Richard III., Shakespeare
Пермский академический Театр-Театр, Perm, Russia
"Heeres a good world, the while. Why whoes so grosse
That sees not this palpable deuice?
Yet whoes so blinde but sayes he sees it not?
Bad is the world, and all will come to naught,
When such bad dealing must be sene in thought."
Richard Gloucester is one of the most brilliant characters in Shakespeare's works. The secret of his charisma is in his direct relationship to the audience – a connection which Richard builds up right away, already with his first steps on the stage. The audience seems to be his only equal parner, his accomplice.
Richard guides the spectator through the plot, shows him his rise to power: how he kills, lies and manipulates, and how easily he achieves to make the other characters do, what he wants them to.
Shakespeare's Richards III is often defined as the personified evil. Usually we consider “evil” to be something outside ourselves, something which is not us, something disturbing, with which we have to fight or which we are afraid of. The image of ugly Richard Gloucester with his hump is one of the expressions of this distanced attitude to “evil” of ours. But Shakespeare also shows us another attitude towards “evil”: how we let it happen and by that - empower it – out of our own lust for profit, or because we neglect it, feeling too weak to resist it, or simply because we succumb to its charms.
Only in the end of the play we come to understand, that we ourselves became the major victim of Richard: holding our tongues we were watching the killer work with an amused smile on our faces.
starring: Mikhail Chudnov, Lydia Anikeeva, Natalya Makarova, Irina Maksimkina, Ilya Linovich, Dmitriy Vasev, Vladimir Ginzburg, Oleg Vihodov, Mikhail Orlov, Alexandr Sizikov, Evgeny Volkov, Ekaterina Piskasheva
director: Andreas Merz Raykov
stage design: Alexey Lobanov
costume design: Svetlana Matveeva
translation: Ekaterina Raykova-Merz