Theatre: Because it's good to play the bad guy

Richard III is Shakespeare's biggest and best loved villain. Robert Lindsay and Ian Pepperell are next in line for the throne.

The hump sported by Barrie Rutter's Richard III was a shoulder pad on loan from Bradford Northern Rugby League Club. Antony Sher's deformity was glimpsed naked, in a shocking touch, when his cloak slithered down his back during the coronation scene. It was, symbolically, through his bulging disfigurement that Anton Lesser's Crookback was fatally speared - blood and pus gushing out of it as though some poisonous boil on the realm had at last been lanced (a nightly headache for the poor actor who had to find the hole in the hump). David Troughton even went to the trouble of consulting an obstetrician who told him that the machiavellian monarch's twisted spine could be the result of having to adjust to a painful hip injury caused by a breach birth.

Yes, Richard III is a role you shoulder in more senses than one - and there has never been a dearth of actors eager to take the hump. Tonight, Robert Lindsay will hobble into view in Elijah Moshinsky's new staging at the RSC, while over at the Leicester Haymarket, Ian Pepperell's hunchback is about to murder his way to the crown in a new production by Paul Kerryson.

Ironically, the last time Lindsay and Moshinsky worked together in the theatre it was on Cyrano de Bergerac, another drama about a man driven to compensate for physical disfigurement. Pepperell comes to Richard after his Ian Charleson award-nominated performance as Hamlet, so he is not exactly short of practice at sustaining a marathon role or establishing an intimate rapport with the audience.

In recent years, we've had Antony Sher's bottled spider of a Richard, scuttling about on crutches. Simon Russell-Beale gave us a goggle-eyed satanic Humpty Dumpty who, in a comic corroboration of his claim that "dogs bark at me as I halt by them", actually did arrive yapped at by disgusted canines. And there was Ian McKellen's ramrod-backed First World War Officer speaking in strangulated Sandhurst tones - a soldier who could not accommodate to peacetime and who hungrily turned to fascism as the continuation of warfare by other means.

But though Richard III offers leading actors a peculiarly rich opportunity to create a vivid and dominating impression, it's significant how often productions of the play fail to get the balance right between its theatricality and its political acumen or to convey well how closely those two elements are connected.

Richard III is virtually a manual on how to stage a coup d'etat and become a tyrant. Not for nothing is it mordantly echoed in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Brecht's Chicago-gangland parody of Hitler's ascent to power. Indeed, when Antony Sher played Ui at the National, he deliberately tripped over the shotguns he was carrying on his first entry and converted them into crutches for a cheeky reprise of his scuttling RSC Crookback.

In the first half of the play, Shakespeare disarms moral judgement by presenting his anti-hero as a charismatically self-conscious actor. The sole character in the canon who immediately buttonholes the audience with a soliloquy, he declares: "I am determined to prove a villain", as though the only legitimate standards by which the bravura of his protean opportunism and artful stage-management could be assessed were theatrical ones. As he flatters the audience into smirking with him at the ironic blindness of his victims, our capacity for seduction makes its own political point. "Effectiveness," outside the theatre, is by no means necessarily a virtue.

The last productions of the play at the RSC and the National made a striking contrast on this question of the enmeshing of the political and the theatrical, for both laid heavy stress on one aspect to the detriment of the other. In its relentless (if highly arresting) emphasis on role play, Steven Pimlott's RSC staging threatened to turn the proceedings into an existential monodrama, the other characters fading into phantasms in the hero's dream.

David Troughton's bulky Mr Punch of a Richard yearned, with Elephant Man-like pathos, for his unyielding mother's love and donned false identities to disguise the painful hollowness within.

About to launch into the famous opening soliloquy, he was interrupted by a fanfare and had to return, in a court clown's cap and bells, to deliver its first half as a public entertainment. The inner state of Richard took hefty precedence over the state of England, his personal disintegration even ruling out the need for a climactic battle. Recycling his speeches like someone in the grip of a nervous breakdown, this Richard walked away from his role and sat at the side where he greeted Richmond's stirring final speech with a slow sardonic hand clap. There was more Pirandello than politics in this production.

Contrariwise, Richard Eyre's National staging swept us into an alternative history of England between the wars - Richard's rise seen as a parallel for the coup-that-might-have-been by a fascist leader triumphing over a decayed aristocracy with his black shirted populist bovver-boys.

The analogy was worked out with unnerving persuasiveness, but the period shift left Ian McKellen's Richard in a tricky position. Military men of such a vintage and pedigree are not famed for infectious glee at their own flamboyant theatricality. Within the constraints imposed on him, the actor was riveting. One-handedly manoeuvring a cigarette from its case and lighting it, he would recount his plots to the audience with the guffawing self-congratulation of a Blimp relating a capital jest at his club: the more outrageous the hypocrisy, the more constipated and clipped were his vowels. But you always felt that this Richard's machinations were the means to a long range end, not also relished for themselves. As a result, you viewed him from a distance and, crucially, with no fear of being yourself compromised. And, as the number of his followers swelled, his own tactics were upstaged by the sheer intimidatory power of the entourage.

Richard the Thirds have come in all shapes and sizes, from the bafflingly unblemished and endlessly popular leader on display in a recent Rumanian production that toured Britain to the one played by Richard Dreyfus in the off-Broadway parody in Neil Simon's movie The Goodbye Girl: not so much a wicked king as a screaming queen.

It's unlikely that Lindsay or Pepperell will be plumping for either of those outre options. Both actors have the requisite power to project ruthlessness and a sense of inner damage. Lindsay was superb as the remorseless (yet underlyingly injured) Labour leader of a northern town in Alan Bleasdale's TV series GBH; in Playing By The Rules, a drama about rent boys, Pepperell made compelling progress from childrens' home waif to spiffed-up heartbreaker to besuited leader of a vice ring. Both actors can flamboyantly command a stage. It remains to be seen, though, whether their respective productions buck the recent trend and allow them to show that the shrewd political strategist in Richard and the theatrical chameleon are indivisable.

`Richard III' opens tonight at the RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon (01789 295623) and then tours. The Leicester Haymarket production previews from Fri (0116- 253 9797)