Richard III at The Globe Theatre: An Unconventional Take on a Classic

It hasn’t rained too much in London. Not since I’ve been here. Or at least that was true until I went to Shakespeare’s Globe to watch the current production of Richard III.
To get the authentic experience, I decided to stand in the Yard during Shakespeare’s second longest play. The Yard, of course, has no roof, and so groundlings (as they were called in the Elizabethan period) are subjected to the whims of the weather, be it blinding sun or torrential rain.
When I went on the night of Wednesday the 12, we got the rain.
However, this rain failed to dampen my enjoyment of director Tim Carrol’s production. Part of the reason for this lies in the unconventionally comic way in which the rather dark and violent tale of Richard’s rise and fall was told.
To be sure, this is no easy task. Richard III, Shakespeare’s canonical history (or, tragedy, depending on who you ask) centers around the titular character’s (played brilliantly by former Globe artistic director, Mark Rylance) descent to power in England after the War of the Roses. After the death of the sick king, Richard has all of the successors to the throne killed, until sovereignty is in his hands.
When reading the play, Richard comes off as a largely one dimensional character, the allegorical kind that I have come to associate with works of literature as old as Shakespeare’s. By bringing a comedic element into the presentation of the lead character, the story becomes more complex.
The comedy that Rylance brings to his role presents a couple things: on the one hand, it forces a connection between the audience and the villain. Richard’s humorousness makes him more sympathetic, which makes the audience compelled to root for him (at least until a certain point). In other words, Rylance’s Richard seduces the audience, just as he does to the characters around him; they are truly cast as members of the diegesis.
This brings up the second important theme added to Richard III by the introduction of comedy. The seductive nature of comedy, it’s ability to send normal people into stitches over a man who orders the death of children and the woman he forcefully married, illustrates how easy it is to get the public on a bad person’s side, if only they know how to make them laugh. In this, there is an undeniable display of both the shallowness required to follow a horrible man who happens to be a comedian and the danger of the mob mentality that comedy sometimes creates.
Though The Globe, which prides itself on faithful reproductions of Shakespeare’s plays, strayed from tradition with its production of Richard III, the time transcending effect was not lost. Standing in the Yard, in the pouring rain, with my fellow groundlings, laughing and shouting hysterically as Rylance encouraged our participation, I felt as if I had been transported to another century.

After the rain I looked above me, at the celingless walls of the Globe. The only sign of modernity was the lack of the stars.