How did you react when Zsótér wanted to direct the play with you?

The same way I reacted in 2005 with Hamlet, when it turned out that Tim Carroll was thinking of me for the role: with astonishment, but also with great curiosity. At the time Tim said that his Hamlet needed my “director’s brain,” the playfulness of a spirit constantly renewing its strategies, and also my ability, as an actor, to plan ten or twenty steps ahead beyond the immediate situations and moments of the character. Sándor Zsótér saw me several times in Hamlet and liked my stage presence. Our Richard may in fact be an extension of Hamlet. Since Sanyi had already worked several times with the Maladype Theatre ensemble and with me personally, it was obvious that we were preparing a non-classical production of Richard III.

What do you mean by “non-classical”?

The beginning of the performance already reveals the unique nature of the directorial intention and the unusual perspective with which Sanyi and his collaborators — Mária Ambrus, Mari Benedek, and Júlia Ungár — approached the classical drama. In my opening monologue I take out a bubble wand and play mischievously with it; through this conspiratorial interaction with the audience I suggest that compared to the perfect proportions and form of a soap bubble, even the most attractive woman or man is imperfect. If I can convey this idea — one of the central pillars of Richard’s program — in the first person singular, then the audience immediately senses that our production requires a different kind of reading, a different spectator attitude, and a greater capacity for abstraction. Maladype’s Richard III will not be a conventional adventure. That is why, as Richard, I do not wear orthopedic devices, nor do I need to spend a long time demonstrating my “science of limping” at the beginning of the performance.

Instead, diction plays an important role.

We perform Shakespeare’s history play in the 130-year-old Hungarian translation by Ede Szigligeti. The text, rich in unusual expressions and never before heard on a Hungarian stage, does not provide audiences with the classical musicality they are accustomed to from István Vas’s translation, so spectators must keep their antennas much more open throughout the performance. They must pay close attention to how each character speaks, what strange adjectives and startling expressions they use. In this way the audience also invests attention and energy into taming the Szigligeti text, making it more tangible, and reaching the essential information and realizations together with the actors. Many people return to see the performance again precisely because of the text.

Your Richard is an outwardly attractive man, and inwardly he is neither satanically evil nor grotesquely twisted. This is not at all a conventional interpretation.

Certainly not. Even from Sanyi’s casting choices and analysis of the play, it became clear that we would not be using stereotypical solutions during rehearsals, and this motivated all of us greatly — for example, in how we would jointly decipher the unexpected losses within the drama.

Losses?

Yes. Because sooner or later Richard must reckon with loss. He overdrives himself, and by the time he finally acquires everything he desired, he is no longer capable of enjoying his victory; he feels like a loser. His separation from Buckingham becomes a serious trauma. The Duke of Buckingham — in our production every “cz” is pronounced in the old-fashioned way — refuses to fulfill Richard’s most important request: he does not want to kill the royal children. This leads to complete estrangement, almost a kind of “romantic rupture” for King Richard, who was elevated to the throne with Buckingham’s help. After that he loses his sense of play, his humor; there is no longer anyone to dazzle. The process of isolation intensifies, and physical and psychological disintegration takes over. We witness the collapse of the concentrating power of an exceptional mind, which eventually — at least in our interpretation — causes Richard to lose his sound judgment as well.

Thanks to Sanyi’s radical directorial gesture, we do not perform the final act. Our production ends with the line: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” By that point, a disintegrating mind is already examining itself, analyzing real and imagined intentions. “Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I” — I began it, and I must also finish it before myself, for myself, by myself. No one will mourn me or search for me. I must confront the end, which means that the “mirroring technique” I previously used so successfully on those around me must suddenly be applied to myself. And that is not so simple. Sanyi’s directorial demand is that Richard prepare an inventory of himself with an ice-cold, razor-sharp mind, and afterward accept that there is nothing more left in him — he is exhausted. He almost longs for death.

The space is tiny, and you are extremely close to the audience. Yet you are not exactly the central figure in the usual sense. Your Richard almost seems to withdraw, though at decisive moments he is there like a spider.

That is exactly what we wanted! That is what makes him dangerous. The fact that he does not reveal himself.

The Anne–Richard scene is often considered one of the key scenes of the play. In your production it seems less emphasized. Was that not of interest to you?

Sanyi thinks that what happens there is essentially a warm-up exercise — Richard is warming up, treating seduction as a kind of training program. If he succeeds there, then his much more complicated later actions will also succeed. We wanted to show Richard’s rare ability to melt so completely into the empathetic observation of another person that the other — in this case Lady Anne — feels that Richard’s claims are backed by attentive personal understanding, and that despite all his disturbing assertions, his concrete rhetorical techniques contain serious and useful truths.

Because of her own situation and emotional agitation, Anne knows perfectly well why she should have nothing to do with Richard, but Richard — still Duke of Gloucester at this point — turns her arguments around with such logical precision that she increasingly loses the thread of her own reasoning and cannot continue what she started; she gets stuck and begins new lines of argument. Taking this kind of structure, these logical leaps and rhetorical rules seriously, Sanyi did not force me into the stereotypical behavioral model that allows the actor playing Richard to conceal a gigolo beneath apparent deformities.

This scene is a huge challenge both for Ágota Szilágyi and for me. We have no grand emotional amplitudes or direct acting templates. It is a complex and demanding acting task to allow the audience, step by step, to notice the contradictions in Anne’s statements and enjoy the way Richard exposes and reflects them back to her. At first it is not a meeting between a man and a woman, but between two people who understand the situation and genuinely want to communicate about it. Yet at the same time they “click” with one another, and from this unexpected and exciting pseudo-erotic experience Anne’s relationship to life is refreshed — in short: Richard breathes life into Lady Anne.

Has your performance changed over the course of the productions?

I am convinced that it has. Returning spectators also tell us so. During the first few performances we still respected Sanyi’s concept almost too much, but over time we began to sense where there were gaps in the concept that could be filled with ever-new acting discoveries and subtler nuances. If Sanyi also appreciates these moments, it elevates all of our performances.

You mentioned that in a relatively short time you already reached your fortieth performance. I assume you are not playing only at your own Base venue.

We are receiving invitations to more and more festivals, especially festivals presenting contemporary theatrical tendencies, so there must be something unusual and formally innovative in our production. The directorial emphases are placed completely differently, and therefore the acting is built from different tools than in conventional Richard III interpretations. It demands from the actors a sense of proportion and style, as well as delicate modulation, which must be applied entirely differently in a room-sized venue, or in Gyula on the large stage of the Castle Theatre, or at an international festival — most recently in Brno, next in Bitola — where the playing area is set before an imposing large auditorium.

Foreign audiences also watch very attentively because they are not primarily given spectacular effects and grand gestures, but rather a finely tuned, intimate, and highly personal adaptation of Richard III. As the performance progresses, the special beauty and power of this approach gradually opens up to them. For example, if my healthy-looking Richard, through his straightforward behavior and direct communication, succeeds in winning the audience’s sympathy and making them my accomplices, they sometimes end up pitying me by the conclusion. Thus, although we begin from very far away, we eventually arrive very close to that single sustained note which, over time, comes to signify for everyone the inevitable essence of the fulfillment of life and death.

What we represent with this production is essentially a kind of minimal music. A work by John Cage — if we do it well.

István Nánay: “Richards,” Színház, July–September 2018.