The logical progression of this idea was a scenic world of mobile surgical screens and a pivotal operating table that contorted into a throne, tomb or warhorse. A functional zip-up tower from a builder’s merchants became ‘the bloody Tower’ complete with a range of DIY tools of mass destruction and the whole space framed by contemporary trussing that supported the occasional use of a full-height, slashed, plastic abattoir curtain. The design was therefore more of a psychological space than any geographical location but constantly counterpointed by the anchor point for Propeller’s history cycle, an ubiquitous flagpole and cross of St George.
Richard III can at times read as a tragic-comedy as much as a warped historical commentary and it certainly plays like that on stage. It’s an entertaining sideshow of gothic horror but also a warning shot across England’s bows. If handled deftly, design has the ability to reflect the clash of themes and tones that Shakespeare composes by making references to recognisable icons that appear and evaporate hopefully before the audience loses its faith in a familiar image (cliché?) and therefore the production’s credibility. The restlessness of the history plays is a set and costume designer’s gift to make visual triggers that affirm our collective memory, and make it a fleeting but powerful reality.
Michael Pavelka
Scenic design for Richard III
Music in Richard III
Propeller’s music is either written by the company or sourced from music we know. We play or sing our suggestions to Edward Hall, and he decides what goes into the production, and at what point in the play. Having adapted Rose Rage from the Henry VI plays, Edward wanted Richard III to have a similar soundscape – English choral music, especially madrigals and church music – and, as I used to sing in a cathedral choir, I ended up arranging and co-ordinating most of the music.
I wanted to give Richard III the feeling of a Requiem Mass. The Dies Irae, a thirteenth-century Latin poem about Judgement Day, used to be recited at Catholic funerals, and we sing arrangements of the original plainsong tune to underscore executions and curses – ‘A day of wrath that day will be, when the age will dissolve into dust.’ We are also using the final words of the poem, Pie Jesu, to book-end the production – ‘Blessed Lord Jesus, grant them eternal rest.’
Most of our music for Richard III has been chosen because the lyrics seem appropriate to the play, but I have also tried to focus on two musical themes: descending scales and semi-tone intervals.
Edward initially said to me that this production might track Richard’s descent into hell, so descending scales were an obvious choice: Down among the dead men, an eighteenth-century British folk tune and our theme for the murderers, repeats the word ‘Down’ as the pitch descends; Locus Iste, a nineteenth-century motet by Bruckner, underscores various scene changes in the first half and has an eerie bass line which descends chromatically (Irreprehensibilis est); our modern arrangement of Dies Irae at Buckingham’s death uses the same downward chromatic scale but with higher voices.
Chromaticism and the juxtaposition of semi-tone intervals (i.e. notes that are very close in pitch) are central to modern harmony. My brother and I were both choir boys, and we used to play out our sibling rivalry by one of us singing a note, and the other singing the semi-tone next to it: the resultant discord forced one of us to change note. I wanted to use the same modern, semi-tone discords to reflect the rivalry of Richard and Richmond for the crown.
For Richmond ‘the Welshman’, we use a traditional Welsh hymn tune (Judge Eternal, throned in splendour, Rhuddlan), complete with nineteenth-century lyrics about ‘purging the realm’ and ‘cleansing the nation’ – disturbing words to us in the modern era. Hopefully, in my harmony arrangement the semi-tones clashing and resolving enhance this ambiguity in Richmond’s character – morally disturbing, yet beautifully persuasive. The older songs we sing too, Now is the Month of Maying (a fifteenth-century madrigal by Thomas Morley) and the Coventry Carol (from a sixteenth-century mystery play depicting King Herod’s massacre of innocent children) both oscillate between major and minor keys, hinging around a semi-tone difference in harmony, with the result that the listener feels either delightfully surprised or deeply unsettled.
Jon Trenchard
This Edition
This is a radically shortened version of Shakespeare’s longest play other than Hamlet. Of the two original texts, a Quarto (1597) and the First Folio (1623), this edition follows the Folio with a few readings from the Quarto, and incorporates the Folio’s stage directions into ours wherever possible. Our text also includes some lines from Henry VI, Part 3 for narrative continuity. We are very grateful to Angie Kendall for her help in preparing it.
Edward Hall and Roger Warren
Richard at Bosworth
The Murder of Clarence
Queen Margaret, the Duchess of York and Queen Elizabeth with the heads of the Princes
Characters
RICHARD Duke of Gloucester, later King Richard III
GEORGE Duke of Clarence, his brother
KING EDWARD IV, also his brother
QUEEN ELIZABETH, Edward’s wife
LORD RIVERS, her brother
LORD HASTINGS
SIR RICHARD RATCLIFFE
LADY ANNE
DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM
QUEEN MARGARET, widow of King Henry VI
SIR WILLIAM CATESBY
TWO MURDERERS
DUCHESS OF YORK, Richard’s mother
SCRIVENER
DUKE OF NORFOLK
LORD STANLEY
EARL OF RICHMOND, his stepson
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