“And thus I clothe my naked villainy”: Richard III and the Deformed Body as Rhetorical Camouflage in Thomas Ostermeier’s Production

Abstract: If the royal body exists to be looked at and acquires its meaning only when it is exposed, then in Thomas Ostermeier’s staging and screening of Shakespeare’s Richard III we have this principle exhibited to its extreme. Taking examples from Ostermeier’s production, I show that what should get our attention, instead, is Richard’s skillful use of the voice and his speaking ability to seduce and manipulate his audience. Since the very beginning of the performance, there is no intention to mask Richard’s renowned hunchback and, on the contrary, it is soon laid bare as a fake: it is just a piece of theatrical makeup. It is mainly through his rhetoric that he builds the performing kind of body he considers useful for the specific purpose he intends to attain. During its run at the 69th Avignon festival, Richard III was filmed and broadcast for the first time on 13 July 2015 on ARTE France, and since then it has been possible to watch for it on different occasions till the Schaubühne broadcast from its own website on 3 April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the article, I therefore also focus my attention on the issue of presence and participation of the audience in the “liveness” of the remediation and I consequently deal with the different temporalities implied in the theatre production and in its recorded version.