If you remember this play from studying it in your youth as being dry, dull, boring, and pretty much a waste of time if you like tension filled dramas, think again! This is a Richard the Third that is mean, nasty, evil, and closer to The Godfather than you might expect. Richard is sexy, he drives tanks, he shoots people, he manipulates events, he cracks jokes - he's everything your Gramma's Shakespeare wasn't. The setting is England, but this is far from a traditional treatment of the play. It plays the "what if..." game by asking 'what if the Nazis won WWII and England was now a fascist, monarchistic state? This gives us the great clothes, the cars, and the decorations that make the enactment so menacing, and therefore the story so effective to today's audiences. To see a bunch of guys sitting around a courtyard discussing what the king will have at his coronation ceremony is pretty dull, but this version has a whole different under-tone to the scene, in the same way that the restaurant scene in the Godfather does. A brilliant performance comes from Sir Ian, but don't miss the others'. Watch everyone; they're all worth it, as is the set, the cinametography, and everything else. Excellence oozes from every frame of this one. If you are a Shakespeare Purist and can only see it done in a traditional way, you will probably think it's far too contrived. But that's too narrow minded, in my view. See it because you like Shakespeare, see it because you hate Shakespeare, see it because you have never heard of Shakespeare. Just see the thing.
Review of Richard III
