Theatre Review: Richard III at the West Yorkshire Playhouse

AFTER working together on Untold Stories back in the summer, Director Mark Rosenblatt is reunited with lead actor Reece Dinsdale playing the titular role in this modern adaption of Richard III. Rosenblatt’s Richard is a far cry from romanticised portrayals of the controversial monarch seen early this year after the discovery of his bones prompted a rather belated funeral service. Rosenblatt’s Richard is closer to Richard Loncraine’s 1995 on-screen depiction. Loncraine placed Ian McKellen in an alternative England where fascism ruled. Here, in the Quarry Theatre, Dinsdale’s Richard also quite obviously takes inspiration from Hitler but transports him to an unspecified digital age, somewhere in the present.

Richard’s ascension and downfall during the War of the Roses is quickly both contextualised and summarised by a blood drenched stage, setting the play’s violent tone before Dinsdale even begins to deliver Richard’s famous opening lines. Conor Murphy’s modern stage design is both stark and striking. He presents Richard through a clinical stripped down traditional theatre in the round, shunting the action from battlefield to asylum, prison and operating theatre. In design, he’s the David Cronenberg of the stage.

The action plays out on a bare circular stage with few props and Sinead McKenna’s circular light rigs invasively illuminating the stage, adding to the play’s increasingly menacing atmosphere. Coupled with Jon Nicholls’ eerie soundscape of security gates shutting, whispering plotters and amplified heartbeats, this modern re-imagining of Richard III is undoubtedly an unnerving watch from start to finish.

Playing Alan Bennett Dinsdale was faultless but as Richard he makes for a cartoonish villain. Despite him wiping out all who threaten his position or stand in his way, Dinsdale’s Richard is both funny and shocking, inspiring both laugher and disgust. Kitted out in a suit with a stick and orthopaedic boot to depict Richard’s infamous deformities, Dinsdale captivates his audience throughout, impressively remembering an awful lot of lines but not always mastering their delivery, occasionally being a tad over-zealous.

Supporting cast play multiple roles which at times makes it difficult to follow who is plotting what. This is made all the more tricky by sections of the dialogue being conveyed through a variety of different modern mediums such as phone messages or a dictaphone recording used as evidence of treason. Some other lines are obscured by creepy discordant background sounds, making it easy to miss plot intricacies, such as Richard’s opening exchange with his brother, Clarence (Dale Rapley).

Rosenblatt’s Richard lacks but this may not entirely be his fault but a weakness in his source material. While Richard III undoubtedly boasts some of Shakespeare’s greatest lines and a fascinating charismatic rogue at its core, it is also one of his longest plays and similar in content/themes to many of his other much more engaging works. Rosenblatt’s Richard drags in the first half but picks up pace in the second; although not perfect, Dinsdale is extremely watchable and Murphy’s bold set design perfectly complements Shakespeare’s grim autopsy of a broken nation exploited by a paranoid power-hungry man desperate to prove a point and make his mark.

Richard III shows at the West Yorkshire Playhouse until October 17.

by Leo Owen