RD3RD is a bold reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Richard III in light of contemporary Philippine realities. It is a non-profit artists’ initiative slated for staging at the Ateneo De Manila in January 2018 and is the Philippine representative to the Festival of Shakespearean plays to be staged as part of the Asian Shakespeare Association Conference in Manila in May 2018.
Directors
Anton Juan and Ricardo Abad
Dramaturg
Judy Ick
Cast
Video
Reviews
‘RD3RD’ is a frightening wake-up call
Wanggo Gallaga | Philippine Daily Inquirer
It is a frightening wake-up call to open our eyes to what is currently happening around us, through a play written hundreds of years ago. It’s the sort of power and energy that makes theater such a powerful artistic medium. And it is very relevant, solidly firm in its intentions—a work of theater that is unafraid to speak its mind.
Looking for Richard in the tambakan
Menchu Aquino Sarmiento | Business World Online
The production design plays on this theme with all the actors costumed in variations on plastic garbage bags and discarded cartons. Their faces are veined and in varying states of putrefaction: naagnas na. It is a world of the damned, as doomed as those who are condemned to repeat their history, a nightmare from which we are still trying to awake.
RD3RD: a Shakespeare adaptation, a commentary on Duterte
JP Sanchez | Scout
Our country has become a frozen landscape, littered by blackened bodies, wailing widows and orphaned children—all shrouded by apathy and indifference, by deceit and violence. All these are what RD3RD tries to illuminate. To light fires. To urge. To signal these times as the winter of our discontent.
Why Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ is suddenly a play for our time
Pablo A. Tariman | Philippine Daily Inquirer
There were no auditions for the play. “Participation here is by invitation only,” says Abad. Cast and crew will not be paid, as this is a voluntary act of performance. We wanted actors who would not only play characters in the conventional sense, but also to play their roles in the context of their political convictions.”
Relevance of Shakespeare to the state of the nation
Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman| Business World Online
Asked what the audience should take away from the production, Mr. Abad said: “I suppose I would like [the] audiences to be more aware that there’s more to leadership than the mission-vision-practice of a single person. And if people refuse to take a stand against brutal policies, then that refusal allows a nefarious system to thrive.”
metempsychotic: thoughts on rd3rd (spoilers)
John Paolo Rodriguez
… [RD3RD] is decidedly not a normal play–it functions as a comparative literature study executed in theatrical form on the universality of shakespeare, literature, theatre, and human failure, as social critique of the silence of the more knowledgeable sectors of society that enabled duterte’s staggering rise to fascistic power as much as the clamor of the less knowledgeable, as scathing satire–even parody–of philippine political dynamics, and even as an investigation on the relationship between the actors, the director, the play, and the audience.
Elsewhere
Photos
Photos by Jaypee Maristaza, Christopher Cancio, and Reamur David. See more at the RD3RD Facebook page.
Shakespeare in the Philippines 