Richard III – Riksteatern

http://www.riksteatern.se

I saw a great play yesterday. Trosa theater society invited the actor Özz Nujen who tours with the play Richard III by Shakespeare.
Yes, the play was written four hundred years ago but the play is very much about our time when some people still think it’s okay to walk over dead bodies to gain power.
Mr Özz Nujen is an actor and a stand up comedian, so the play is a combination of stand up com and commedia dell’arte. Lots of laughs but also lots of seriousness. It’s an important play, so if you’re near any of the places in the tour plan, go see it! You won’t regret it. The tour goes to places in Sweden and Finland in April.

It’s about how naive and easy to fool we are. We never learn and that is the key for dictators to enter the stage and take the total power over us. We don’t get it until it’s too late.

We have to stop underestimate that kind of people. The only way we can do that is to trust knowledge and have the courage to question those peoples intentions. They always lie to gain what they’re after. We know it, but still we far to often choose to ignore facts and we let them of the hook when we should trust facts instead of trusting them.

We know they only do things for their own good, still we think that they might change one day and become good people. They never change.

They always blame others for everything bad that happens. It’s never true and the bad things might not even exists. They just want us to be scared and they want us to believe it’s not their fault.

We have to learn not to trust this kind of people if we want to live in a peaceful world. It’s never just one group of peoples fault somethings not working okay. It’s never just one persons fault either. It’s everybody’s fault that the world looks like it does. We’re in this all together and the sooner we learn that everyone is equal and everyone has the right to be free,the sooner we will have world peace and maybe we also can save our planet that very same day 🙂

I actually had a hard time to applaud yesterday in the play. I didn’t want to applaud Richard III and I didn’t want to applaud the Conquer technique. I didn’t want to applaud the actor when he used the same technique as Richard III to get us all to applaud him. It’s a brilliant play and the actor is brilliant in his thirteen parts he plays by himself on stage. It’s also a brilliant piece of experience too see how a bunch of people just follow whatever the actor tells them to do. Applaud and they (me too sometimes) applauds. Laugh and they all laughed (me too very often). The actor explain the tricks the power people use and everyone nodded in understanding even if they acted as they didn’t understood through the whole play, they just followed the leader on stage. That’s what you suppose to do at a play, right?

At the end people stood up and applaud and you know how all such things starts. First a few, then the rest because everyone else is doing it. I sat down. Not because I thought the play was bad. It was brilliant, the actor was brilliant. But I had questions. Who did we applaud? The actor or Richard III. What was the actors true intentions? To actually enlighten us about the dangerous power people or to plant some trust in us for him? What if he his future Richard III? What do we know about him really? After seen him in one play? From what I’ve seen of him before,he seems to be a true human being with the heart in the right place, but what if he tricked us to believe that?

I’m sounding lika a total lunatic now, but I just want to show you the thoughts the play started. Can we trust the mass of people standing up celebrating an person we know so little about? Can we trust a person who obviously knows a lot about how to trick an audience to like him? Can we trust a play to be just a play?

I only missed one thing with the play. I wish the actor had finished the evening with some words about how we as an audience acted exactly as naive as we act when we don’t see the when the power people take the lead. He could have told us he used the exact same methods to gain our trust, with the difference that he didn’t had anyone killed to get to the stage.

The sad truth is that most of the audience had a great evening at the theater and went home with a big smile on their faces. But without the insight of what they had just experienced.

This play will stay long in my head and I will turn the thoughts around forever about how we humans act and don’t act.

Anna