Richard III

Richard III
By Peter John Gardner

Every time a Shakespeare play was assigned reading in one of my high school classes, a common complaint heard from the peanut gallery of future brilliant minds was, "Why do we have to read this shit?" To a student that's uninterested in the material, the plays are boring, hard to understand, and contain plots that have become cliche hundreds of years later. I call it "The Nirvana Effect". It's all about context. If one is just now digesting something by Shakespeare/Nirvana, they're most likely going to compare it to a more contemporary work that used the same template but enhanced. But at the time of release, Shakespeare/Nirvana was groundbreaking stuff.

What's remarkable about Shakespeare is that if you take his plays, many of them still work if you just change the setting to a different time and place. Richard III takes the classic Shakespeare work and sets it in 1930's era England. Well, less like the real England and more like a bizarro world version where England is a fascist regime during World War II. The story follows Richard, the younger brother of King Edward IV, and his murderous quest to overthrow his brother from the king's throne. Richard manipulates and murders his way to the top, at one point even having his own brother Clarence executed just so that he could shift the blame onto Edward and accelerate the death of the ailing King.

Playing Richard is the always excellent Ian McKellen whose overacting brings out a slightly comical side to the character. McKellen doesn't play Richard like he would in a stuffy old theater in Great Britain. Instead he plays him the same way he would later play Magneto in the X-Men films. Robert Downey Jr. plays Lord Rivers, brother of Queen Elizabeth, and makes the odd choice of using an American accent in the film. Throughout the first half of the film, Rivers is the primary thorn in Richard's side, and halfway through the film, Downey has one of the more entertaining death scenes in this type of film which I wouldn't dare spoiling.

Back to why we still read Shakespeare. It's apparent while watching this film adaptation that one could take the themes of misuse of power and trust and apply them to any modern government. An easy analogy would be the Bush administrations use of the politics of fear throughout their term. Sure, being the big bad tough guy on the block may work in the short term, but how much good will toward us from countries around the world did we destroy because of it all? A more rudimentary example would be a co-worker that steps on other co-workers and makes false accusations about them to the boss in order to further their own career. Sure, stepping on people is one way to the top, but once you get there, people will resent you for it.

Could somebody take this play and set it during modern America? Perhaps, as there will always be a place for a cautionary tale about the abuse of power and the morality of what it takes to acquire power. Whether or not you want to place Democrats or Republicans as the totalitarian rules is up to your own politics. Personally, I would tweak things so that the Richard III turns into the story of how Jay Leno took over the Tonight Show...twice. Jay III, starring Richard Gere as Jay Leno, coming soon to a theater near you.