I
t’s hard to escape the feeling that
Arthur Hughes is enjoying himself.
He’s 30 years old and about to take
on one of Shakespeare’s great lead-
ing parts. He has a direct gaze and
a smile as broad as the Grand
Canyon. He is also the first disabled
actor to play Richard III at the Royal
Shakespeare Company.
“I don’t really need to think about
how I am going to get into the physical-
ity of Richard III,” he says. “I came out
like this, oven-baked. We don’t need
prosthetics because there is a disabled
body on stage before I’ve even opened
my mouth.” As he speaks, he gestures
with his right arm, which is shorter
than his left, with a wrist that bends at
a right angle.
This is the result of a rare condition
called radial dysplasia, which means that
he was born missing the radius bone
and the thumb. Has it ever been painful?
“No, never. It’s just my hand. It’s not as
dexterous as my left, but I can carry
shopping with it, and text and I could
punch people with it. Not that I ever
have,” he adds quickly, laughing.
He is entirely at ease, yet his cast-
ing in a production directed by the
RSC’s artistic director Gregory
Doran is still a radical act. “We’ve
got a really good crack at making
quite a different Richard, who is
not so Machiavellian. It is the
damaged human inside that
is pushed to these things.”
Doran’s husband, Antony
Sher, played his genera-
tion’s definitive Richard III
in 1984, speeding around
the stage bent over on
crutches. Doran has
said that perfor-
mance “would
probably not be
acceptable” today
and that onlydisabled actors should now play Rich-
ard, “at least until the level playing field
is achieved”.
Hughes is inclined to agree. “I think
right now Richard should be played by
disabled actors. Every disabled actor
who plays him will have a different dis-
ability — the spectrum is so wide. Every
one will bring something different to
Richard. It means something to have
one of the most famous disabled char-
acters in the English language repre-
sented by a disabled body.”
He clearly doesn’t have much time for
people who argue that if it is all acting,
then anybody should be able to play any
part. “That’s not understanding what
the ritual of theatre is and why we do it.
It’s not only to sit and be entertained.
It’s about us understanding the world
and our representations of it. In those
representations disabled people are
woefully underrepresented.
“When you’ve got a character like
this [Richard III], telling the story of a
society, it should be understood
through the lens of a disabled per-
son. There’s a difference between
watching a disabled body go
through that play and watch-
ing someone with a pros-
thetic hump and a limp
they’re putting on. It does
Richard III a disservice to
cover him in prosthetics
because you are actually
following a really rich,
interesting arc of a
disabled person in an
ableist world.”
Hughes explains all this
with the patient demean-
our of a man pointing
out the obvious and
someone who firmly
believes that society’s
habit of ignoring dis-
abled people has toTHEATRE
‘I CAME OUT
LIKE THIS,
OVEN-BAKED’
Arthur Hughes is the first disabled actor
to play King Richard III at the RSC. He tells
Sarah Crompton why no one who needs
prosthetics should play the role again
end. “We live in a world built predomi-
nantly by non-disabled people,” he
says. “And when disabled people come
up against portions of that world that
are inaccessible to them because
they’ve not been thought about or for-
gotten, then they are being disabled by
society, it’s not that they are inherently
disabled. Life could be ‘normal’ for all
of us, if the world was just accessible.”
Art and culture help to change
assumptions. It matters when the deafIt means something to
have one of the most
famous disabled
characters in the English
language represented
by a disabled body
8 29 May 2022