Reviews for Richard and Anne

The average rating for Richard and Anne based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-02-14 00:00:00 Guy Thibault Richard and Anne opens on the first night of a New York production of Shakespeare's Richard III. Just before the curtain rises the the actor playing the title role (the Player King) is disturbed by the presence of a jester who is visible only to him. When the curtain rises, the Player King begins to intone the famous soliloquy: "Now is the winter of our discontent . . .," but he is unable to finish because the jester begins to appear in the background. The jester is now visible to all and when the Player King and the stage manager demand he leave, he fades away. The curtains cannot be lowered and other problems plague the company. The jester, Dag, was the jester of King Richard III, and he explains that he has lain for centuries in his grave (which he shares with Richard) and has grown tired of the lies told about his beloved master. He wants to tell the truth about Richard. The producer replies that even if Dag could prevent this one performance, the play will continue to be read and performed all over the world. Seemingly accepting defeat, Dag fades, but when the performance continues he reappears with Richard III'described as a handsome man with a somewhat stern and sad face. Their appearance again disrupts the performance. Richard tells Dag that they seem to be in the way and should leave, but when Dag replies that the actors are portraying him and Anne, Richard politely asks them to continue. At the conclusion of the scene in which Richard woos Anne over Henry VI's corpse, Richard applauds, praising the scene as "very deft and amusing." Dag is astounded: "This is the sulphuric leech that's eaten Its way down through the rubble there at Leicester And bitten into your good years, yours and my lady's, Till my earth felt the sting, and came to hear it__" Richard continues to praise the play, and disbelieves Dag when he asserts it is about him: "Well, the name's Richard. There have been many Richards, One like this perhaps. Not I." When Dag finally convinces Richard that the play is about him: "This is the only version'and in all histories This is the way you're known." Richard believes that he can do nothing about the lies that Tudor has told about him, and agrees to leave the stage. Dag, however gets into an argument with the producer who calls the police to remove the two whom he believes belong to some whacko group that goes around trying to clear Richard's name. While waiting for police reinforcements, Dag and Richard are allowed to tell the audience Richard's story. Dag instructs Richard that he can call anyone from his past but may not speak any words not spoken or change the past Richard cries, "Who wants his life again if it's to be Unchanged? Who wants it the way it was? Richard agrees to play Dag's game if only to see and talk to Anne again. The one thing Richard wants to tell her is that he never loved anyone but her. Richard agrees to go on, even though he cannot change things. Henry Tudor initially appears as a rat scurrying and clicking around the stage. (A bit harsh perhaps, but turn about is fair play. If Shakespeare can portray Richard as a deformed evil monster, why not Tudor as a rat?) Tudor takes human form as a music master in the court of Edward IV and with John Morton eggs on Clarence to kidnap Anne to prevent her marrying Richard. But Richard rescues and marries her. In the next scene Bishop Stillington is called to defend himself for waiting until after Edward IV's death to claim that the king's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was bigamous. The bishop explains that he would have lost his head otherwise. Richard says that neither he nor Anne wanted the crown, but Stillington reminds him that parliament had ruled against Edward's sons and that he is sure Richard will rule well. Richard then asks Dag to bring on his son's last Christmas at Middleham. Richard remembers it is Anne's last Christmas, too. Despite their sorrow following their son's death, Richard cannot understand why she believed he loved another woman. Dag explains that Tudor and Morton (those two troublemakers again) sent a woman to Anne who convinced her that Richard saw her illness as a failure and death as abandonment. Anne persuades Richard to go to battle, promising him "your wife will be all new when you return." When he returned , she was gone: "She died believing I could love quickly elsewhere, take another wife All new. Must she lie there believing this As long as earth is earth?" When Dag replies he thinks she must, Richard says won't go back quietly to his grave. The next scene takes place after Richard's death as Tudor tells his nobles he, unlike Richard, will rule with justice, truth, and gentleness. He asks Elizabeth of York to marry him, but her mother demands to know where her sons are, insisting that they were alive after Richard's death. Alone with Polydore Vergil and Morton, Tudor confesses he had to destroy the boys. Morton convinces him to come up with a more elaborate story about their murder in order to blacken Richard's name. As all three agree to set about destroying Richard's reputation, Tudor sees Richard in the shadows and blurts out that he has been tricked into the admitting his guilt. Richard also accuses him of planning to seize the throne from the beginning. Tudor declares that Richard can't change the histories that have stood for hundreds of years, while Richard argues that truth is stronger than lies. At this point, the stage manager interrupts Richard, telling him he listened to the audience after the first act. Their reaction was that his true account was interesting, but that they liked the old version better with the hump-backed usurper. Dag says he loved King Richard and he loved his mistress Anne but that he is beaten. Richard responds that they are beaten together. The actors resume the performance of Shakespeare's play with the Richard's wooing of Elizabeth. The Player King cannot remember his lines as Anne appears, calling Richard's name. As she fades, Richard proclaims over and over again that he loved only her, and she eventually hears and understands that as long as death lasts she will have him. When this play within a play ends, the producer announces to the audience that they will perform Shakespeare's Richard III the following evening. A sentimental take on Richard and Anne's story, but the play is touching--as well as having some traces of humor. While Shakespeare's version of history will continue to be presented and accepted as truth by many, Maxwell Anderson is not without hope that the truth about Richard will be be heard and believed by some.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-08-22 00:00:00 Sebastian yael Orozco nava I remembered this play as being nothing more than a superb melodrama organized around a charismatic, one-dimensional villain, but I now realize it is more complex than that. Richard's deformity is not merely a physical sign of spiritual evil, but also a metaphor for the twisted era of internecine and intra-generational violence of which he himself is the inevitable conclusion. Richard claims that his disability disqualifies him for a peaceful age's love-making, but his effective wooing of Lady Anne--literally over her husband's dead body--belies this claim. No, Richard, who from infancy has known nothing but civil war and betrayal, can only be effective when he is either murdering his Plantagenet relatives or plotting to do so. (Thus, when he finally becomes king, he can neither enjoy the honor nor rise to the challenge, and therefore is soon plagued with nightmares and consigned to destruction.) Richard fancies himself as the medieval Vice, commenting sardonically to the audience on the action he has devised, heedless of the fact that he is also part of a universal moral design. Richard, who embodies in concentrated form the worst deeds of his time, must be purged so that a new age can be established. It is here that the women of the play become important, transforming it into Senecan if not Sophoclean tragedy. In periodic choruses, the queens Margaret, Elizabeth and Anne (plus the Duchess of York) mourn their children and others who have been snatched from them by civil war, and call down vengeance on Richard and other murderers. The interesting thing about this chorus, however, is that it is not composed of unified expressions of grief and vengeance, for the woman continually curse and blame each other, each proclaiming her own sorrow as somehow superior to that of the others. Ironically, the age's long history of crimes against mothers deprives even maternal grief of its unity. I believe this is Shakespeare's first self-conscious attempt to create tragedy--in the classical sense--out of popular drama. The conception of the women's chorus--both a traditional tragic chorus and at the same time something more personal, more ironic--is particularly impressive in this regard. Unfortunately, however, Shakespeare overreached himself. In execution, the chorus of queens is often whiny and wearying, and slows down the action without illuminating it. Nevertheless, it is a great step toward the tragic resonances of the major plays.