CINEMA-BRITAIN: ‘Richard III’ Becomes a Failed Fascist Satire

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Mar 12 1996 (IPS) - Pity William Shakespeare. To get modern audiences to see his spectacular, biased history of King Richard III, director Richard Loncraine and actor Ian McKellen have dressed the play up in pseudo-Nazi garb.

In their movie version of ‘Richard III’ — which, in a further humiliation, is credited to McKellen and Loncraine as writers, and simply “based on” Shakespeare’s classic — England is in its jazz era, and the villains drive tanks, smoke cigars and wear lots of black leather.

McKellen, a noted British stage actor, plays Richard effectively enough, as an understated, soft-spoken villain enticed by the power of evil. But all around him we see the mixed messages that are the result of confusing the machinations of medieval royalty with fascism.

Perhaps the most absurd sign of that confusion is when McKellen, about to be killed, snarls out the play’s most famous line, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” Actually, he is in a jeep when he is pleading for his horse, with machine-guns blazing around him.

The problem is a simple one: how to update Shakespeare, particularly to interest modern cinema-goers.

Actor-director Kenneth Branagh has handled the matter effectively in the past by bringing out racial or sexual dynamics that audiences in earlier decades had left understated.

Branagh’s recent work on a new version of ‘Othello’, featuring Laurence Fishburne as a proudly black Moor (in comparison with the black-faced Laurence Olivier in a previous version), gained new power — as well as a bizarre topicality given last year’s trial of similar jealous lover O.J. Simpson.

But ‘Richard III’, which drew much of its power simply from the sheer outrageousness of Richard’s murders as he kills his way to the English throne, gets more muddled the more topical it gets.

Some of the actors, notably Jim Broadbent as the treacherous Buckingham, rise to the challenge: Broadbent’s Buckingham is a leering, Goebbels-style figure, content to rise alongside his fascist master.

But other actors are updated in ways seemingly devised only to shock the viewer. Richard’s wife Anne, played by Kirstin Scott- Thomas, shoots heroin into her leg; Lord Rivers, played by Robert Downey Jr, enjoys being tied up by prostitutes. What it all means, beyond a critique of royalty in general, is unclear. (MORE)

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