Over the years, Beijingers have seen famous conductors and world-class dance companies streaming in and out of the city – but as for theatre, celebrity players choose other stages on which to strut and fret their hours. That is, until now. This month, China’s capital hosts The Old Vic’s much-lauded Bridge Project, which pairs up actor Kevin Spacey and director Sam Mendes for a modern version of Shakespeare’s Richard III.
One of today’s more versatile actors, Spacey is best known for Academy Award-winning film work such as The Usual Suspects and American Beauty. However, in 2004, he took over as artistic director of London’s The Old Vic, and with Mendes formed the Bridge Project, a three-year transatlantic collaboration that volleys classics across the pond.
‘Spacey has done a wonderful job of bringing quality theatre back to The Old Vic,’ says Paul Stebbings, founder and director of TNT Theatre, an international Shakespeare-focused touring company. ‘It’s great when a film actor realises that stage acting is more satisfying and does something about it. I salute him!’
Richard deals with one of literature’s most deliciously evil anti-heroes. A hunchback with a withered arm, he laments his inability to engage in dancing and romancing and avows villainy instead. His crimes are magnificent and many: he plots to have his brother, George of Clarence, imprisoned and murdered, and woos the widow Lady Anne even as she is wailing over her father-in-law’s casket. Richard freely admits to murdering both the men in her life, claiming her beauty drove him to it, but later poisons her so as to marry his niece. Protectorate to his young nephews, he has them both killed, ‘reluctantly’ crowns himself king, and then continues to slay a series of potential rivals. The five-act drama concludes with Richard dying on the battlefield, but not before uttering one of The Bard’s most famous lines: ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’
Reality, of course, tells a different tale; hindsight has cast Richard as history’s greatest victim of British propaganda. For starters, his loyalty to King Edward IV was steadfast, while his ‘honourable’ brother George kept switching sides. Unlike the famously debauched Edward, Richard lived a clean, almost prudish life in a reasonably happy marriage; there is no proof his wife was poisoned, and when advisors suggested the incestuous second union, he recoiled in disgust. Most writings of the time describe this ‘poisonous, bunch-backed toad’ as handsome but small of stature – true, some mention uneven shoulders, but doubts linger as to which was higher (subsequent portraits were doctored). And even his detractors praise his bravery on the battlefield – clearly his ‘deformed, unfinish’d’ figure never hampered his physical activity.
However, Richard did seize power, and the two princes did disappear from their Tower apartments. Though the Richard III Society offers alternative theories, most historians believe that the king ordered his nephews killed, a rash act he most likely regretted. While murdering royal rivals was considered inevitable, slaying children was beyond the pale – and Tudor propagandists nurtured these seeds of doubt into full bloom.
But it was Shakespeare who planted the garden, thus transforming himself from reliable playwright to literary genius. True, the real King Richard was an ambitious politician, but theatregoers find monsters more fun to watch. ‘Richard [the character] has a decided bent towards sexual kinkiness and relentless gusto, as he surges from victim to victim seeking ever more power,’ says Joseph Graves, artistic director of Peking University’s Institute of World Theatre and Film. ‘[He] seduces us as surely as he does Lady Anne.’
Stebbings reminds us that it was Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather who killed him at the Battle of Bosworth. ‘This is political theatre that draws on medieval religious plays where the devil was the most entertaining character,’ he says. ‘And Richard was a devil.’ A devil that, by all accounts, Spacey was born to play. Theatre of this calibre is not often seen on these shores, and abject villainy always promises a great night out. Not to be missed.