Richard III bears the brunt of some of the most colourful lines in Shakespeare. An ugly hunchback, “rudely stamp’d deformed, unfinish’d,” while based on an historical King of England, Richard was a propagandist invention, literally intended to ‘embody evil’. 

So outrageous, cunning and malevolent is Shakespeare’s bad king that great actors including Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellan and Antony Sher have humped up to play him. Enter Sara Beer, a Welsh actor 4ft 3″ tall and born with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that Richard III also had. She is determined to play the villain and, in fact, is well prepared for the role having already memorised some of the lines as a child, reciting them while being fitted with her restrictive Milwaukee back brace. In her entertaining monologue, written and directed by award-winning Welsh playwright Kaite O’Reilly, Beer plays a demanding three-pronged part, she says: “a version of someone closest to the actual me; an actor trying to find a way to create her interpretation of Richard for a production and an actor playing Richard“. 

The aim of the production, part of the TNC’s Simbiòtic festival, is to call out the absence of inclusivity in theatre, the layers of prejudice that see actors such as Beer unable to squeeze into a part physically and intellectually suitable for her, yet shaped instead by male thesbians with prosthetic humps and ‘bionic’ legs, slumped onto “too many crutches to ride a horse”. “We are too often portrayed as frail, sad, lonely individuals who need to be rescued in some way by a beautiful non-disabled person,” says Beer. The tragedy of the thing (after all, Richard III is a tragedy) is that it is evident that Beer makes a fantastic Richard III: bringing feminism, corporeal clout and complexity to the part.