Richard III as Soap Opera: Or, Petty Conspiracy Plots and Catfights (Cody)

 While attending the IU production of Richard III last Friday, I was somewhat displeased by the play’s very literal translation/adaptation of this Shakespearean classic into a modern “biker world.”  As the program notes, “This production uses a biker world to provide, according to Gavin Cameron-Webb, ‘an immediate context for the audience.  The Wars of the Roses can be fairly described as gang wars.  Also, the nobles of the time appeared to behave like thugs.”  The problem, of course, with this transhistorical association is that it effaces the historical relevancy of the noble classes in Medieval England—the “modern” biker world is, in terms of socioeconomic and sociopolitical hierarchies, far from being commensurate with social class designation of “nobility” in 15-century England.  For me, as I was unable to reconcile this transhistorical difference in social class signification, this particular production’s re-presentation of Richard III became incongruous since the association seemed arbitrary or inappropriate insofar as Cameron-Webb’s only reasoning for creating a “biker world” seems to be on the basis of ostensible gender “universals”—i.e. that brutish masculinity is roughly translatable across time and space. It is within this transhistorical universalizations of gender and masculinity that made this productions adaptation seem, to me, very literal and more or less banal.

Thus, as a antidote to this sort of modernization and as a strategy for satirizing the general plot of Richard III—which, from a “postmodern” perspective, I find to be equally banal—I prefer the association of this “tragedy” with the melodrama of soap opera.  If we are to “modernize,” or even “post-modernize,” a text, I find that such form of translation must move away from simple transhistorical associations that seek to provide a contextual framework and means of identification for the audience and, instead, move toward a re-presentation that seeks a transhistorical critique (of gender, race, class relations, for example).  Accordingly, I am specifically interested in Richard’s opening soliloquy as commensurate with soap opera’s trope of (familial) backstabbing and in the play’s concluding battle as an epic-battle-cum-catfight that mirrors soap opera’s ubiquitous melodramatic struggles for greater social economy and status (or, rather, soap opera mirrors the Shakespearean social antagonisms and conflicts).  Enter Alexis Carrington from Dynasty, a modern Richard in her ruthlessly conspiratorial zeal.

(For this clip, skip ahead to 7:11 when Alexis backstabs her sister, Caress.)

(Krystle confronts Alexis after the discovery that Alexis had caused Krystle's previous miscarriage by intentionally startling her horse with a gunshot.) 

In soap operas, we find practically everything we find in Richard III (expect for good writing): family members conspiring against each other, contrived and aggrandized scenes of heterosexual wooing, violent battles and murder, elaborate family trees and extensive character lists, embodied ghosts . . . the list goes on.  There is equally the melodrama that comes with depictions of the “plight” of the upper classes, of royalty and nobles, of wealthy oil magnates in Denver. As such, unlike our local production of Richard III, an association of this play with soap operas, in particular with Dynasty, maintains the context of social class and, more importantly, an implicit social critique of the upper classes.