Richard III

Season Lineup:

Richard III
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Jeremy Hutton
Sept 15 - Oct 2, 2010

Shakespeare’s delightfully bloody and brutal history of Richard III follows the corrupt path of a twisted man with equally twisted ambitions. Richard manipulates, marries and murders his way to the top with unmatched charm and zeal.

"Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe’
- Richard in Act V Scene III.
Suave, calculating and brutal, meet one of Shakespeare’s greatest villains.

What people are saying about Richard III

Richard III is a performance sure to thrill and entertain.
The Medium Online

"Sills is marvelous. His voice, gesture and well-timed humour, grant the Duke a certain normalcy and appeal even as he hires assasin after assasin." - Ontario Arts Review

"The experience of Richard III, through the creative direction of Jeremy Hutton, offers an intesne and memorable look into the mind and machinations of this deformed, scheming and tyranical king." - The Medium

"Bold choices in Shakespeare always make for an interesting production and Jeremy Hutton has certainly made some bold choices on this one. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I encourage any lovers of Shakespeare, history, or onstage violence to check this one out." -Mooney on Theatre

Andre Sills to playing title role in Richard III

On returning to Hart House, Sills says: "I am delighted to be back on this stage working with Jeremy again and I look forward to the challenges that Richard has to offer."

Andre Sills Bio:

For Hart House Theatre:
Title role in Othello. Andre is very pleased to be returning to the Hart House Stage after six years.

Recent theatre credits include Taming of the Shrewwith Theatre By The Bay, A Midsummer Night's Dream with Shakespeare In Action, The Nile at the Toronto Fringe Festival, The Overwhelming with Studio 180 and The Canadian Stage Company.

Andre Sills Photo
André has spent the past four seasons working at The Stratford Shakespeare Festival acting in the following shows: Macbeth,Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo & Juliet,Love’s Labour’s Lost, Caesar & Cleopatra, Henry IV, Part 1,The Duchess of Malfi and Pentecost. (Caesar & Cleopatra was also filmed for the Bravo Network.) André is a graduate of theBirmingham Conservatory under David Latham. He made his American theatre debut recently playing the title role in Othello, and the lead Harmond Wilks in Radio Golf with the St. Louis Black Repertory Company.

Other theatre credits include Much Ado About Nothing (Canadian Stage), and Titus Andronicus(Canopy Theatre). André is a graduate of George Brown Theatre School.

Upcoming theatre: Soulseek for Birdland Theatre, and Ruined for Obsidian Theatre.

Buy Richard III tickets

3 Week Run
Week 1 - Wed to Sat 8pm
Week 2 - Wed to Sat 8pm
Week 3 - Wed to Sat 8pm + Sat 2pm

Tickets: Adults $25
Students & Seniors $15
$10 Student Tickets every Wednesday Night!

BUY TICKETS
www.uofttix.ca
416.978.8849

Sun, 2011-05-15 20:00

Ticket Prices:
Adult $25.00
Senior $15.00
Student $15.00

DIRECTOR'S NOTES

Welcome to Richard III, the most delightfully bloody history in the Shakespearean cannon. We begin our production at the Battle of Tewksbury – a battle won by the York faction at the end of Shakespeare’s Henry VI part 3. Richard III is the last in a long series of English history plays, and the context provided at the end of Henry VI is hugely beneficial to the clarity and impact of Richard’s story. If one sees the play not as a history but as an exploration of England’s most compelling villain, then it only makes sense to start at the beginning of Richard’s machinations and open with his very first murder. Despite this, the purists in the audience need not fear - the glorious summer of Shakespeare’s famous opening scene will appear directly after a brief winter of discontent.

“Then since the heavens have shaped my body so,
let Hell make crook’d my mind to answer it”.

Richard of Gloucester - Henry VI part 3. Act 5, scene 6

On many occasions, Richard describes the deformity of his body as an outward reflection of his twisted mind and mangled soul. I wanted to expand on this idea and make the setting itself yet another reflection of Richard’s deformity. It is a setting more representative of the character of the play, than any specific time or location.

Instead of staging a place for Richard to inhabit, I set about staging Richard's mind as a place inhabited by everyone else. It is an abstract representation of the Elizabethan world as seen through Richard’s twisted imagination - a place where every atrocity he conceives can be conjured with the snap of his withered fingers. Dead trees shrouded like corpses are as attractive and unsettling as Richard’s own personality and what appears on the surface obscures what lurks below.

For Richard, the people in his life are merely the pawns of his mind. He murders and manipulates them all until he has created a kingdom of nightmares. Yet he himself is tormented with dreams and cursed by ghosts, both living and dead. The world that he creates begins to turn on him and soon he is left the victim of his own nightmare.

-Jeremy Hutton, Director

CAST

Henry VI
Peter Higginson

Queen Margaret
Annemieke Wade

Edward, Prince of Wales / Richmond
Andrew Knowlton

Lady Anne
Sochi Fried

Edward IV
Rob Candy

George, Duke of Clarence / Blunt
Scott Moore

Richard, Duke of Gloucester
Andre Sills

Queen Elizabeth
Claire Acott

Rivers / Oxford
Martin Chodorek

Grey/Messenger 2
Benedict Dingle