Richard III: villain who transcends the ages

A hellhound. A bottled spider. A "lump of foul deformity."

If you see William Shakespeare's "Richard III" at Intiman Theatre you will hear its notorious main figure called those nasty things. And more.

The insidiously comic, disturbing and timeless play leaves no doubt that this is a royal we love to loathe. He's a grotesquely evil schemer who coolly orders the murders of a brother, a wife, two nephews and others who might hinder his bloody rise to the British throne.

At least, that's Richard III as the Bard of Avon conjures him. And as actors from Richard Burbage (in the 1590s), to Laurence Olivier (in the 1940s) to Stephen Pelinski (now at Intiman) have played him.

Lest we forget, drama is not a dependable guide to history. Dramatists depicting powerful leaders have their own agendas — which may not include being faithful to the facts.

Consider the real Richard of Gloucester, whose rise and fall end Shakespeare's "War of the Roses" history cycle of plays.

Was the 15th-century monarch a hunchback or otherwise physically deformed, as most stage portrayals suggest? Some paintings of him indicate that; others don't. Did he really have his princely young nephews whacked? The Richard III Society contends there's no hard evidence for the murders and insist their guy got a bum rap.

They also point out, Shakespeare had his own reasons for making Richard a demon — albeit a very witty, sly, seductive one. The Bard's ruler and fan Queen Elizabeth I was a Tudor. Richard III was from the rival Plantagenet lineage, but was succeeded by a Tudor: King Henry VII — Queen Elizabeth's grandfather.

As Marjorie Garber writes in "Shakespeare After All," any Elizabethan drama "about the rightful succession of the Tudors, and the end of the reign of the Plantagenets, necessarily benefited from any account of the last Plantagenet king as a monster unworthy to rule."

A great play is a living organism. And it's not surprising its interpreters have recast "Richard III," politically and otherwise, during the work's long, colorful run.

In the 18th century, London actor Colley Cibber thought the lengthy script would bore the masses. So he slashed it nearly in half, reworking it as a brisk action tale. He also added lines, including the famous cry: "Off with his head! So much for Buckingham."

Cibber's bowdlerization was so popular, it became the standard "Richard III" text for decades, before Shakespeare's original version inched back into favor in the 1800s.

An 1821 staging of "Richard III" in New York had another striking agenda: to showcase African-American actors, then largely excluded by racism from playing classical roles.

As Carlyle Brown detailed in his 1990s play "The African Company Presents 'Richard III,' " the tyranny in the plot dovetailed with the bigotry faced by the black players in the African Company. Their "Richard III" was shut down by Manhattan police twice, in two different venues, and some performers were arrested.

Historians suspect a prominent producer of a competing, all-white "Richard III" had a hand in the harassment. And that the crackdown may also have been part of a move to quash a local campaign by free blacks to gain the vote.

Since the mid-20th century, "Richard III" has gained more immediate political currency as theater artists (and political pundits) saw in Richard a reflection of modern oppressors.

Russia's Joseph Stalin, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, U.S. President Richard Nixon and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler have all been compared to Shakespeare's despot.

In the satirical Watergate-era musical, "Dick, Deterred," written by David Edgar, the ex-president morphed into a "sly, evil Richard," as one critic wrote, "surrounded by courtiers no less machinating" than those Shakespeare drew.

Better known is Ian McKellen's fascist Richard III in a superb Royal National Theatre staging (and 1995 film).

Director Richard Loncraine explained that he and McKellen set their adaptation in the 1930s because it was "a period when a tyrant reminiscent of Richard III might just have arisen in the United Kingdom.

"On his abdication, Edward VIII visited Hitler with approval and Oswald Mosley aped Germanic fascism. These reverberations were helpful for the play's credibility, presenting not real history but events that might have happened ... "

Director Bartlett Sher's "Richard III" at Intiman is set in Richard's era (the 1400s). But its focus is modern, too, in the sense that it is less about a single, sui generis villain, than about what kind of society could spawn such a tyrant and enable his power-grab. (Recently, Seattle Shakespeare Company's corporate Richard was enabled by flaming e-mails and distorting video-cams.)

"The fascinating tension of the play," writes Sher in a program note, "is the question it asks of the people around [Richard]. How long will they stand aside while terrible things are happening, before they feel the moral strength to challenge the prevailing authorities and speak up?"