Review: Richard, My Richard at Shakespeare North Playhouse ****

The rehabilitation of Richard III’s character continues apace.

For every (increasingly fractious it seems) production of Shakespeare’s history play, with its long-defining portrait of ‘the son of York’ as a murderous and twisted monster, there is a more sympathetic re-evaluation of the last Plantagenet king.

And since his remains were miraculously rediscovered under a council car park in Leicester, those already on ‘team’ Richard have seen their numbers swell.

Historical novelist Philippa Gregory was among the congregation at Richard’s subsequent re-internment, in Leicester Cathedral in 2015, and has written of how the ceremony moved her.

And all roads in Richard, My Richard – her first play, currently receiving its world premiere at Shakespeare North Playhouse – lead inexorably back to that spot.

We first meet Richard (Kyle Rowe) as he rises, discombobulated and belligerent, from under the tarmac to the consternation of Tom Kanji’s effervescent character History who doesn’t want the pesky Plantagenet hanging around and challenging his account of the past.

Rowe’s Richard is a bluff, muscled fighting machine without a hint of Shakespeare’s ‘hump’. But he’s certainly got the hump when History lays out the accepted view of his reign and character, and demands to recount his own part in the brutal power struggles of the late 15th Century.

Above: A slideshow of images from Richard, My Richard. Photos by Patch Dolan.

It’s a powerfully presented piece of theatre, at times compellingly so, directed with vigour by Katie Posner, a dark world dressed in dark hues and atmospherically lit by Philip Gladwell.

Happily, that darkness is pierced with occasional and much-needed moments of levity, mostly at the hands – and expense - of the cream-clad History.

Unlike the relative black and white of, say, the English Civil War, the Wars of the Roses has always been a mind-blowingly complicated tangle of complex characters and shifting alliances.

Gregory acknowledges and runs with this in a crowd-pleasing ‘History’ lesson where the repeated punchline is ‘Margaret Beaufort’.

Her History turns out to be a raging misogynist who sees women as either fragrant or feeble.

But anyone who has read Gregory’s carefully researched novels will be well aware that these women are anything but feeble, or a punchline.

Above: Tom Kanji as History. Top: Kyle Rowe as Richard. Photos by Patch Dolan.

And here the Plantagenet women – Elizabeth Woodville (Jennifer Matter), Anne Neville (Tori Burgess), Margaret Beaufort (Laura Smithers) and the teenage Elizabeth of York (Mary Savage) - take centre stage in all their clever, nakedly ambitious, driven and influential completeness.

If there's not an overwhelming amount of nuance in Richard's depiction, Gregory does have her titular protagonist retain some ambiguities in his own account of his life and actions, notably when it comes to his brothers (and brothers in arms) Edward (Matt Concannon) and the Duke of Clarence (Tyler Dobbs).

Is Richard a straightforward soldier, loyal but buffeted by circumstance? Or a shrewd and uncompromising political operator willing to do anything in the pursuit of power? Maybe it's both. Who can ever be completely sure?

Meanwhile Concannon and Dobbs pop up as a second brotherly double act which puts local lads the Stanleys under the historical spotlight as they swear fealty while all the time weighing up the direction of the wind before committing themselves to the ‘winning’ side.