Repertory’s 2015 production of William Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of King Richard the Third coincides with the ceremonial burial of the remains of the real King Richard III, which were found beneath a car park in Leicester in 2012, more than 500 years after the death in 1485 of the last English king to be killed in battle.
Director Julian Anderson’s concept for the play is “to allow the man to emerge from the propaganda surrounding the king and to put the Richard which later historians have discovered back into the play and make it, as Shakespeare wrote…The TRAGEDY (note, NOT history) of King Richard the Third”.
No hunchbacked comic villain then, for this production of Richard III explores the nuances of Shakespeare’s text informed by established historical fact, so that the audience has to make up its own mind as to whether Richard really was the ambitious murderer he is often portrayed as, or a worthy and noble, even heroic – albeit often misrepresented – king of late medieval England.