Anatomia de Ricard: Ricard 111

Anatomia de Ricard

Ricard de 3r and Ricard 111 are two independent plays related to each other. They can be seen separately and it is not essential to have seen the first to be able to enjoy the scond. Some days the double programme is offered.

In 2015, À Trois Teatre premiered at the Sala Beckett Ricard de 3rd, a text born from the Project CROQUIS_BCN of the Obrador de la Sala Beckett. Quim Ávila played the role of a shy and introspective teenager who discovered  William Shakespeare’s play Richard III and identified with the character obsessively. Like him, he used force and manipulation to achieve his goals and the audience witnessed the transformation of the teenager on stage.

Eleven years later, the new production of Ricard de 3rd, now starring Brandon Caritg, returns in the form of a diptych, accompanied by Ricard 111. This second play, newly created, recovers the character of the teenager obsessed with Richard III, but presents him to us in his maturity, when he has changed secondary school for prison. Sentenced to 111 years in prison, he lives in a fragile normality, surrounded by books and silent routines. The play dissects Ricard’s mind and observes the scars of a man faced with his responsibility for the crimes committed. And it is precisely Quim Ávila who resumes with the character he already played in the original production.

Ricard 111

Eleven years have passed. Ricard’s name no longer resonates in the corridors of a high school, but in those of a prison where he is serving an impossible sentence: 111 years. The boy who mirrored himself in Shakespeare’s monster now tries to inhabit a fragile normality, made up of routines, books and silences.

He knows that the voices that pushed him to kill had a clinical name. He also knows that the blue butterfly he thought was real – that delicate presence that guided his actions – lived only inside his head. Accepting this was the first step towards a painful lucidity.

Richard 111 confronts the viewer with a disturbing enigma: what happens when evil can no longer be attributed to ghosts, only to oneself? In his return to Shakespeare, Richard will look for answers in the other characters, perhaps to understand what he never wanted to look at in the face.

And the spectator, once again turned into a privileged witness, will not be able to help but wonder if redemption is possible or if there are shadows that, like certain butterflies, only seem to live one day but can inhabit us for a lifetime.