‘This it is when men are ruled by women’: The Ableists’ Curse and the RSC’s 2022 production of Richard III (directed by Gregory Doran) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 23 June-8 October 2022

Staged as the third in a series, following 2 and 3 Henry VI (titled Rebellion and Wars of the Roses), this Richard III shared its designer – Stephen Brimson Lewis – with the other two productions. What started out as a series of stage-floor platforms in Part 2 had decayed into fractured and half-buried duckboards of a World War I trench in Part 3. By the time of the opening of Richard III, the unchanging set was a huge red box with a clear, uncluttered stage, over which towered a replica of Sir Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph, dedicated in 1920 to the fallen of the Great War and rededicated in 1946 to those lost in World War II. (Figure 1) Richard III reminds us, in the various scenes of mourning mothers and queens, that war ruins female as well as male lives and in 2005, John W. Mills’s memorial to the Women of World War II (further north along Whitehall) underlined the suffering of those left behind the front. In Lewis’s design, the phallic brutality of the Cenotaph suggested both the generations of those lost and being lost as well as the macho vanity of the great dictator – Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and now, bare chested on his steed, or seated at the end of a Brobdingnaggian conference table, Putin. As Shakespeare’s play demonstrates, while men skirmish to realize political or territorial ambition, women and children pay the price. In the production’s final moments, a wreath of red and white roses was laid at the base of the Cenotaph as though such tokenism could possibly ameliorate the slaughter that prompted it. Never have Richmond’s (Nicholas Armfield) sanctimonious pieties – ‘That [peace] may long live here, God say “Amen”’ (5.6.41) – sounded so hollow. As the assembled cast knelt upstage to face the Cenotaph, the play’s most desperate casualty, Queen Margaret (Minnie Gale), crawled out from stage left, curled up on the floor, facing downstage, her back to the memorial, and died.