Crookback

Went to see (on film) the Almedia Theatre production of Richard iii, with Ralph Fiennes; a fairly intimidating performance, lacking the antic malice of Olivier. There were some lines I didn’t remember –

I have no brother, I am like no brother; 
And this word 'love,' which graybeards call divine, 
Be resident in men like one another 3080
And not in me: I am myself alone. 

 on returning home, I checked it out and found they’d shifted quite a lot out of Henry VIth Part 3 into Richard – and left out other bits, particularly from the last battle scenes.  Let me see, what other Richards have I consulted?  Anthony Sher, and Ian McKellen.  But I should see if I can buy the rest of the Wars of the Roses tetralogy to add to our already vast stack of unwatched Shakespeares: I think we have a tempest, a Macbeth, and a Hal 8 waiting.  Rose resists putting them on for the good reason that she’s virtually certain to fall asleep in front of them unless she’s been forethoughful enough to have six strong coffees in the afternoon.

The trouble with Richard, though, as a study in villainy, is not that Richard is over the top but that he has to be so very over the top to be any worse than everybody else in the family, or, indeed, the peerage.  Everybody is plotting the death of everybody else; if you gave the soliloquies to someone else – Buckingham, say – Richard would almost fade into the background.

Actually, that bit of Hal VI III – and in the actual play,

What do I fear? myself? there's none else by:
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!

brings to mind Peer Gynt;

Out yonder, under the shining vault,
among men the saying goes: “Man, be thyself!”
At home here with us, ’mid the tribe of the trolls,
the saying goes: “Troll, to thyself be — enough!”

Anne felt that way:

I want to be normal, to love and be loved, crisp new love, but I still prefer not to make close bonds with mortals. Mine is the troll's motto, "To thyself be enough."

I didn’t ask her if she was rooting for Richard, but I wouldn’t be surprised; a disability thing.

In the Olivier version, too, he actually retained, a few lines from Colley Cibber’s rewriting – the one that drove what one might call the real version off the stage for two hundred years, except that, as the Fiennes version shows, the real version isn’t staged today either, it being rather hard to follow as being the last  episode in a continuing series.  One episode of Game of Thrones would be hard to follow, too.

Anyway, I’ve ordered the Hollow Crown from Amazon, with Cumberbatch as Richard, and am weighing up going back to the Peter Hall version, with Ian Holm.  As Schopenhauer says, when purchasing books one is under the illusion that one is purchasing the time needed to read them, and the same goes double for DVDs.