A Co-Production of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, and the Croatian National Theatre in Varaždin
The end of a long war brings a desolate peace, as if the world has merely paused in its incessant slaughter. The old king is dead, and a new one has already proclaimed the horizons of a different order. Yet in this fragile transition of power, Richard – the first of Shakespeare’s major anti-heroes – is not satisfied with the outcome, and declares his own ambition a matter of destiny.
Richard III is born ‘deformed, unfinished, sent before his time’. He describes himself as a beast: a porcupine, a spider, a toad; a cur, a mongrel, a swine, a wild boar and a tiger. Within him seethe contempt for the world, an irresistible urge to kill, and a consuming hunger for the throne. Richard sees himself as a god and seeks to shape the world according to his own prophecy; he sets history in motion and is ‘determined to prove a villain’. Like every tyrant before and after him, he finds justification for each of his crimes. Yet the assumption of royal power leads only to the gradual disintegration of the self, until in the end nothing remains but emptiness. Richard, who sought to play with history, becomes its plaything – merely another entry in its unbroken, blood-soaked catalogue, while the great kingdom itself is reduced to something worth less than a horse.
Richard III was William Shakespeare’s first great success. Since its earliest performances, audiences have continually recognised their own rulers in it: the fatal ambivalence between arbitrariness and self-destruction, the seduction and terror embodied by autocrats and dictators.
For Jan Kott, Richard III embodies the entirety of historical experience, the terrifying logic of the ‘Grand Mechanism’ in all its ugliness and grotesque grin. Our own civilisation continues to produce new Richards: ruthless and manipulative rulers driven by an insatiable hunger for power, whom we fear, by whom we are fascinated, and whose spectacular downfalls we inevitably witness.
The staging of Richard III, a co-production of the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, the Croatian National Theatre in Varaždin and the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, will be directed by the award-winning Slovenian director Vito Taufer.
The Zagreb premiere will take place on 13 November 2026.
