From Paper to Stage: A Log of the Transformation of Shakespeare's 'Richard III' to Joaquín Furriel

Calixto Bieito directs on stage, accompanying the actors' work with his body. He's not a director who gives instructions from the audience. During the first performance of the play The True History of Richard III in the Martín Coronado Hall of the Teatro San Martín , Calixto used gestures and expressions to guide the actors like an orchestra conductor. When he liked a scene, he would smile at his creative team in the audience and raise his thumb. He would indicate when a scream needed to be suppressed ( he did this twice with Ingrid Pelicori as the Duchess of York and with Belén Blanco in the role of Queen Consort Elizabeth Woodville), distinguishing himself as a director who cares about sounds.

He's on stage, moving through the drama, very close to the actors, capturing those precious moments and pointing out any changes in the moments in which the situations unfold. But what I liked most (and what speaks to his uniqueness) was when his gaze spread across the audience, as if he were already imagining the audience, as if he were thinking about their reactions.

Calixto was on stage to watch the play from the actors' place. He directs not as a spectator but as an actor or director—a playwright who generates and modifies what happens with his presence, who seeks to capture the uncapturable in theatrical future.

I always saw Calixto on stage. During the days when specific scenes were being performed, separate from the entire play, he always spoke over the actors' lines , thinking about that stage present, helping them understand the subtext, and intervening on their bodies alongside their performance.

Before the rehearsal, when the actors and actresses passed amplified lyrics through the microphone in a kind of dismembered chorus of what would later be the lines integrated into the play, he seemed like an explorer observing how the scenery was fitted together, how the stagecraft movements were carried out, how the positions were marked on the stage.

The Catalan director, who has staged Shakespeare productions in German, English, and Swedish, asked the San Martín Theater team to videotape the production so he could reproduce it accurately when he embarked on a new trip after the premiere. It's important to clarify that this play took five weeks to put together (four if we consider the last week is dedicated to dress rehearsals), and that the first month of rehearsal was dedicated exclusively to reviewing and memorizing the lyrics without the director, who arrived in Buenos Aires at the end of May.

The staging of this version of the text written by William Shakespeare in 1592 is conceived from a synthetic perspective, from the coexistence of spaces that unite different temporalities. On the one hand, there is the original 16th-century text translated by Lautaro Vilo and edited in a joint dramaturgy by Calixto Bieito and Adriá Reixach to preserve the essence of the story. However, the playwrights add to the Elizabethan drama the research conducted by Philippa Langley (Silvina Sabater), which led to the discovery of the remains of the real Richard III in 2012 in a Leicester parking lot.

The play is narrated using a contemporary approach : a car that alludes to the parking lot but is used in different scenes as part of the plot of death and conspiracy that Richard constructs; a circle of tables that transform into desks or more ambiguous structures; and a configuration of screens. This style, drawn from Shakespeare, furious, and absurd, makes it possible to realize scenes that seem impossible in the original script.

Because Richard III is one of the most complex plays, even incomprehensible to the general public, by the English author. If you don't know much about English history and don't study drama, the material becomes confusing. As with many Elizabethan texts, these are plays that, having been assembled from fragments of copies that were modified, and because, in many cases, the original text is unknown, are susceptible to being structured in different ways and to the deletion of scenes.

Calixto's challenge was to be able to tell a story from an aesthetic capable of appropriating the arbitrariness of Shakespearean texts, which were governed not by verisimilitude but by a more effective and, in the case of Richard III, ruthless desire. Scenes where the characters are exposed to extreme transformation.

At the beginning of the play, Ricardo (Joaquín Furriel) sets out to win over Lady Anna (María Figueras) , who is accompanying the funeral procession of her husband, whom Ricardo himself murdered. This is one of the most difficult scenes in the entire Shakespearean drama. Furriel is portrayed as a clownish creature, straight out of a macabre children's birthday party.

Figueras drags a black bag filled with microphone stands, which come to represent her husband's body and which Ricardo will later use as part of his political instrument. The scene is narrated with ferocity, from the close proximity of the bodies in a sort of sick, animalistic battle, which produces Anna's transformation from contempt to a certain acceptance of the courtship.

In this production, Calixto works Evil as a contagious element and makes the madness that permeates all the characters a component linked to unbearable pain but also to fear.

Richard III can be told if one understands the fear his figure could inspire. He is a hero devoid of virtues, driven by a single goal: to achieve and maintain the power he conquers because he has no qualms about killing.

The connection with archaeological work allows for a discussion of Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard III (who arrived in England in 1485 and remained there for two years until his death at the age of 32), influenced by the political context of the Elizabethan era. Queen Elizabeth I was the granddaughter of Henry VII, the king who defeated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth during the Wars of the Roses, which initiated the reign of the House of Tudor.

For this reason, Shakespeare had to present a villain without limits , whom he imagined as deformed as a trait that drove his evil. The discovery of the remains and the research by Philippa Langley, who is in the line of what the British call Ricardians (people interested in reclaiming the figure of the former monarch), revealed that Richard was not the monstrosity whose appearance is often insulted throughout the play.

In fact, in the first monologue, Ricardo admits that since he can't love , since even dogs repel him and women despise him, he's going to dedicate himself to doing evil. Calixto told Silvina Sabater that her character was in love with a dead man, so when she discovers his remains, she realizes she doesn't see a skeleton, but a man.

The casting of Joaquín Furriel for this role (an actor whose physical features are not suited to the role of Ricardo) underscores this dissent from Shakespearean impersonation. Furriel is also the architect of this project. During rehearsal breaks, he would often talk with Calixto about specific scenes where he felt the mystery or tension needed to be heightened, and he was always suggesting elements, creating unscripted scenes in the immediacy of rehearsals.

He brought a cake for the sequence of the agony of King Edward IV (Richard's brother and husband of Isabel Woodville) to tempt him as if he were a diabetic who finds his poison in sweets and he also decided to embrace and carry the body of Anna when, already his wife, she dies in a state of madness.

The production of The True History of Richard III is riddled with dead people. Luis Ziembrowski, Ingrid Pelicori, Belén Blanco, María Figueras, Marcos Montes, Luciano Suardi, Iván Moschner, Luis Herrera and Silvia Sabater are always on stage in various roles and remain there, even after being killed in a Shakespearean reference linked to the numerous apparitions where villains see the ghosts of their dead until the end of their days.

If Calixto asked for silence every time an idea arose and he didn't want to lose it, it was largely because his staging is daring (as any stage creation that takes on a Shakespearean tale should be).

One of the first scenes I saw staged in the Coronado room was the final battle, which does not take place here (Richard III was the last English monarch to die in battle and put an end to the Plantagenet dynasty) , but is replaced by a dreamlike situation (quite Lynchian) where Richard is in a child's room, configured as a fragment or detachment of a merry-go-round populated with drawings of horses, and his schoolmates come to harass him.

The children are actors disguised as infants. It's worth noting that Ingrid Pelicori suggested dragging Ricardo/Furriel's body to the center, and Calixto agreed to try it, acknowledging that it was a good idea to include as part of the performance.

Thinking about Richard III as a child who suffered bullying helps complete the narrative of the archaeological investigation. That war, where defeat is sealed by Richard's plea of "A horse, my kingdom for a horse," takes place in his head; it is the result of trauma and is separate from the outcome of the plot of deception, manipulation, and crimes he masterminded, and to which all the characters obeyed, despite the contempt and hatred Richard instilled in them.

In this structure where several worlds are articulated, Elizabethan tragedy manages to dialogue with this era by finding its resolution not in the emulation of a battle but in the transcription or mutation of another form of war that occurs in the dissemination of Evil, in a more psychological component, in a cruelty that seems to be strengthened in a man but that is capable of taking over the bodies and wills of those around him.

Power radiates in this work from which it is impossible to escape; the characters, beyond their vigor, have something of a zombie quality in that first scene where they are seated at the table with their bonnets, equipped with the now-lost grace of a party favor that falls on those slumbering bodies.