Richard III

Here's Richard again. The one played by Lars Eidinger, who became a legend at Avignon in 2015. For his fifth Shakespeare, Thomas Ostermeier was keen on this outstanding performer. The role demands one, for the sinister Duke of Gloucester's seduction is paradoxical, to say the least. Counterfeit body, demonic soul, why on earth does this monster continue to fascinate audiences for over four centuries, and how could he do so so well without an exceptional actor to embody him?

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is the first great master of self-staging that theater has produced. Or at least the first modern character to bring himself into the world theatrically. Even before he was king, he was a marvellous actor and a superb scriptwriter, endowed with the instinct of a big cat and the calculating intelligence of a fine reader of Machiavelli. And he wants to be a son of his works. Richard is convinced that the games played by other men have been forever forbidden to him, ever since he was born. Lost for lost, he has decided to play with what he is. He, who is less than anything, almost a beast, is going to rise above everyone else, on a heap of corpses, and wants to make himself known in this way: by being nothing more than a succession of masks, which he juggles virtuosically, from the fury of a rock musician to the melancholy of a being who remembers having been Hamlet.