If Richard has been undergoing something of a benign reassessment since being dug out of a Leicester car park, John Haidar’s angry production kicks the pendulum resolutely back to the familiar character of (Thomas More’s) Tudor vilification.

The production begins with an interpolation from Henry VI Pt 3 in which the old king is dispatched by Gloucester in the Tower, as a first step on his way to the throne. After this Henry troops his dolorous spirit across the stage collecting ghosts as they accumulate at the hands of Gloucester. Indeed it is a feature of Mr Haidar’s production that the past is ever present, finally doing for Richard in the build up to and during the battle of Bosworth as the ghosts congregate to finally mock the defeated tyrant.

Tom Mothersdale’s creation is a dark, impulsively malevolent thing.  A bustling, misshapen upstart, swooping around the stage like a balletic crab, his pincers jabbing and snipping at anything that gets in his way. He is an actor quite at home in his expressive body which, articulate as it is articulated, gives physical expression to a twisted mind. Today it’s an uncomfortable analogy of course, but actor and director go at it with purpose. Nonetheless he is at his best when we see in his expressive face, new, usually malicious thoughts, take shape.

As if the audience were his jury, he sets out to woo them with as much care as he gives to the wooing – carried out with some humour – of Lady Anne over the dead king’s corpse. Indeed dark humour is never far away in Mr Haidar’s conception. There is no nobility about this Richard, an upstart delighted and surprised at his own inexplicable power.  If one were to look for a weakness in the conception it is that it hangs on the deformity rather than fighting against it.

The sepulchral gloom of Chiara Stephenson’s tenebrous modern setting, unrelieved even by any sumptuary leavening, whacks the audience over the head with the notion that these were dark times. Perhaps the parallel with our own times is, in the same way that it is something of a mystery as to how this Richard achieved, all but briefly, his usurping goal, so it is similarly inexplicable how we came to be in the parlous state we are now in, with the collapse of political decency and any semblance of intellectual integrity. Dark times indeed when we allow ourselves to be seduced by things so palpably wrong.   ★★★★☆   Graham Wyles   7^th March 2019