Shakespeare? What a pain!

Posted by Nell Mead at 15:48 on 19 Nov 2011

I was lucky enough taken to the Old Vic recently by an old friend, to see Kevin Spacey playing the lead role in Sam Mendes’ production of Richard III. I’m not generally a huge Shakespeare fan (memories of watching Macbeth at the National Theatre when I was studying it at GCSE put me off somewhat; and I found Jacobi’s Lear unconvincing this summer) nor am I a particular Spacey fan; but this show really blew me away. I was enthralled and barely glanced away from the stage for the entire three hours.

But three hours is an awfully long time for a man to play a twisted hunchback; the King is rarely offstage and the physicality of Spacey’s performance was quite extraordinarily compelling and consistent. He played a man in pain extremely convincingly; in fact I’d be amazed if he wasn’t genuinely in quite some significant pain by the end of the production, and I wonder if I was the only audience member relieved to see Richard hoisted aloft by his ankles at the end: at least he finally got some traction to relieve his poor, tortured spine!

After all, Kevin Spacey wouldn’t be the first actor to be left crippled by Shakespeare. I rather assume this story is apocryphal, or at least that the wording has been altered over the years; but according to Antony Sher’s “Year of the King”, at the end of the original production of Richard III, Burbage told Shakespeare “If you ever do that to me again, mate, I’ll kill you.” Somewhat later, in 1972, Robert Hirsch of the Comédie-Française apparently found some sort of solution: his Richard limped on alternate legs from night to night!

Simon Russell Beale managed a five-month run as Richard III in Mendes’ production for the RSC in 1993; but just three days after it transferred to the Donmar Warehouse, he was forced to retire and to have an operation on a prolapsed spinal disc. The same thing happened to David Tennant in 2008 during a run of Hamlet: after a successful summer run in Stratford-upon-Avon, the production moved to the Novello Theatre and Tennant ended up in surgery.

Given how slowly spinal discs go wrong, it seems unlikely that Shakespeare and his directors can be completely blamed for this spate of injuries to leading men. They probably had some degree of back pain before they took up their roles. However, there’s no doubt that the physical demands of playing a role which requires extreme postures to be maintained for prolonged periods, will cause a degree of soft tissue deformation and also of extreme concentrations of compressive stress on the spinal discs. Moving and changing position regularly causes compressive stresses to alter, and it is thought that this assists with disc nutrition (which is why it forms the basis of Sarah Key’s “pressure change therapy” theory); the reverse is also true, with prolonged relatively static postures, particularly extreme postures, effectively reducing the discs’ nutrient supply and causing damage.

So my pleasure in watching this extraordinary production was tempered somewhat by the thought of the damage the leading actor was doing to himself in his effort to provide a superb experience for the viewing audience. Mr Spacey, I do hope you have a good physio!