Few times have I seen a performance of someone that doesnt stick to verse where it actually works. And although there are times where it doesnt work, Wishaw does a marvellous job at this role. Simply marvellous.
They should have let him live and set him up in a temple somewhere. After he lost the crown he began turning into a Buddhist guru hundreds of years before England even knew what that was.
I love this production, and Ben Whishaw is superb, but (the director's fault, not Ben's) this soliloquy is butchered. It is crucial to understanding the impact that the events of the play have made on Richard, how his earlier arrogance has changed to a humility tinged with self-pity, the extent to which he blames himself for his downfall, yet the director chose to cut over half of it. I suppose that if you don't know the play, you wouldn't notice, but it would have been better for all sorts of reasons to have left more of it in.
@P H I'm not sure about the PC thing - they left a lot of the Christian stuff in over the play as a whole. They probably cut this soliloquy a lot (a) because it's long and (b) because the second half is pretty difficult for people not that familiar with Shakespeare's English. I might be wrong, but those are what seem to me the most likely explanations.
