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 ROB PENSALFINI, artistic director of the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble and star of their latest production, tells JODY MACGREGOR about RICHARD III.
JODY MACGREGOR: What has director Tom McSweeney brought to the play?
ROB PENSALFINI: He does bring with him a real eye for visual detail and scenic detail. He really cares about the language as well, but one of the things that we’ve developed as a strength in our training and something that a lot of reviews say about our show is the language is really clear. It’s accessible, it’s easy to understand, it’s alive. It’s not dead, old, museum Shakespeare. So that’s great, we bring that and then Tom marries with that his incredible visual eye. He’s got an amazing sense of detail about how the slightest gesture or look or angle of the body can really send a clear, or more-or-less clear, signal and change what you’re saying.
JM: Is it hard balancing being the artistic director and playing Richard?
RP: A lot of people say it’s actually the most challenging role in Shakespeare. It’s not as big a role as Hamlet, but Hamlet gets more time off-stage and I’m on stage, not all the time but pretty close to it. While I’ve been working on the play anything but the essential artistic director stuff has gone to one side, but that’s cool.
JM: Do you see Richard as a straight-up villain or tragic antihero?
RP: Yes. Which is to say, I don’t think there are any real villains, pure villains or pure heroes in Shakespeare. This is one of the reasons that I do this work at all – he’s got complex human beings. You’ve got a fellow who does horrible things and I’m not gonna try and apologise for or excuse the things that Richard does. I’m not even gonna try and justify them, but I am gonna say that there are reasons, no excuses, and the thing about Shakespeare is that’s what he’s interested in.
JM: What’s different about performing in the Roma Street Parklands rather than a theatre?
RP: One of the things that we lose with Shakespeare, in particular when it goes into black boxes or indoor theatres, there’s something about the energy of the language and the size of the characters that really suits the outdoor setting and of course the park in Spring is beautiful. You get unexpected wonderful things and unexpected perhaps challenging things. A wonderful thing is that sometimes at night during a performance curlews will start to cry, that beautiful sound that they do, usually at a perfect moment in the play. Then there’s other things, like the first year we were there someone wandered by and had a bit of a yell at us while we were on stage – which is fine, that happens at least once a year, someone who’s maybe had a few too many yells at us – but this guy then lobbed a stubby, a full stubby of beer from quite a distance. It was a pretty impressive throw, and it smashed on the stage. I was in the middle of a soliloquy, a monologue, and it just spattered glass all the way across the stage. I got through to the end of the speech but I don’t think anyone was listening.
RICHARD III runs from Thursday to Sunday, Oct 7–10, Oct 21–24 and Oct 28–31 at Roma Street Parklands’ Amphitheatre. See www.qldshakespeare.org for bookings and more information.
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