DUNEDIN SHAKESPEARE CLUB

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22719, 4 November 1935, Page 2

DUNEDIN SHAKESPEARE CLUB

PUBLIC READING OF “RICHARD 111 ” On Thursday next in His Majesty’s Theatre the Shakespeare Club will give a public reading of “ Richard III.” The principal character is, of course, the Duke of Gloucester, afterwards King Richard HI, whose pitiless ambition for the crown brings disaster to friend and foe alike, and finally results in his own destruction. He has been likened to Macbeth, but unlike Macbeth he has no conscience—he idols all his murders beforehand without fear or hesitation. His hypocrisy and soulless cunning make an Inhuman monster of him, so that even so ambitious an adherent as Buckingham hesitates to support him iu his designs on the young princes in the Tower. The only character in the play who compares with him in force of mind and determination is Queen Margaret, whose dreadful curses hang forever over Richard’s head like an avenging spirit. _ She is at once the prophetess and the victim of justice, and it is the knitting of all the avenging forces round her image which clasps all the persons and all the action of the play into unity. Richard believes he makes and guides the storm in which so many lives are shipwrecked, but he is really the chief victim of the stjrm, driven from shoal to shoal till he is wrecked inevitably. The cast for the reading includes Messrs J. Fleming. J, B. Flynn, M. H. Gaston, J. W. Hayward, M. Joel, W. B. Quennell, F. J. Gair, and H. W. Hunter, Mrs E. J. Murray, Miss N. Buswell, Miss I. MacRae, Miss L. Hale, Miss V. Jefferson, and Mrs H. L. Macmillan. Songs will be rendered by Mr John Kennedy during the evening.