Richard III has, Frankenstein-like, (indeed, Frankenstein-like) escaped from its creator, into the wilderness of a disturbing psychological and historical terrain. And it is of the essence of the play that its performers have given it life in a way that commentators have more often than not been unable to. —Edward Burns, 2006

Colley Cibber

Richard III has been a stalwart of the stage since its first performances in the late sixteenth century—indeed, it is the most continually performed of all of Shakespeare's plays. Richard Burbage, the preeminent tragic actor of Shakespeare's company, originated the role in 1593 and it remained one of his most popular creations. There is little documentation of revivals of Richard III during the seventeenth century, but in 1700 the English actor Colley Cibber adapted the play—adding lines from Richard II, Henry V and 3Henry VI, entirely reworking Shakespeare's original verse to "improve" the play for his contemporaries' tastes, cutting the very long text by more than two-thirds, and eliminating several major characters. Not until Sir Henry Irving's production in 1877 was Shakespeare's text, though still abridged, restored—but Cibber's play remained on English and American stages into the twentieth century.

Performing Cibber's text, the great eighteenth-century British actor David Garrick brought to this role a psychological depth so profound that it virtually revolutionized the conventions of tragic acting. One critic described this extraordinary performance of this brilliant 24-year-old actor:

The moment he entered the scene, the character he assumed was visible in his countenance; the power of his imagination was such that he transformed himself into the very man; the passions rose in rapid succession, and before he uttered a word, were legible in every feature of that various face... All was rage, fury, and almost reality.

The Romanticism of the early nineteenth century made for emotional responses to Richard III, culminating in the electrifying performance by one of England's greatest actors, Edmund Kean. Upon seeing Kean's fiery, passionate performance, the poet Lord Byron wrote: "Just returned from seeing Kean in Richard. By Jove! he is a soul! Life, Nature—truth, without exaggeration or diminution... Richard is a man and Kean is Richard."

The great Victorian actor Henry Irving, who acknowledged the influence of Kean's acting style upon his own, played Richard with Shakespeare's original text, finally abandoning Cibber at the end of the nineteenth century. Actor Charles Calvert's "Grand Historical Revival of The Life and Death of Richard III... perfect in correctness of detail and accuracy of mis-en-scène" was staged in 1870, on the eve of Napoleon III's anticipated invasion of Britain, in a production that emphasized a nascent democracy in Richard's eventual downfall.

A democratic spirit did not always greet performances of this time, however. The first black theater group in America, the African Company, opened in 1821 in New York with James Hewlet, and later the most celebrated black actor of his time, Ira Aldridge, in the title role of Richard III. The political terrorism of the play also finds a peculiar reflection in this period with Junius Brutus Booth's portrayal of Richard in 1817 at the London's Covent Garden, and throughout the United States in the years that followed. The English father of Abraham Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth, Mr. Booth made himself up to look like his predecessor Kean and was said to have lived the part of Richard so fully that he tried to kill Richmond on stage.

Edmund Kean as Richard III

Creating perhaps the best-known Richard of the modern era, Sir Laurence Olivier's virtuoso performance in 1944 at The Old Vic dazzled and chilled its war-fatigued audiences. With a false nose and cruel, sardonic voice, Olivier as Richard was "a bravura display of a hypnotic actor playing a hypnotic actor, for his king is a sly, resourceful master of the revels who woos and plays to the audience, while he manipulates all the characters in the drama," as one critic wrote. In 1955, Olivier directed and starred in the film of Richard III. Though it returned to parts of Cibber's text, this was still the first Shakespearean movie to have both color and sound, and the first Shakespeare film to be shown on television when it was aired by NBC in 1956. Four decades later it is perhaps the most widely recognized and lauded film interpretation ever made of a Shakespeare play.

Many contemporary directors, trying to distinguish theirs from Olivier, have presented a Richard who is the antithesis of Olivier's—less dramatic, less theatrical and more stoic and witty. Tyrone Guthrie opened the new Stratford Festival in Canada in 1953 with Alec Guinness in the title role. Guinness portrayed a Richard characterized more by his mordant wit and crass behavior than by a hypnotic, villainous power. As one critic put it, "Despite his hunchback and his withered arm, his grotesque shadow that he hates, he's no monster. He's a wily, sly and ruthless man, virile, comic and quite charming at times; grubbily intelligent."

In the 1984 Royal Shakespeare Company production, Antony Sher finally laid to rest the ghost of Olivier's virtuoso performance with his highly physical approach to the role. The costuming for his character included a pair of spindly crutches, which Sher used to underline Richard's theatricality—the debilitation of his deformity became yet another act he could put on as needed. The insect-like look was completed by long sleeves that trailed off Sher's medieval-influenced black silk tunic. Taken with the crutches and Sher's own thin legs, the effect was of a six-legged creature, the "bottled spider" of the text. Seizing on this metaphor, as well as Shakespeare's other abundant animal imagery, Sher played Richard as part animal, part spider, part man. One critic wrote:

Mr. Sher gives the most mesmerizing, mischievous performance of a lifetime. Never before (not even in the Olivier film) have I felt a sense of loss when the evil genius, the gargoyled toad who closes the curtain on the Plantagenets, is eliminated. Somehow it is fitting that clear-faced Henry Richmond, in the act of becoming the first Tudor monarch, should stab the horseless, dying Richard in the back, the sword seeming both crucifix and stake, the exorcism of Dracula.

Junius Brutus Booth as Richard III

A later RSC production from 1995, featuring David Troughton in the title role, also played on the metaphors Richard uses in the text, this time transforming Gloucester into a self-appointed jester version of the morality figure of Vice. Instead of leading an army to Bosworth, Troughton's Richard led a carnival-style brass band into battle. The jester role further emphasized Richard's theatricality in a production that frequently acknowledged the audience's experience viewing the play by exposing dramatic conventions, like re-setting a scene in full-lighted view of the audience, and aligning the "omniscient" auditorium audience with the few characters, such as the ghosts and the Duchess of York, who see through Richard's charade.

In 1960 a Polish production of Richard III served as a vehicle for the formulation of Shakespearean critic and scholar Jan Kott's groundbreaking theory of "The Grand Mechanism" in Shakespeare's history plays—a theory that presented history as an essentially endless but meaningless process. Director Jacek Woszczerowicz portrayed Richard as a philosopher and a catalyst through which to measure the dark side of human nature that creates history. The play became a parable about the struggle for power, its consequences, and its destructive impact on the weak and deficient nature of man. Richard is given Richmond's words at the beginning of the play, and the final repetition reveals the "good and honest" Richmond to be nothing more that Richard's double, who will repeat his gestures and crimes in the years to come. In the production's opening and closing moments, iron bars appeared on four sides of the stage, confining the men of the play within the Grand Mechanism of Power, where they are left to die, sacrificed to sustain the Mechanism's existence.

Peter Hall and John Barton's 1963 Wars of the Roses, as well as Adrian Noble's 1988 The Plantagenets, were adaptations of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III—performed together, they highlighted the historical context of Richard's story. The Wars of the Roses commented upon the ever-shifting ground of both personal values and political machinations. With a pared-down script eliminating many of his asides, the character of Richard was portrayed downplaying his rhetorical flair—a minimalist take that disappointed some critics, but supported Hall and Barton's interpretation that terrible wrongdoing in the guise of politics can be committed by "any man in any age." Richard's ascent became what Peter Hall called a "classic coup d'état."

Again drawing a political parallel, Ian McKellen starred in a 1990 production at the Royal National Theatre in London that transposed the setting to a fictionalized 1930s England, with Richard as a Hitler-like fascist king. The New York Times review noted, "Neither a crookback nor sexually overheated, Mr. McKellen's king is a stunning antiheroic alternative to the archetypal Olivier image." In 1995, a film version of the same concept with a screenplay penned by McKellen opened in movie theaters worldwide, offering a commentary on current political events—not unlike what Shakespeare offered to his audience in writing the play. Chicago film critic Michael Wilmington praised McKellen's performance, but added that "the under-two-hours mass movie format…strips [the famous quotes] from their context like TV sound bites. So condensed is the drama, that Richard seems to be racing through his crimes, like a man on destiny's stopwatch." The star-studded cast included Annette Benning as Queen Elizabeth, Robert Downey, Jr. as her brother Lord Rivers, Nigel Hawthorne as Clarence and Maggie Smith as the Duchess of York. McKellen's website has a detailed history of the production, including the complete screenplay.

Sir Laurence Olivier as Richard III

Al Pacino's 1996 film Looking for Richard, documenting his three-year investigation into the play, is widely regarded as an insightful exploration of the art of acting as well as of the play itself. By featuring actors like Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey and Winona Ryder from a behind-the-scenes perspective and intercutting scenes of the play with vignettes of the actors' experience, the film makes a larger statement about Shakespeare's enduring place in popular culture and art. A comprehensive review from Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture focuses on Pacino's passion for Shakespeare and the film's effectiveness as both film and marketing tool for Shakespeare. The most surprising recent development of Richard III on film has been the rediscovery of a 1912 version, the oldest complete American silent feature film.

In recent years, the play has been well mined for post-modern interpretations and modern parables. In the early 90s, Chicago's Footsteps Theatre staged the play as part of its all-female Classical Project. Other all-female productions followed at London's Globe Theatre as part of Mark Rylance's "Regime Change" season, which also featured an all-male production of that "other" Richard, Richard II. Incorporating more contemporary touches, a 2001 adaptation titled Richard 3 featured three individual and strikingly different looking actors playing the title role, as well as biohazard suits, rap music and video effects. During the coronation scene in a 2007 production at the Classic Stage Company in New York, paper flags bearing Richard's insignia were distributed for the audience to wave on cue, as they might at a presidential convention. Other productions have re-imagined the play as taking place entirely in a mental institution, in the board rooms and bowler hats of modern British businessmen, and in the 2009 adaptation entitled Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, among the shifting dynasties of a 21st-century Persian Gulf state.

Antithetical to the pervasive conspiring, posturing and violent male world of Richard III, its female roles have proved historically problematic in production. Starting in Cibber's day with the obliteration of Margaret, in production the female roles have been cut entirely, constricted or condensed from multiple parts into one. By 1984, the same production that featured Anthony Sher as a spidery, malevolent Richard cast Frances Tomelty as a particularly political Elizabeth. Rather than establishing her position as a more traditional outgrowth of grief and guilt, this post-feminist Elizabeth instead maneuvered for power in a way that reflected Richard's own ambitions. Her moral objections instead became machinations of a realpolitik sensibility shown in Act 4 as she physically circled, and finally settled into the throne as Richard pressed for a union with her daughter. Elizabeth inverted the power structure, using her own sexuality to bind her commitment to Richard and impose her own expectations onto the deal.

The role of the ghosts has been as variously interpreted in performance as the roles of the play's women. The ghosts of Richard's battlefield dream have been seen as elements of the supernatural, sometimes drawn physically into the final confrontation with Richmond as arbiters from beyond the grave in Richard's downfall. The influence of modern psychology has represented Richard's victims' ghosts as manifestations of deep-seated guilt, physically helpless to impact the actions around them but powerful forces in Richard's unraveling and ultimate demise. In Barton and Hall's Wars of the Roses, the ghosts commiserated with Richard's impending defeat, instead of acting as harbingers of revenge or deserved justice—his victims perched around him, playing tag, cradling his head, embracing and kissing him. Sam Mendes (known for directing the films American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, and most recently, Away We Go) staged his ghosts similarly in a 1992 production, seating them along a conference table with wine and balloons, toasting first Richard and then Richmond, while an ominous and somewhat otherworldly Margaret looked on. Conversely, Michael Boyd's 2001 Richard III had the ghosts advance upon the sleeping king with violence, recreating the actions of their own murders against their murderer before returning to observe his death on the battlefield.

CST's previous production of Richard III, directed by Barbara Gaines at the Ruth Page Theatre in 1996, featured the ghosts appearing through a mirror, replacing Richard's unguarded gaze at his own reflection with a horde of victims loosed from the flames of hell, created by scenic designer Alex Okun, resident designer with the Moscow Art Theatre and son of the stage designer for the Moscow Circus, and lighting designer Kenneth Posner. Described by the Chicago Sun-Times as "the form, literally, of a vast ship of state, with a raw wood deck and trap doors and a great expanse of overhead beams," Okun's set reflected the emotional territory of the play, capturing sculptural images of the different settings by manipulating these static elements, where visual tricks were key to creating the spiritual world on stage. Ms. Gaines' production placed a greater importance on the women of Richard III, who as Newcity noted were "nicely foregrounded in a play too often produced as if the ladies are mere props for all the macho posturing." The audience was drawn into the experience of the women, as when Richard exposed his unsightly hump to Lady Anne, inviting both her and the silent spectators beyond to empathize with the agony of his deformity.

While Richard III has changed considerably in its four hundred-plus years on stage, from melodramatic spectacle and psychological examination to historical epic and post-modern pantomime (including at least one "equestrian" production from 1880), Richard himself has never ceased to intrigue directors and audiences alike—he is, and will remain, the villain we love to hate.

– Contributed by the CST Education Department