Electrifying Spacey

Was it curvature of the spine? Was it a club foot? Was it just an epic dose of facial acne? We don’t know exactly where, how or in what degree Richard III’s deformities manifested themselves.

Was it curvature of the spine? Was it a club foot? Was it just an epic dose of facial acne? We don’t know exactly where, how or in what degree Richard III’s deformities manifested themselves. Nor did Shakespeare. So he just went with a hunch. In Sam Mendes’s modern-dress production, Kevin Spacey offers us Richard as a double paralympian. He has a mini-excrescence, like a junior dinosaur egg, obtruding meekly from the back of his crisply laundered white shirt. He also has a fabulously twisted and withered left leg, that is emphasised by a line of stylish black-leather buckles worn, as fashion apparently dictated, over his trousers. I make much of these peculiarities because the production does so, too.