While the script is fantastic for Richard the III I realized while I was reading it through that I was having a bit of a hard time keeping up with the many characters. It seemed like everyone was dying off just as you got to know them! In an effort then to help me keep track I thought I would watch a film adaptation. I jumped out on a limb and watched the 1995 version. There were some parts that I could see getting bad before I got there so I would just look away, but it is Richard the III so it simply couldn’t be a pleasant story.
A Film Audience
As I said, I decided to do this in the first place to try and get a better feel for the flow of the play and so I was following along with my book while I watched the movie. It was interesting to see how the film played with timing the events. Often segments that did not appear till the next scene would be interspersed with moments from the prior scene. This made it difficult to follow at times, but I always found my bearings again and continued. Another aesthetic choice was to shorten the dialogue. For example in Act 4 scene 4 when King Richard is manipulating Queen Elizabeth to convince her to let him marry her daughter half of his main persuasive argument, lines 296-316, are simply removed. This choice plays well to this screening of the film, giving it a much faster pace, and facilitating rapid shifts from event to event (building the tension of the coup and sustaining that tension as Richards power was challenged).
A Modern Play Audience
Given that a modern 2000’s audience has grown in a world full of instant messaging, fast food, and instant information, I wonder how much more of this play would need to be cut to keep a modern audience entertained? Would it need to be shortened? Do people who aren’t there for a class assignment really want to sit through a 2+ hour play? I wish there was a performance of this going on nearby; I’d like to examine that.
