“
Now is the winter of our discontent” says Richard, Duke of Gloucester, at the start of the speech to the audience which opens
Richard lll . Conrad Nelson, who plays Richard, begins to unveil his character, a man deeply corrupted and distorted both within and without, and “determined to prove a villain”.
Conrad puts the soliloquy in his own words to help us understand this extraordinary character. Although driven by ambition and greed, and capable of immense acts of selfishness and cruelty, there is
something about Richard that is none the less attractive . Perhaps it is the intimate relationship that he shares with the audience that makes us if not like him, at least want to watch his every move with fascination. Here, at the start of the play and of his bloody passage through it, Richard isn’t dissembling, he’s telling the truth, but to those of us powerless to do anything other than watch the inevitable happen.
Richard’s power is soon demonstrated in
the wooing scene in which he confronts Lady Anne who is accompanying the body of her father-in-law Henry VI to burial. It is hardly a meeting of equals: the traumatised Anne (Richard is also responsible for the death of Henry VI and Anne’s husband and father) is probably suffering from what we now would term post-traumatic stress. She is certainly
vulnerable and isolated and gets no help against Richard’s verbal assault from the men who are accompanying the body. It is a difficult scene to perform. Anne is completely taken by surprise at Richard’s declaration of love, and Maeve Larkin (Lady Anne) found her performance was helped by thinking of Anne’s religious faith and her genuine if naïve belief that Richard has “become so penitent”. For Maeve,
turning point in the scene came at the moment when Richard sinks to one knee and offers Anne a knife with which to kill him, but she is unable to take it. Her resolve crumbles and with it her future.