"Richard III". Jesus College Shakespeare Project

All hail the Jesus College Shakespeare Project. In just over two years it has become an Oxford institution, a standard-bearer for high-quality Shakespearean drama, and a long-term social experiment.

In case you don’t know, the Project is mounting all Shakespeare’s plays in (as far as possible) chronological order of composition, one per term. It was the brainchild of Jesus College Alumni Engagement Manager Peter Sutton, and he also directs all the plays. By my reckoning he’ll be done in another eleven years, at which point presumably he can get back to engaging with the alumni – or possibly retire.

Why ‘long-term social experiment’?

It’s because performing the plays in order, spaced out at four-month intervals, gives a hint of something that hasn’t been seen or experienced since Shakespeare wrote them: continuity. Not just thematic continuity, but also human continuity, both for the audiences and the actors.

For the audience, nowadays we are used to seeing Shakespeare packaged up into ‘The Wars of the Roses’ – all the York v Lancaster plays performed over two days, or edited down to a single show. We’re used to the ‘big’ plays being mounted frequently, while the less-popular ones hardly ever get a showing. With the JCSP we can feel something of the mounting excitement that must have bubbled up when a new play was being written, irrespective of its reputation. For those old enough to remember, it’s not unlike the thrill that cinema-going audiences felt in the early 2000s when a new Harry Potter film came out each year. But better.

For the actors, that continuity is even more special and revealing. They get to feel what it must have been like to be part of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the late Sixteenth Century – and they do it in a room that was actually built in 1610. Peter Sutton has stuck with a largely regular troupe throughout the Wars of the Roses tetralogy. So, for example, Caroline Taylor has now been portraying Margaret of Anjou for almost a year and a half, over four plays. She’s about to complete her DPhil. Like the original actor in Shakespeare’s day, she’s not the same person as she was when she began the role, and she has a unique insight into the way the performer would have developed along with the character. The same is true of people like Ella Turner as Queen Elizabeth; Tom Allen, who played Henry VI across all the plays – including as a dead body this week; Jules Upson, who has played several roles – but very possibly the same ones taken by the same actor in the 1590s; and of course Kate Harkness, who finally takes centre stage as Richard III in the current production.

As with previous JCSP productions, the spoken word is to the fore in this Richard III. Clarity, meaning and sheer verbal beauty are in abundance. It’s been sensitively cut to just one hour forty minutes, but honestly, apart from some wholesale ejections towards the end, you’d hardly know anything was missing, and since the audience is perched on very hard benches, the running-time is spot on.

Richard III is Shakespeare’s first popularly-acknowledged masterpiece, and as such there have been many outstanding productions. Most recently, Arthur Hughes gave the first RSC rendition by a disabled actor. Ian McKellen’s National Theatre staging in the 90s was turned into one of the all-time great film adaptations. Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic dripped with all the psychopathic malice of Keyser Söze. Going even further back, Anthony Sher turned his abhorrently arachnid-like interpretation into the unputdownable memoir, Year of the King.

By comparison, in the first half, the Jesus production doesn’t fully capture the creeping, hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck menace of Richard’s dastardly villain. The wooing of Lady Anne Neville didn’t quite leave me agog at his preternatural powers of persuasion. The scene where he gives an out-of-the-blue execution order on Hastings can make you squirm with fear, especially when, just before pronouncing his present death, he calmly sends the Bishop of London out of the room to go and get some strawberries – but it came across as more of a shock than a terror move. The showpiece scene where he feigns religious devotion in order to seem reluctant to take the crown stopped short of disgusting me with its shameless, dissembling conspiracy. It’s not that these scenes didn’t work: they most certainly did, and Kate Harkness delivered on the promise of the previous plays with infectiously nervous energy. But I felt they could have gone even further in plumbing the banal depths of evil.

After Richard ascended the throne, this production really came to life. Announcing his wife’s imminent death to the world while literally holding her trembling hand fully captured his delicious nastiness. The idea of depicting the Battle of Bosworth as a slowly-gyrating cyclone of ghosts with Richard at its centre, vainly and pathetically shooting at the heads of those he’s already murdered, was spellbinding. The agony of the mothers, kept from seeing the princes in the Tower, called to mind the pain of parents across the world today separated unjustly from their children by bombardment or kidnap. It became an enveloping, emotional onslaught.

At the end, the climactic victory of Richmond seemed to speak to our divided country even today, split into binary factions over every subject from Brexit, to vaccines, to Israel, to gender: England hath long been mad, and scarr'd herself… We will unite the white rose and the red. If only it were that easy…

Next term, JCSP moves on to a play that seems to gain in status with each year that passes: Titus Andronicus. There will be blood.