Richard III

Pavelka created the Scenographic, set and costume design for a Shakespeare double bill with the all-male Propeller Theatre company, of which he is a founding member. The critically applauded production was coupled with 'The Comedy of Errors' and toured both nationally and internationally through Europe and an extesive tour of three venues in the USA including a six week residency at the Huntington Theatre (University of Boston).

It is the aim of the Propeller Theatre Company to stage all three final plays of Shakespeare’s history cycle: Henry V, Henry VI (Parts 1,2 and 3) and Richard III. The ambitious undertaking is to produce one of these each year from 2011 to 2013 and to ultimately join them together as a 'demi-cycle'.

The concept that underpins the sequence of Histories, chronicling a pattern of blood-letting, power politics and compulsive revenge, is that the England portrayed on stage descends into a regressively barbaric state. Pavelka’s design therefore takes us back in time, reversing generations from the 20th back to the 19th centuries: the increasingly violent acts counterpointed by an incremental stiffening of the clothing. Richard III therefore tested the range of these ideas and presented opportunities to rejoin the beginning of the cycle.

The production explored Richard’s obsessive, compulsive behaviour and the resulting serial killing-spree from the subjective, internal perspective of his psyche - he was 'observed' by the audience, as a patient might in a Victorian sanatorium. The Propeller ensemble was designed as masked hospital orderlies who at first served Richard’s destruction of his family and rivals and then, of himself.

The scenic space bore all the hallmarks of Pavelka's design signature; both stretching and condensing of space allowing for the visual and aural presence of the ensemble whilst focusing the action and supporting the dramatic situation. Highly mobile and flexible semi transparent hospital screens changed the dynamics of the stage which was contextualised by a fixed, contemporary industrial framework, emblematic single flagpole and vanishing vista. This frame will become a generic landscape for both Henry V and Rose Rage (the two-part adaptation of Henry VI, Parts 1,2 and 3) and therefore the Histories Cycle.

www.propeller.org
www.michaelpavelka.com