-he uses the intelligence of Buckingham to plan what they have to do to get the power. Buckingham helps him by change of some properties.

-he uses the loyalty of Ratcliff to kill all of people that are a problem to get the power.

-he uses the innocence of Clarence who is arrested and shunted in a high tower to be murdered under the orders of Richard and Clarence thinks that Richard will go to save him.

-he also uses Elizabeth Queen to get married with her daughter. She offers her to him. She needs to save her children who are shut in the tower. However Richard kills them.

-he has a contempt attitude with Margaret Queen. Her interventions in the play are to talk about the corrupt actions that the rest of the characters do. They took the throne of England away from her and she is continually “bad saying”, because of her painful, with an special, strong and heavy vocabulary and puns.

 

         All of these actions of murdering, lieing, deceiving, despising, betraying, etc, are always justified and allowed under the word of God. The actions aren’t property of the characters, but also the words are done by God. All of them use, in some specific moment, the Bible. The characters even directly read as if the words be themselves.

 

OPINION

         After my personal valuation up there explained, I would stand out that the play show us that finding the power by every price, the ambition taken to its most level, only finds the destruction and the death with which I am absolutely of course.

         Finally, I would stand out as an anecdote that some people of the audience was slept during some moment of the performance.  

Consuelo Hernández Rubio    Group B