Richard III Casebook: Jennifer, Pacing

In our meeting with the director last week, he emphasized the need to trim down Richard III in order to make it more manageable for the modern stage. If the lines didn’t advance the action, reveal character, or show relationships, or if it they were repetitive, they were cut from the play. As the second-longest play after Hamlet, Webb - and many other directors -- are compelled to streamline.  However, the pacing of Richard III is vitally important to the overall operation of the play, and when I go see Webb’s production, I will be particularly interested in how he “advances the action” without losing the characters’ personalities and perspectives.

A good number of reviews of recent productions have complimented the speed with which the play moves, in spite of its long running time. “Posner directs this epic of evil with a sure hand and snappy pacing that holds the attention despite its length,” says a review of a San Diego production. “Briskly paced and sensibly edited, this ‘Richard III’ is relentless in its march towards its anti-hero’s tragic, self-inflicted destiny,” says a review of the most recent Chicago Shakespeare Theatre production of the play in 2009. No wonder Ian McKellan’s version (and others) have relied on militaristic motifs; the “marching” has a logical context. 

However, if the play goes too quickly, the modern audience will lose the sense of character and a clear understanding of why these people want each other dead. Webb explained that modern audiences don’t grasp the vital meaning of the various character names, so that information needs to be provided in other ways (sets, programs, additional lines, etc.). This has consequences. The 10 minute BBC cartoon version of Richard III certainly leaves a lot to be desired. More significantly, in a performance that was taken on the road by the Public Theatre’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit this August, the play was brutally cut down to 90 minutes. Charles Isherwood, the NewYork Times reviewer, was generous in nearly all respects, but took issue with the consequences of such pacing:

The abbreviated running time is naturally designed to appeal to audiences that rarely encounter Shakespeare . . . Still . . . shearing it in half inevitably makes for some uncomfortable shortcuts. While all the big set pieces are here . . . many scenes have been severely abbreviated or modestly refashioned. . . As a result the ambitious Richard dispatches foes and friends alike with a speed that is almost disorienting and on at least one occasion, a little confusing. 

Clearly, this production erred too much on the side of audience comfort/expectations and ended up damaging the play’s logical structure.

In contrast, a Richard without the powerful drive can reveal underlying weaknesses in the characterization. Of a controversial production at the Globe this past summer, reviewer Michael Billington of The Guardian said that “This is not the usual Richard: a symbol of active, energetic evil in the tradition of Olivier and Spacey. Instead [Mark] Rylance comes before us as a withdrawn, slightly apologetic figure as halting in speech as he is in gait.” However, this clashes with the “vituperation of the other characters” to the point that “Rylance's butter-wouldn't-melt-in-his-mouth approach to the role makes Richard's bad publicity a bit hard to explain.”

Therefore, the play must allow Richard to march through deaths and destruction, without inspiring us to lose count of the characters as quickly as he does. To pull from Dorothy Sayers’ novel Have His Carcase, “Richard [is] two men in one . . . One of ‘em’s a wormy, plotting sort of fellow and the other’s a bold, bustling sort of chap who chops people’s heads off and flies into tempers” (242-243) A good production will strike a balance between the two.