Where Does Evil Live? La verdadera historia de Ricardo III at Bilbao’s Teatro Arriaga
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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 myth.
The stage
is cold and metallic, framed by a massive steel door and a suspended car—both
relics and symbols of the excavation site. The actors move through an
environment that looks half morgue, half cathedral.
And at its centre? The actor Joaquín Furriel, whose body twists and convulses like a living fossil, “hipnótico, físico, casi animal”—Thypnotic, physical, almost animal (Cadena SER Bilbao, 15 Oct. 2025). His Richard III seems less a man than an organism—fitful, sensual, tormented. Unlike the traditionally hunch-backed schemer, Furriel’s Richard is not marked by physical deformity but by a psychic one: a body straining against its own corruption.
To convey
this, the script fuses fragments of Shakespeare’s text with contemporary
commentary and philosophical monologue, turning the play into a meditation on
violence, truth, and spectacle. Even without linguistic fluency, the rhythm of
the Spanish communicates meaning. Words become percussive; pauses act as
punctuation. I found myself reading gesture and sound as one might read musical
notation. The bones of Shakespeare’s verse are present—simply re-articulated,
re-sounded, and translated into movement and atmosphere.
Bieito’s
trademark extremes are all there: the nakedness of emotion, the ritual cruelty,
and the direct challenge to the audience—and what a challenge it is. One
hundred and twenty minutes of relentless emotional upheaval leave spectators
both exhausted and exhilarated. At moments, particularly during the monologues,
Richard even seems to accuse the audience of complicity: “You made me; you want
to see what evil looks like—so here I am.”
It was
not what I expected.
Having read
the play and some of its critical reception, I half expected Richard III
to be revived as political commentary on tyranny, propaganda, and charisma—a
stage version inspired by Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant perhaps, partly as
a reflection on contemporary politics and the global resurgence of
authoritarian leaders.
I suppose,
envisioned something closer to Ian McKellen’s version. Directed by Richard
Loncraine, this 1995 film adaptation was set in a 1930s Britain re-imagined as
a fascist state. Art-Deco palaces became military bunkers; red banners a
laurel-wreathed boar’s-head evoke the visual language of Nazy Germany. The
result is both elegant and chilling. Shakespeare’s fifteenth-century civil war
becomes an allegory for twentieth-century totalitarianism and a meditation on
how charisma and propaganda can seduce a nation (sounds familiar, rewatch the
film!)
In this
cinematic world, McKellen’s Richard is the consummate showman. His
conspiratorial glances into the camera make the audience his accomplice; we are
seduced by the very evil we claim to condemn. Critics at the time described the
film as a study in theatrical fascism: a warning about how political
tyranny thrives on performance, rhetoric, and beauty. McKellen’s Richard is
witty, urbane, almost glamorous—a monster we cannot help admiring, even as he
murders his way to the throne.
Furriel‘s
Richard, by contrast, denies us that seduction. He offers no charisma, no
charm, no witty invitation into complicity. His power is visceral rather than
rhetorical: a twitching, convulsing body that enacts cruelty without grace.
Where McKellen’s film aestheticises dictatorship, Bieito’s staging anatomises
it. His Richard III is not a political allegory but a post-mortem.
Historically
authentic?
I may even
have envisioned a fifteenth-century version of the play—historically accurate à
la Charles Kean, or historically realistic à la the BBC’s The
Hollow Crown. While I have never seen the former, the latter is available
on.
Director
Dominic Cooke frames the 2016 Richard III as a traumatised veteran of
endless civil war, his body twisted by injury and his mind scarred by grief. In
this interpretation, evil emerges not from ideology or bravado but from
trauma—the slow corrosion of a soldier who has seen too much.
Played by
Benedict Cumberbatch, the play’s titular character murders not from delight but
from exhaustion; his cruelty is mechanical, almost dutiful, as though each act
of violence were a grim reflex of survival. Cumberbatch’s Richard was coldly
intelligent, yet moments of anguish break through, particularly in the private
asides filmed in trembling close-up. His villainy is pitiable, almost
inevitable, a by-product of England’s ceaseless civil wars.
The setting
mirrors the emotional condition of the protagonist. The palette is muted: mud,
candlelight, and the dull gleam of armour replace the supposed splendour of
Tudor ceremony. This Richard III unfolds in an atmosphere of
fatigue—both moral and physical—where ambition has curdled into habit and
violence into routine.
By
contrast, Joaquín Furriel’s Richard, in Calixto Bieito’s La verdadera
historia de Ricardo III, dispenses with both political allegory and
psychological realism. Under Bieito’s direction, the figure is stripped to his
essentials: a body in crisis, convulsing under the pressure of its own desires
and decay. Rather than explaining Richard’s evil through ideology or trauma,
Bieito presents it as “una disección teatral de la maldad y de la historia,” a
theatrical dissection of evil and history (Kritilo, 4 Oct. 2025). His
production treats the play not as a narrative but as a specimen. The bones
found in Leicester become metaphors for the ways we reconstruct history —
piecing together fragments, inventing motives, rewriting guilt. The text itself
is fragmented, sometimes whispered, sometimes distorted through microphones.
The famous opening — “Now is the winter of our discontent” — emerges like a
radio transmission from the grave, breaking apart into echoes. The audience,
seated within the nineteenth-century plush décor of the Teatro Arriaga yet
confronted with Bieito’s metallic purgatory, becomes the final layer of
sediment covering the corpse of monarchy, politics, and theatre itself.
Furriel’s
performance stands at the center of this ritual. His Richard is neither the
smooth manipulator of McKellen nor the self-loathing soldier of Cumberbatch. He
is a composite: forensic sample, political ghost, mirror to our desire for
spectacle and stories. When he murders, it feels less like ambition and more
like experiment — as if testing how far corruption can go before the body
collapses.
Bieito and
Reixach also overturn the moral geometry of Shakespeare’s play. In place of an
arc that ascends toward redemption through Richmond’s triumph, the Bilbao
production ends in suspension—neither defeat nor deliverance. The forensic
theatre returns to its point of origin: the body under light, the evidence
unresolved. Furriel remains on stage, caught between animation and inertia,
while the others recede into darkness. The metallic hum persists, suggesting
that the machinery of cruelty continues to operate, indifferent to kings or
chronologies. No comfort, no closure. Evil is not conquered; it
endures—classified, archived, and still breathing.
A coda
of comparison
All three
Richards — McKellen’s fascist, Cumberbatch’s veteran, Furriel’s forensic
phantom — confront the same question: where does evil live?
- For McKellen, it lives in
politics and charisma.
- For Cumberbatch, it lives in
trauma and history.
- For Bieito, it lives in the act
of looking — in us.
If
McKellen’s camera seduced the audience and Cumberbatch’s lens pitied them,
Bieito’s mirror accuses them. Watching La verdadera historia de Ricardo III
is like standing over an open grave and realizing the bones look uncomfortably
familiar.
Every
generation seems to dig up its own Richard. In Spain, where the play has
become a site for artistic experimentation — from Àlex Rigola’s urban Catalan
version to Miguel del Arco’s political free adaptation — Bieito’s staging feels
like a culmination: Shakespeare as post-mortem.
In Bilbao, the king was not only reimagined but exhumed, dissected, and displayed. What McKellen turned into fascist theatre and Cumberbatch into human tragedy, Bieito turned into a question:
“Why do we
keep digging up this corpse? Is it because we still don’t know whether the
monster was him — or us?”
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