SOURCE: Carnegy, Patrick. “Epic Conclusion.” Spectator 286, no. 9013 (5 May 2001): 47-8.

In the following review, Carnegy commends Michael Boyd's 2001 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Richard III for achieving “a play balanced as Shakespeare intended it.” Carnegy notes that Boyd focused less exclusively on the character of Richard so that the other characters received their proper due, particularly the female characters.

A year after the RSC launched its Shakespeare Histories cycle at Stratford it has completed it in London with Richard III, celebrating by offering audiences the experience of all eight plays in the course of a few days. Four directors have been at work, ranging from the white-box modernist Steven Pimlott (Richard II) to the relatively conservative Michael Attenborough (Henry IV). The second tetralogy of the three Henry VIs and Richard III has however been entrusted to a single director, Michael Boyd, and the continuities between these plays have...