Richard III at the Globe

As soon as Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London announced the cast for their summer 2024 production of Richard III, questions from the theatre community arose about the decision to have Michelle Terry wear Richard’s crown. While known for her extensive, award-winning work in theatre, the concern was that Terry—an able-bodied actor who has been the artistic director of the Globe since 2018—had cast herself as Richard. Thus, while the high-energy production’s depiction of a comedic, swaggering, misogynist, Trump-inspired Richard by a mostly all-women cast was at times both compelling and entertaining, what is most likely to be remembered is this contentious casting decision.

In recent years, there has been increased attention and sensitivity towards performances of this king. Richard (the Shakespeare character) does somewhat describe his disabilities in the play. So, actors often have portrayed him with a hunchback. The disabilities of Richard (the historical person) were generally known by early modern audiences, but Shakespeare and/or Shakespeare’s Richard sensationalizes that knowledge, in part by not depicting a sincere lived experience. Further, in 2013, Richard’s skeletal remains were excavated, and they confirmed a likely diagnosis of scoliosis. In the wake of this discovery, and given the increased concerns about disability awareness, many companies choosing to produce Richard III have paused to consider authentic representation, the possibility of inadvertently reinforcing stereotypes, how casting decisions might limit opportunities for disabled actors, and the prospect of reducing the complexity of a character to a single, physical trait. In other words, there has been increased professional resistance to cripping up, the term often invoked to describe non-disabled actors performing a disability they do not have. Thus, actor Tom Motheresdale played Richard III at the Bristol Old Vic in 2019, Mat Fraser for Hull Truck and Northern Broadsides in 2017, and Arthur Hughes at the RSC in 2022. This new ethical standard to reclaim the part speaks to the surprise of casting Terry. Further, under the direction of Elle While, Terry chose not to perform Richard as having any disability.

These decisions garnered criticism. Perhaps the most searing of which came from the Disabled Artists Alliance who expressed the concern that “Members of the disabled community and allies from across the theatre and arts industry [were] outraged and disappointed by the casting of a non-physically disabled actor.” The DAA continued, stating that Richard’s “disabled identity is imbued and integral to all corners of the script, [and the] production cannot be successfully performed with a non-physically disabled actor at the helm.” Interestingly, the production not only chose not to perform the disability, but also kept in the dialogue where Richard references his shoulder or arm. Instead, Terry either spoke these lines without really referencing her body or, at some of the quirkiest moments, simply held her left hand in the air. In so doing, Terry was not technically cripping-up, but rather imagining the character as able-bodied and with disabilities that are entirely rhetorical, perhaps even imaginary. That decision, of course, is also problematic. The sentiment about Shakespeare’s Richard—that he tactlessly exaggerates his disability so to appear a passive underdog for manipulative reasons—has resonated in the past, but it is unlikely in 2024 and beyond to temper criticism.

While the production stripped away this part of Richard’s lived experience, it infused that experience with contemporary American political culture. The focus on Richard’s cunning ambitions follows a traditional approach to the play, but much less traditional was the thinly veiled and generally comic sanitization of Donald Trump. For the first half of the play, Terry wore biker jeans, a leather jacket, and a very bleach-blond, puffy, disheveled hairstyle. For the latter half of the production, she wore a chiseled, plastic torso, with greased, protruding six-pack abs, seen by his wide-open shirt vis-à-vis Vladimir Putin. Throughout each phase of Richard’s plan also came a notable costume change: an increasingly large and menacing-looking codpiece. Sometimes bejeweled, sometimes jagged, Richard’s codpiece noticeably guided every part of his plan, sometimes comically as a silly prop and sometimes as much more aggressive statement on Richard’s leering over and general treatment of women in the play. The codpiece also reinforced how a nickname for people named Richard also speaks to Richard’s toxic masculinity. Put simply, as communicated by his actions, rhetoric, and comically large codpiece, this Trumped-up Richard is a Dick. His obnoxiousness, crudeness, and toxic masculinity oscillated from farcical to horrific while also being consistently chaotic and never with sympathy or nuance.

To make no mistake that Terry’s Richard is Trump-inspired, all of Richard’s henchmen began wearing red baseball hats with a “RIII” logo on them after he is kinged, and even more notably, some of Trump’s own memorable rhetoric made it into the play. For example, soon after his first interaction with Lady Anne, where Richard attempts to woo the wife of the man he just killed, the production interpolated lines from Trump’s 2005 Access Hollywood video that resurfaced late in his successful 2016 campaign. Terry-as-Richard tells the audience, “When you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything.” Then again later, Richard boasted, “I’m the star. . . I can just take what I want.” Elsewhere, Richard in soliloquy promises to “Make England Pray Again.” Inserting Trump references in Shakespeare productions has become somewhat of a platitude in recent years, but after I reviewed this production, a second term commenced. Similarly, the performance I attended occurred merely three days after the first assassination attempt on Trump’s life, which further eliminated Trump’s relevance to political and popular culture and made the delivery of these lines even more sinister. At the same time, though, these lines were included in this production to comment on the political misuse of power. While it certainly was not the intention, knowing the controversy surrounding Terry’s decision as the artistic director to cast herself as Richard, the boast “I can just take what I want” speaks to the reality of power dynamics not only in Trump’s MAGA-America but in the theatre world as well. Further, to direct away from Richard’s disability and towards Trump’s persona is even more strange, considering that Trump himself has been criticized for ridiculing people with disabilities, as he did to journalist Serge Kovaleskiy at a rally in 2015.

In addition to the production’s Richard as a satire of Trump, there were other notable ways the play engaged with damaging toxic masculinity. The cast was composed of all women or non-binary actors, which in turn reinterpreted the dynamics of power and ambition in the play. For example, to emphasize the number of people this Trump-like Richard disposes of during his ascent, the production called on two Rats (i.e., Ratcliffe) who callously rolled bodies into a trapdoor as ominous jazz music played, in turn suggesting a party-like celebration every time Richard destroyed one of these women. Buckingham (Helen Schlesinger)—a devoted henchmen who is eventually cast aside by Richard—was costumed very much like one might imagine Mike Pence, and like Pence, was discarded when needed. Finally, the production was not without disability representation. Lady Anne (Katie Erich) spoke passionately with British Sign Language, and as Richard manipulated her throughout the narrative, black ropes were tied to her wrists, hands, and neck, ultimately denying her any way her to communicate. In the end, though, the controversy surrounding the casting decision of Richard, and the unemotional yet powerful self-condemnation of that casting decision that was emphasized by quoting Trump himself, likely will be what is remembered about this high-energy, entertaining, yet somewhat shallow take on toxic masculinity in the Trump-era of megalomania, in turn reducing the difficulties of this era to silicone abs, cod pieces, and overblown rhetoric.