Richard III as Hamlet?

In a writers workshop…
Gerard: I want to write a story, about vengeance, using the Hamlet premise, you know, a character who has to take revenge on his uncle for killing his father and marrying his mother.

Instructor: A lot of people died in that play.
Gerard: Exactly. Too many deaths. Too melodramatic. All caused by Hamlet being too indecisive.
Instructor: You want to make him more decisive?
Gerard: Yeah. Have him get in there. Take out Claudius without all the fussing about.
Instructor: Like Richard III? A killer from the get-go?
Gerard: That’s it.
Instructor: No “To be, or not to be”? The play would be finished in five minutes. No Hamlet.
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Voice-over
Over in five minutes. What would happen if you replaced Hamlet with Richard III? Vengeance is Hamlet’s superwant. But the story is also driven by his internal conflict of thinking deeply, seen by some as indecisiveness. Richard III? A decisive psychopath. Without Hamlet, there is no inner conflict, no character-driven plot, no universal themes, no story. Hamlet: therein lies the genius of Shakespeare, lasting so far 400 years.

Amadeus by National Theatre

After the National Theatre production...

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Francesco: Some good lines by Peter Shaffer reminiscent of Robert Bolt. Salieri on his two assistants: one keeps me clothed the other keeps me full. One covers me up, the other fills me up. Something like that.

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Ricardo: I wonder, Mozart, I mean, was he?

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Francesco: Was he what?

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Ricardo: So crazy, so mental, so mad.

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Francesco: So unhinged, so disturbed, so psychotic? Perhaps he was. Salieri said so. Many others too. The price of genius?

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Ricardo: Was he poisoned do you think?

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Francesco: Some say he died of a strep infection. Swollen legs. Lot of deaths around 1791 and 1792 attributed to that in Vienna. Hard to tell 250 years later of course, but sometimes the truth is less dramatic than the drama.

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Voice-over

Beyond the circumstances of Mozart’s death is the the debate over whether he could have suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome. The symptoms... and they are mentioned in the recollections of friends and acquaintances and picked up by the playwright. The tics, the jumps, the scatology make for arresting drama after all. Throw poisoning by a jealous colleague into the mix and there you have a formula for drawing in an audience. But a great play. The poetic nudges aside the prosaic.

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