Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is in the line for the throne if only the people before him would get out of his way. If they won’t – well, he can help with that…

Dav­id Lawrence (Richard) is glee­fully nasty. The audi­ence is made his con­spir­at­ors as he wreaks hav­oc through the lives of those around him. He behaves appallingly, then talks situ­ations around to his own advant­age, fin­ish­ing off by look­ing at us as if to say “Can you believe they fell for that?!”
Heart strings are tugged by three women Ania Upstill (Lady Anne Neville), Kirsty Bruce (Eliza­beth Wydville), and Bri­anne Kerr (Richard’s Mum). Kerr in par­tic­u­lar is very affect­ing and believ­able as someone who knows what is likely to hap­pen yet is power­less to stop it. The rest of the char­ac­ters are played by vari­ous mem­bers of the com­pany. There are also sev­er­al young addi­tions to the reg­u­lar cast who do really well in artic­u­lat­ing Shakespeare’s words. I par­tic­u­larly like the sar­cast­ic spin that Mia Van Oven (Prince Richard) and Mad­die Gillespie (Prince Edward) give to their lines.

We’re up in the dome space at BATS Theatre with a scaf­fold­ing tower at one end and the throne in among the audi­ence seats at the oth­er. There is a fam­ily tree set­ting out the links between all the char­ac­ters on the floor. The act­ors help­fully point to the vari­ous names when talk­ing about the fam­ily con­nec­tions. There are a lot of them, so this design device is very wel­come. A small raised area is off to the side with the wall covered by cur­tains. This is one of the spaces for the Bac­chanals cus­tom­ary polit­ic­al com­ment­ary. (You’ll laugh because oth­er­wise you’d cry.)

THE TRAGEDY OF KING RICHARD III is a fast scramble through the life of a man who does the most appalling things, yet gets away with it. Recom­men­ded.

  • RICHARD III, on at BATS Theatre until Sat­urday 31 Janu­ary 31 2015.