Trusting the Words: Patsy Rodenburg, Laurence Olivier and the Women of Richard III
King’s College London
Patsy Rodenburg is well known as one of the most distinguished voice coaches in international theatre, but for some thirty years she has also been Head of Voice at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 2011 she directed her final year students in a production of Richard III at the Bridewell Theatre, in London. It was a production about which she had been thinking for several years, and had tried out earlier in workshops with senior actors in New York.1 It gave her the scope to demonstrate the fundamental principles of her practice: that actors and directors should trust the text and speak it well.2 For Rodenburg, this meant keeping the shape of the play intact (albeit some 900 lines had to be cut) and, in particular, keeping the adult female characters – Lady Anne, Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess of York, Queen Margaret – and their scenes.
I want here to compare Rodenburg’s work with one of the few productions that can truly be called iconic: Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film Richard III. I do so not in any sense that one approach is ‘correct’ and another ‘wrong;’ rather, I hope to demonstrate the infinite adaptability of the Shakespearean text – conscious that, as James J. Marino writes, ‘Early modern plays were never finished; they were merely sent to the printers.’3 The comparison shows the development in Shakespearean performance over the half-century or so between the two productions, much of it attributable to Rodenburg’s influence.
As the opening credits acknowledge, Olivier’s film included ‘interpolations’ by David Garrick and Colley Cibber. He introduced the silent character of Jane Shore (Pamela Brown), and he cut characters, including Queen Margaret. These interventions were not frivolous but were justified by his views on how to direct: ‘If you are going to cut a Shakespeare play, there is only one thing to do – lift out scenes. If you cut the lines down merely to keep all the characters in, you end up with a mass of short ends.’4
Olivier based the film on his successful stage production, which had opened in London in 1944 and later toured to Australia. As has been widely acknowledged, this film was close to the theatrical presentation, so much so that the cinematographer, Otto Heller, was initially asked to reproduce theatrical lighting effects and the stage blocking was sometimes preserved. 5 On the whole, the stage cast including John Gielgud (Clarence) and Ralph Richardson (Buckingham) was retained, but there was one significant change: instead of Vivien Leigh, who had played Lady Anne in London and on tour, Olivier cast a relative newcomer, Claire Bloom. Bloom, in her memoir Leaving a Doll’s House, states that Olivier’s approach to her was completely unexpected.6 However, by 1954 Leigh was beginning to gain a reputation for unreliability, and the young Claire Bloom was ‘insurable’ as Vivien Leigh was not.7
Olivier saw Richard III as being a play entirely about Richard; thus, like Garrick, Cibber, and the great actors of the nineteenth century, the play was a vehicle for the lead actor. Acts 1 and 2 were viewed as being mostly exposition and in need of drastic reorganization. ‘To start with it’s a very long play,’ Olivier told Roger Manvell in 1955. ‘It’s not until the little Princes come on that the story forms that nice river sweep, going swiftly to its conclusion from about half way through the play. The first part up until that moment is an absolute delta of plot and pre-supposed foreknowledge of events.’8
This approach influenced how Olivier directed and performed the scene in which Richard, at this point still Duke of Gloucester, woos Anne to be his wife (1.2 in Shakespeare’s play,9 Chapter 2 on DVD). The scene opens with Anne following a small procession carrying a bier on which is a body – of Henry VI in the play but here implied, through clever cutting of Anne’s speech, to be that of her husband, Henry’s son. Both characters have been killed by Richard in the backstory. As Anne weeps over the ‘Pale ashes of the house of Lancaster’ (1.2.6), Richard approaches and begins his advance. Anne resists Richard at first, but gradually Richard disarms her, admits that he killed her husband and father-in-law but claims he was driven to it by her beauty. He gives Anne his sword and offers to let her kill him; she hesitates; eventually, Anne succumbs to his rhetoric and agrees, guardedly, to accept his ring. The scene is one of great power, and the audacity of his success surprises even Richard: ‘Was ever woman in this humour wooed?’ (1.2.230).
In Olivier’s staging, this long scene is interrupted at 1.2.114, when Richard says to Anne that he is fit for ‘Your bedchamber’. The stage direction from 1.2.147, ‘She spits at him’ is brought forward to this point, Anne leaves with the body and Richard speaks a line brought forward from 1.2.232: ‘I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long.’ Then he moves on to intercept his brother Clarence on his way to the Tower, in a scene displaced from 1.1.41–117. After this interchange, the camera takes us again to Anne, now praying at a tomb (presumably her husband’s) in a cloister, and Richard resumes his wooing, until Anne accepts his ring. As well as re-ordering the action, Olivier cut many lines from the scene, both from Richard’s role and Anne’s. As Olivier said, it is a long play and cuts were inevitable.10 The effect, however, is to shorten Anne’s resistance to Richard and the time it takes for him to ‘turn’ her; the camera closes in on her as she takes the ring and gives undue prominence to the jewellery, as if this is what has finally won her. Between the first and second stages of the wooing (Chapters 2 and 3 on DVD) she has changed from a dark gown and elaborate headdress to a white gown and loose hair, quite virginal in appearance. Among the lines that Anne has lost are some of her most vehement repulses of Richard: ‘Dost grant me, hedgehog?’ (1.2.104); ‘Black night o’ershade thy day, and death thy life’ (1.2.134). Also cut is the moment when the corpse’s wounds bleed in Richard’s presence, indicating him as the murderer. Changing the identity of the corpse she mourns from her father-in-law to her husband also serves to give even more force to the boldness of Richard’s wooing and to make her yielding seem reprehensible.
Olivier’s Anne is a fragile medieval beauty who is mesmerized by Richard. In this she is not alone, as Manvell noted: ‘For the purposes of this production everyone whom Gloucester overthrows has at least the appearance of helplessness.’11 Claire Bloom caught the character to perfection, and in casting her, Olivier picked up on a quality that she was able to bring to the part at this moment in her life. She says of herself, ‘I was lonely, sad, and when I started to work on Richard III I was extremely vulnerable … I was, at the same time, very unsure of myself, and desperately anxious about the future … to play opposite [Olivier] was like being caught in an electric current.’12 This vulnerability and uncertainty about the future is inherent in her portrayal of Anne caught in Richard’s magnetism.
As we have seen, Olivier saw Richard III as centred on Richard and coming to life only with the introduction of the Princes in the Tower at 2.4. For Patsy Rodenburg, however, the structure of the play depends on the scenes with the women: Anne (Alex Clatworthy), Elizabeth (Kae Yukawa), Margaret (Marianne Tees), and the Duchess of York (Constance Cha). The scenes with Margaret, 1.3 and 4.4, are the pillars holding up the arch of the play’s movement. She sees the women in Richard III as survivors: witnesses to the horrors of war. Margaret is the only character to speak in every one of the four plays – the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III – which make up this tetralogy, and the story of the Wars of the Roses is as much Margaret’s story as anyone else’s. This point was made by Jane Howell in her production of Richard III for the BBC TV Shakespeare series. After Richmond has spoken the last line, the camera moves over corpses, first close in and then gradually pulling back to show a pyramid of bloodied bodies; at the top is Margaret, who is laughing as she holds the dead Richard.
Not only did Rodenburg retain the female roles, she also added one. Shakespeare creates two roles, the Keeper of the Tower and Brakenbury, which in performance are sometimes combined, sometimes doubled by the same actor, sometimes played as two characters by two actors. Rodenburg was clear that she wanted one role, so that the character could be seen to develop, and she cast it as a woman (Rachael Deering). This was a production set in contemporary London and, in an age which has seen women at the head of the Security Services (as well as playing M in James Bond movies), this was a credible portrayal. Brakenbury begins in 1.1 as the polite bureaucrat escorting Clarence to the Tower and, when she interrupts Richard’s conversation with him, showing due deference to her master’s brothers – ‘I beseech your graces both to pardon me’ (1.1.84) – but insistent. In 4.1 she performs the same duty, preventing Anne, Elizabeth, and the Duchess from visiting the Princes in the Tower: ‘By your patience, / I may not suffer you to visit them’ (4.1.15–16). In fact, as she reports her instructions, Richard III repeats his dead brother’s earlier command:
His majesty [Edward IV] hath straitly given in charge
That no man shall have private conference,
Of what degree soever, with your brother.
(1.1.85–7)
I may not suffer you to visit them.
The King [Richard III] hath strictly charged the contrary.
(4.1.16–17)
Brakenbury’s speech is the first indication for Elizabeth that ‘the King’ is no longer her son Edward. Under Rosenburg’s direction, Brakenbury visibly empathized with Elizabeth and comforted her; the gesture emphasized that for all its high politics, this is a play about a family which has seen too much grief. As the play progressed, Brakenbury became one of the women’s party.
By giving the women’s scenes their original scope, Rodenburg highlighted the building blocks of the play’s structure. There is a strong symmetry in the action, most obviously in Margaret’s speeches. At 1.3.187–302 she curses Edward IV, Elizabeth, Prince Edward, Rivers, Dorset, Hastings, Richard; when she returns at 4.4, her curses have come to fruition and her lines explicitly point up how the second half of the play mirrors the first:
I called thee then vain flourish of my fortune;
I called thee then, poor shadow, painted queen,
Decline all this, and see what now thou art.
(4.4.82–3, 97)
These speeches are stylized, a vocal representation of the turn of the wheel of fortune, yet Rodenburg also imbues them with a warmth and domesticity. This is a queen defeated in battle, about to leave her adopted country for ever; but it is also the family elder who has watched the younger generation making all the mistakes that she did. Her litany of death, in which Elizabeth and the Duchess join, is all of family members: ‘I had an Edward … I had an husband …Thou hadst an Edward … Thou hadst a Richard … I had a Richard … I had a Rutland …Thou hadst a Clarence …’ (4.4.40–6). And whose fault is it? Her relative the Duchess’s, who brought Richard into the world and did not control him: ‘From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept / A hell-hound’ (4.4.47–8). For all its artfulness, the scene is full of intimacy and humanity; for Rodenburg, Richard may be – is – a monster, but with a family like this, can we really be surprised? Shakespeare provides a sliver of explanation for even the most evil of men.
This is not to suggest that Rodenburg turned Richard III into a domestic tragedy, but to demonstrate the depth and insight of the play which emerges when the women’s parts are taken at face value. Shakespeare gave seven scenes to the women’s roles (excluding the Ghosts of 5.3): 1.2 (Anne), 1.3 (Elizabeth, Margaret); 2.1 (Elizabeth); 2.2 (Duchess, Elizabeth); 2.4 (Elizabeth, Duchess); 4.1 (Elizabeth, Duchess, Anne); 4.4 (Margaret, Elizabeth, Duchess). Act 3, in which there are no women, is the Act in which Richard manoeuvres his way to the throne, with the bustle of meetings with the Lord Mayor, arranging councils – all the plotting that goes with staging a coup. It is the centre of the play and the keystone of the arch of Richard’s story, for which the women’s scenes provide the support. Rodenburg made cuts here, but still retained all the narrative.
Richard III has an unusually high number of female speaking parts for a Shakespearean play, as well as four children,13 and none of the female roles is necessary for the progress of the plot. Yet, Rodenburg says, ‘playwrights craft better roles for the boy-players’ than for grown men because they have to spell everything out – nothing can be left to assumption. And the women in Richard III are closely observed when they are away from the male characters. Rodenburg sees 4.1 as a scene in which ‘the women gather to bear witness.’ Here, the two Princes are housed in the Tower and their mother Elizabeth, grandmother Duchess, and aunt Anne have come to see them but are turned away. In their hearts, they know that the Princes have been killed. In preparing the actors for this scene, Rodenburg told them about incidents in India in which local women would gather outside a house where they thought a dowry-killing had taken place, and bang pots and pans to show that they knew what had happened: to bear witness. This is the effect she was looking for here. Similarly, in the lines in 4.4 discussed above, the women are giving voice to the names of the dead to keep them present. Again, the women are the living witnesses to the slain.
Rodenburg argues that the other women learn from Margaret. Although Elizabeth asks Margaret, ‘teach me how to curse mine enemies’ (4.4.117), Margaret’s lesson to her is how to stop Richard’s plans: ‘Margaret gives the women courage.’ At 538 lines, 4.4 is the longest scene in the play. It begins with Margaret’s dialogue with Elizabeth and the Duchess, then introduces Richard and his entourage, and moves into a reprise of 1.2 (Anne is now dead) with Richard trying to persuade Elizabeth to let him marry her daughter. But his rhetoric no longer works. Schooled by Margaret, Elizabeth fights back. In Rodenburg’s words, ‘Elizabeth is literally fighting for the life of her child’, and all the grief for the death of her sons is channelled into anger. In her production, the actors literally fought, using the energy from the lines and the space from an uncluttered stage space in a frightening, intensely physical, scene. Elizabeth eventually seems to give way but, unlike Anne, she is using Richard’s deviousness against him. By Act 5 she has betrothed her daughter to Richard’s opponent Richmond. Rodenburg argues that Elizabeth’s resistance has shaken Richard: he has lost his confidence, and will lose the battle.
Rodenburg’s vision of the women in Richard III is, then, very different from the tradition in which Olivier was playing. She is quick to say that she could only direct the play in this way because she had an exceptionally generous actor playing Richard (Kurt Egyiawan). Olivier’s production came at the end of the era of the great star system of actors. Although it is now much-studied and its filmic qualities appreciated, as Russell Jackson says, ‘Olivier’s film of Richard III was more of a terminus than a turning point.’14 Rodenburg’s practice is defined by a belief in ensemble playing and connexion to the text.15 It is her faith in Shakespeare’s playwriting skills that enables her to bring out both the intricacies and the overarching vision of a play such as Richard III. And what she is teaching her students is, above all else, to trust the words.
Notes
1Personal information in conversation with the author, as is all material relating to this production; interview at the Guildhall School, 11 December 2012.
2Patsy Rodenburg, Speaking Shakespeare (London, 2002), esp. pp. 1–16.
3James J. Marino, Owning Shakespeare. The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 2011, p. 74.
4Roger Manvell, Shakespeare and the Film (New York, 1971), p. 48.
5Barbara Freedmann, ‘Critical Junctures in Shakespeare Screen History’ in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson (Cambridge 2007), pp. 56–8.
6Claire Bloom, Leaving a Doll’s House. A Memoir (London 1996), p. 94.
7Russell Jackson, ‘Olivier’s Film of Richard III: A Legend of the Crown – Among Other Stories’ in Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (eds), Shakespeare on Screen. Richard III, (Rouen, 2005), p. 235.
8Manvell, p. 48.
9All citations from William Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd edn. (London, 2009).
10The BBC Shakespeare production, which is not cut, runs 239 minutes.
11Manvell, p. 50.
12Bloom, p. 94.
13Elizabeth’s two sons Edward and York, and Clarence’s son and daughter. Rodenburg cut Clarence’s children.
14Jackson, p. 240.
15Podcast 1 December 2010 at https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/guildhall-school-events-podcast/id332579993 [accessed 30 December 2012].