I first saw Martin Freeman in pantomime when he was playing Buttons and the audience was audibly upset when Cinderella decided to marry boring Prince Charming instead of him. Freeman has come a long way since then. He comes straight from playing the villain in Fargo on television to playing the greatest villain in British theatre. He is no longer the Mr Nice Guy of The Office, Dr Watson and The Hobbit.
Director Jamie Lloyd jokily takes his starting point from the play’s opening lines and updates the action to the 1979 winter of discontent. Some of the best Shakespearean productions have been set in modern times. Richard Eyre’s Richard III at the National Theatre in 1990, with Ian McKellen and set in a 1930’s Fascist Britain, was one of the best Richards in living memory and his production was the basis for an excellent film by Richard Loncraine in 1996. Unfortunately Lloyd’s update doesn’t work and his approach is seriously hampered by a cramped office setting with multiple desks which give the actors very little space to manoeuvre. It would have been better to have had a bare stage rather than this ugly clutter.
There are other innovations. Clarence is drowned in a fish tank, not the usual tub of malmsey. Queen Elizabeth is tied up with office tape. The ghosts of those Richard had murdered physically attack him during the Battle of Bosworth. Best of all, Richard personally kills his wife, Anne, with the help of a telephone cord in an extended Hitchcockian sequence with sound effects produced by a banging lift door refusing to shut.
Lloyd is keen to attract young audiences and Freeman’s presence should do just that; but audiences coming to see Richard III for the first time would actually be better off watching Ian McKellen on DVD. Freeman is always intelligent and crystal clear; but you never feel you are seeing the consummate virtuoso villain Shakespeare created. It is a performance, perhaps, more suitable for the Richard in the Henry VI history plays.