Touch of evil

Richard III is seriously bad for your health. Any actor will tell you that the part of the ‘bunch-backed toad’ is so physically punishing that the chap in the title role usually ends up being injected with painkillers by the local quack before each show. Or he finds himself in hospital when he should be on stage.

Mark Rylance has heeded these warnings. His Richard — an astonishing feat of creative originality — is very nearly able-bodied. He has no crutches, no twisted limbs, no bandy legs, no hump weighing him down like a medicine ball. He walks with a faint limp. He carries a withered arm discreetly under his doublet. And he has a slight suggestion of a cyst-ette on his shoulder. Otherwise, he’s perfectly formed. Rylance will probably make it to the end of the run without becoming addicted to Class-A drugs.

From the moment he appears, he toys with our expectations. He’s dandyishly dressed in a velvet cape, a golden tunic, a debonair cap and a pair of sumptuous amber stockings. But his manner is distracted, low-key, out of rhythm. He stutters his lines. He chuckles to himself. He frowns and squints and scratches his balding scalp. It’s a Stan Laurel performance. There’s even a hint of the stray mongrel in there too. No one has ever played Richard like this. It’s true he gives us the Evil Laugh, just as we expected, but he lays it on early and only once. And by overdoing it, massively and deliberately, he makes it clear that we need to drop all our preconceptions about the character. Thus warned, we watch transfixed as something fresh, something unheard of, something uniquely horrible comes into being.