“Richard the Third” and “Looking for Richard”: from Stage to Docudrama

My paper will deal with Looking for Richard (1996), a docudrama about Shakespeare’s Richard III, whose director is American actor Al Pacino. Along the same line as of Jan Kott’s Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, Looking for Richard is an intense meditation on the relevance and meaningfulness of the Bard’s lines to our own world. The interweaving of performances, discussions, interviews and rehearsals enhances the metatextual potentialities of the cinematic text and reverberates with the Shakespearean one. Moreover, epitextual and peritextual elements embedded in the film will be examined: they testify to the social practice of reading and translating the script into diverse media, inexhaustibly investing the source text with new meaning.