Royal National Theatre
Production of Richard III

[Information from the RNT press kit for the touring production, 1992, and excerpts from U.S. newspaper reviews. With thanks to Bob Cox, Ashland, OR, for keyboarding.]

The Richard III tour of the United States results from an unprecedented collaboration between the Royal National Theater and American presenters in both the commercial and not-for-profit theater worlds. The six organizations presenting the tour are the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Ordway Music Theater, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, the Shorenstein Hays Nederlander organization and the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts.

"We are delighted these important presenting organizations have come together to make it possible for us to come to America with this production," says Richard Eyre. "This is the largest tour the National has ever undertaken in the United States, and we hope this will be the start of a long and fruitful relationship between the two countries. We attach great importance to international touring and we hope that our visit will encourage more American theater companies to come to our shores in the future." The Royal National Theater gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Arts Council.

Ian McKellen first acted with the National Theater under the direction of Laurence Olivier in 1966. Ever since he has been considered a successor to Olivier as a great classical actor. His pre-eminence was recognized by the Queen when she knighted him last year during the run of Richard III in London. His passion for Shakespeare was revealed to audiences throughout the world in his one man show, Acting Shakespeare, which he presented over a ten year period, most recently on a sold-out United States tour in 1985. At the Royal National Theater and in the west End of London he regularly plays in modern drama including the world premier of Martin Sherman's Bent. On Broadway he won a Tony Award as Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. His accolades range from a record five Laurence Olivier Awards to being the current Professor of Contemporary Drama at Oxford University. American television audiences have also seen him as the villain Chauvelin in The Scarlet Pimpernel (CBS) and the hero in the thriller, Dying Day (PBS). His films include Plenty and Scandal. Richard III completes a recent quartet of renowned villains - lago(Royal Shakespeare Company and television), Hitler (television) and Dracula in the Pet Shop Boys number one video "Heart!"

Richard Eyre, who succeeded Sir Peter Hall as Director of the National in 1988, became an Associate Director of the company in 1981. His acclaimed productions with the National include Guys and Dolls (winner of the Olivier and Standards Awards for the Best Director), Futurists(Time Out Award for best Director), The Voysey Inheritance, Racing Demon, White Chameleon and Napoli Milionaria (with Ian McKellen). He has just directed David Hare's new play Murmuring Judges now playing at the Olivier Theater and will be directing Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana in the Lyttelton Theater opening on February 6, 1992. His other productions include Hamlet at the Royal Court and the award-winning Comedians at Nottingham and the Old Vic, both with Jonathan Pyrce.

He directed his first production, The Knack, at the Phoenix Theater, Leicester in 1965, where he later served as Assistant Director. He was subsequently Director of productions at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theater and Artistic Director of the Nottingham Playhouse. From 1978 to 1981 Richard Eyre was a producer with the BBC's influential Play for Today series, winning numerous awards for his productions.

His television films include The Insurance Man (Tokyo World TV Festival Special Prize 1986) and Tumbledown (Winner Italia RAI Prize 1988, BAFTA Best TV Single Drama Awards 1989) and The Ploughman's Lunch (Standard Film Award for Best Film 1983) and Laughterhouse (Venice Film Festival Award for Best TV Film 1984).

The National's epic staging of Richard III has a cast of 27, including 4 children, and a production team of 30. The settings and costumes for the production are by Bob Crowley (a Tony Award nominee for Les Liaisons Dangereuses) with lighting by Jean Kalman and music by Dominic Muldowney. The 16-week tour of the United States has been produced by Roger Chapman, the Head of Touring at the Royal National Theater. "We're extremely excited at the prospect of a coast-to-coast tour," says Mr. Chipman," and we're delighted to have received the crucial support of Northwest Airlines."

First performed in the early 1590's, Richard III has ever since been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. It has been performed by the leading actors of the day in every period of the English theater. In the acclaimed Eyre staging, Richard is a political gangster at home anywhere between the decline of the Roman Empire and the onset of the 21st century. Set in the 1930s with echoes of the rise of fascism, the National's production of the classic tale of royal villainy is a gripping political thriller for all times.

Created by an Act of Parliament in 1949, the Royal National Theater is the flagship of the British theater and each year presents more than 1,400 performances to some 900,000 people at the company's home on London's South bank and on tour through the world. The chief aims of the National are to present a diverse repertoire, embracing classic, new and neglected plays from the whole world of drama; to present these plays to the very highest standards; to give audiences a choice of at least six different productions at any one time. Pricing is geared to make the National accessible to everyone, regardless of income.

Since 1970 the Royal National Theater has sent numerous productions to the United States including: The Three Sisters and the Beaux Stratagem (Los Angeles, 1970); No Man's Land (New York, Washington D.C.,1976); Bedroom Farce (Washington D.C., New York, 1979); The Browning Version and Harlequinade (Baltimore, 1981); One Woman Plays and The Mayor of Zalemea (Denver 1982); Animal Farm (Chicago, Baltimore, 1986); and The Duchess of Malfi, The Critic, The Real Inspector Hound and The Cherry Orchard (Chicago 1986). In addition, Amadeus and Wild Honey, based on the National productions, have been staged here. Ian McKellen has appeared in the last six of these productions.

Reviews of the RNT Touring Proudction

• In another interesting one-man show McKellen gives us a Richard III who is a ruthless military man drunk with power and villainy. Though surrounded by a stellar cast they have little to do.

  A stronger Buckingham would have tempered McKellen's performance the way Ralph Richardson's did in Olivier's Richard III but in this production we didn't get one.

  This is a star turn, a part that is really a grand parody of villainy and a role that demands of its star a virtuoso performance - and Sir Ian McKellen gives us that.

  --Sir Ian McKellen as Richard III, Jacquelin Bloomquist in the Ricardian Register Fall 1992 p.10.

• This was not a Richard you liked but it was excellent theater.

  Some of my fellow Ricardians were upset by this rendering of that play; memories of Sir Laurence Olivier's film and more recent productions come to mind One more thought: if Shakespeare had not written that play, there would be no Richard III Society!

  -- A Modern Richard for Modern Times, Mary Schaller in the Ricardian Register, Fall 1992 p.11.

From Other Reviews

• "Richard is simply a skillful and ruthless practitioner of the techniques of his backstabbing times."--Made Glorious Summer,Richard Henry III Time, June 22, 1992.

• "The humor and terror in this Richard are inseparable."-- McKellen's Richard Is for This Century, Frank Rich, New York Times, June 12, 1992.