Richard

‘Man dreams the life that is his until his living is done. The king dreams he is a king and lives in deceit of a king.’ Barca – life is a dream (1635).
Richard began in its original form as a Shakespeare monologue form Richard II that I’d rehearsed to use in auditions for drama school. I’d updated the look and feel of the monologue by placing my Richard in solitary confinement in a top security prison. The idea being that whilst he was segregated from the rest of the prisoners his status as warlord would have been stripped and bestowed upon someone else, someone who would end Richard’s rule.
Much to my disappointment I never gained the coveted place I sought at a drama school but the first seeds as Richard II in another guise had been firmly planted in my head. And rapidly began to take root. I decided that an inner monologue uttered aloud is both a reflective appraisal of a particular situation but also a possible sign of mental illness. Voices, challenging one another inside a person’s head and spilling into the outside world. Trying to make decisions based on judgements coming from inner turmoil.
Having personal experience of such a situation and the chaos it can bring to a person’s life I gave Richard the opportunity to create a world outside of the one he could no longer control, a world created from half remembered dreams and recollections of events that may or may not have taken place but which he believed were actual memories. I gave Richard a second chance.
I decided to break the monologue into several parts, specifically designed to illuminate parts of Richard’s own character and the memories he believed were his. For this purpose I used Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes such as Hero, Child, Monster, Priest, Trickster, etc, who were then able to deliver parts of the monologue as bizarre ambassadors to Richard’s thinking to reinforce his growing conviction that his journey in a make believe world was real.
The time and period in which events are set was deliberately ambiguous in keeping with the delusional nature of Richard’s mind. Thus, there are crossovers from history and legend stitched together with the present day to create an ethereal kingdom into which Richard could escape, a kingdom he believed he once ruled.
The physical location of this kingdom was set amongst the local landmarks of my hometown, Portsmouth, places that were sacred to me growing up as a child, some of which have disappeared since this film was made. But their memories, like Richard’s, have been indelibly stamped in my mind and as I grow older they’ve become places into which I can escape the oncoming advent of old age and my own inevitable death.
Following the completion of the film I began some extra research for the Presskit and by chance came across this article
‘Rumours that Richard was still alive persisted after his death but never gained much credence in England. In Scotland, however, a man identified as Richard came into the hands of Regent Albany in Stirling Castle and served as a figurehead to anti-Lancastrians. Henry IV’s government dismissed him as an imposter and it was suggested the man had a mental illness.’