Richard III review

While both Andoh and Hughes envisaged Richard as an outsider carving out a place for himself in a hostile world, Terry’s Richard is far less sympathetic. Here, she portrays him unambiguously as a sexual predator, constantly forcing himself into other people’s personal space, whispering threats and innuendo into their ears. The lightly reworked text strips out any reference to Richard’s physical appearance, along with most of his most famous lines. His speeches are scrambled together to reveal new angles, explicitly exposing his lies and contradictions. Instantly recognisable quotations from Trump are clumsily inserted into the dialogue, raising laughs and causing skin to crawl in equal measure.

Terry’s Richard is such a heightened, overbearing presence that everyone else feels muted by comparison. She leaps mercurially from one thought to the next, delivering lines as though in debate with her own troubled mind, sometimes sneering, sometimes fearful, always full of cruelty. Marianne Oldham gives a powerful performance as Elizabeth, clearly charting the bereaved mother’s journey from regal self-assurance to shattering grief to steely defiance. And stepping in at late notice to cover an injured Hayley Carmichael, Joanne Howarth is a dignified, witheringly dry Duchess of York.

While gives the show a breakneck pacing, enlivening the grim content with absurd visual humour and interrupting the action with muscular dance breaks where Richard’s court of boorish louts stamp and thrust. With a cast made up almost entirely of women, all the laddish swaggering and offhand, sexist remarks feel particularly pointed. Designer EM Parry clads the Globe’s facade in a cages of rusty orange wire, lending it an unfinished, industrial feel. A bloodstained trapdoor occupies a prominent spot, becoming a constant reminder of the fate awaiting those who stand in Richard’s way – throughout the production, bodies are unceremoniously dumped into the pit below, stripped of agency and dignity.

Although While’s strikingly modern style feels chaotic at times, this ambitious production offers an intriguing, under-explored angle on Richard’s familiar story.