Ophelia de Vere

  This one starts with a confession: I do not speak a word of Spanish—or Basque, for that matter. Still, I took the opportunity to see a stage adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III during my last trip to Bilbao. The Teatro Arriaga presented Calixto Bieito’s La verdadera historia de Ricardo III , a “free version” of Shakespeare’s most ruthless king, performed in Spanish and Basque-inflected accents, illuminated by cold, forensic light. I understood perhaps one word in five. Yet the theatrical experience is as much about language as it is about performance, visual storytelling, rhythm and sound, cultural adaptation, and shared global heritage. Theatre of Dissection: The Play as Autopsy Bieito and his collaborator Adrià Reixach do not begin with the Wars of the Roses but with an archaeological dig: the 2012 discovery of Richard III’s skeleton beneath a Leicester car park. From this literal exhumation they construct a metaphorical one—a theatre that dissects history, power, and ...