Viv Hardwick discovers how actor Henry Goodman decided to bring the murderous role of Richard III to the stage and why he feels Shakespears's disabled king deserves respect.

The play launches the seven-strong Royal Shakespeare Company's Tyneside season.

ASK Henry Goodman about his inspirations for bringing the hump-backed horror of Richard III to life and he's on his feet faster than you can stab a rival for the throne of England. "I'll show you." he says, "it's time to get your little pencil drawings out," he laughs.

He shows how, by studying the walk of a disabled person with a physiotherapist, he replicated the orthopaedic-booted waddle of a man born with wasted leg muscles.

"I've trained in movement for years and you notice that when somebody's leg doesn't work, they have to use their upper body to carry the leg. They haven't got the muscles to lift the leg up and move it (he demonstrates).

"If someone's got a bad foot they can use the leg, but the foot drags. So you break down the problem and say if I'm going to spend the whole night doing this (swinging his legs from the hip to move) then your neck gets buggered up and your back gets buggered up.

"So I had much advice in how to work after I finished the show.. Afterwards, I do need a massage and physio pretty much every day for the aches and pains. What I could have done is have a metal structure and visually told the story and it costs you less to do it, but I wanted to be properly debilitated by this thing."

Having worked with well-known disabled actor Nabil Shaban, and become friends to the extent he carried Shaban up stairs to rehearsals, Goodman noticed that the wheelchair user came up with jokes about himself to put the rest of the cast at ease.

He says: "He is a highly intelligent, complex modern human being. What I learnt from him is that he would mock himself and make it easier for everyone else in rehearsal to work with him. He'd make jokes about himself and he'd learned to use his disability to be more friendly.

"What's interesting is that Richard doesn't do that, why does he say 'I'm so disfigured nobody's ever going to love me?' That's why the play is ultimately interesting because in a moral universe it's about right and wrong."

Intense, loud, dark-haired, London East End Jewish Goodman moved on from the Royal Shakespeare Company 18 years ago with such success that he landed the BBC sitcom series Unfinished Business alongside a string of theatrical masterpieces from shady lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago to Shylock for Trevor Nunn, which ended up as a movie. Sadly, Goodman's finest hour should have been the lead (Max Bialystock) in The Producers on Broadway last year. But he was sacked after ten days and 32 preview performances. Far from finished, he switched New York theatres and earned rave review in Moliere's Tartuffe before taking up an RSC invitation to play England's legendary tyrant Richard III.

Having read that he's fed up of discussing The Producers, the conversation is almost in keeping because Goodman admits he's played a lot of absolute swines "I don't know why, but I have."

As for Richard, "he's an absolute bastard, as an actor you know it's theatrically exciting because he's the only character in Shakespeare's 37 plays where the central character steps forward to the audience and says 'look, I'm a swine, this play's about me and I'm a complete sod, now let's go and watch'.

"So the audience becomes complicit in what he does in a way and I find that thrilling. As it goes on you like him in spite of yourself and then kick yourself for liking him. That may not happen at Newcastle, but it's something that I enjoy."

The version heading for Tyneside as the RSC season curtain-raiser has been set in Victorian times while Goodman aims to avoid portraying Richard as a hump-back myth who's just malevolent rather than humane and humorous.

He's fascinated with how the society of 1475 - the play's original setting - coped with the disabled and has opted for his character to have a facial birthmark as well as physical disability because 13th Century folklore saw it as evidence of contact with the devil.

Not that everyone in Shakespeare's England was born with disability, Goodman explains: "People tend to forget that Elizabethan England was a police state. It was Muslim-style country where you could have your arm chopped off if you said something against the Queen. Ben Jonson was branded and stuck in prison and Shakespeare managed to avoid it, but only by being very canny about the Kings and Queens of England and dancing with words very carefully."

The actor is also fascinated about the comparisons you can make between Richard's behaviour and the court of his brother Edward and the spin doctoring of today's politicians. He recently played an Alistair Campbell-like figure in Alistair Beaton's New Labout West End satire, Feelgood, where a hotel wing is deliberately burnt down to kill a journalist - "I'm sorry to tell you" - to stop them revealing something.

He adds: "Richard has a chip as well as a hump on his shoulder about his sister-in-law Elizabeth (Edward's wife) coming up from the middle classes and taking over the government by giving jobs to her brothers." Playing Richard provides him with the anxiety of influence from other actors who've starred in the role.

"You want to bring something fresh, but the danger just to do something new and weird to be different is crazy. Ian McKellen said why don't I play the role as Saddam Hussein because I look dark and could easily have a black moustache, but I actually thought it doesn't go anywhere and doesn't have a series of parallels and it has to be more than a surface gag that lasts ten seconds.

"I didn't want to do it on crutches like Antony Sher, so the blessing side of this is to find a little bit of colour that the others didn't. It's also important to me that the play is not called The Mythological Melodrama of the Villain Richard III but The Tragedy Of Richard III."

It doesn't bother Goodman at all that at 53, he's playing Richard 20 years beyond the bloody end of the monarch, who died famously in search of a horse.

"I wish I'd been offered it earlier... mainly because it would have been less pressure on the spine," he jokes.

* Richard III runs November 17-22 at Newcastle's Theatre Royal. Box Office: 0870 905 5060

* Henry Goodman can also be seen in Foyle's War on ITV1 on Sunday at 9pm

Published: 13/11/2003