William Shakespeare’s R3 was a re-arranged version of Richard III. The idea was to treat Richard as the protagonist, not as the villain. The two main challenges with this show were the staging and the casting.
The show was performed at two different venues six weeks apart. Once in the round, with the audience on all sides, and once on an alley stage with the audience in two sections on opposite sides. This meant that the show had to be staged very carefully so that the audience always had something to see that wasn’t just an actor’s back!
Richard III has a very large cast of characters, and only a couple of my actors had had any real experience doing Shakespearean text. The first part of the rehearse process was a couple of months of one-on-one work with every member of the cast with lines to walk them through how to approach the text and correctly speak it. For the most part, we succeeded.
