Joaquín Furriel and Calixto Bieito bring the life of the last English king killed in battle to San Martín.

This is the third time that actor Joaquín Furriel has had to deliver one of the most famous lines in the history of universal theater at the San Martín. In 2010, it was with Calderón in La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream ). The audience fell silent, and some bit their tongues to keep from joining in the historic verse aloud: "What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction, and the greatest good is small; for all of life is a dream, and dreams are dreams." Nine years later, he only surpassed Furriel in popularity when he performed Hamlet (directed by Rubén Szuchmacher), and had to face an even more famous monologue and once again feel the concentration of the audience and the anxiety of the spectators to witness the moment in which the character questions himself: "To be or not to be, that is the question." In 2025, it's the turn of a new famous phrase: it will be the ruthless and hunchbacked King Richard III, who at the end of the play, in his greatest moment of despair, bargains: "My kingdom for a horse."

From June 27, one of the most ambitious projects of the 2025 season can be seen in the Martín Coronado room of the Teatro San Martín: The True Story of Richard III , directed by Calixto Bieito , the Spanish director, now based in Switzerland and with great international projection, whom Furriel himself went to look for for this show, after his experience with Life is a Dream , when Bieito chose the actor in a casting and without knowing him, to be the protagonist of his show.

Interested in working with classical texts and generating a contemporary vision, both in its staging and its writing, Bieito decided to start from a true event for his version of the Shakespeare classic: the discovery in 2012, in a Leicester parking lot, of the remains of Richard III, which put an end to a 500-year-old mystery about the final resting place of the last English king to die in battle . The cast of this show includes Luis Ziembrowski, Ingrid Pelicori, Belén Blanco, María Figueras, Marcos Montes , Luciano Suardi, Iván Moschner, Luis “Luisón” Herrera and Silvina Sabater.

–The renowned Polish critic Jan Kott said that “every generation finds its own unique traits in Shakespeare.” What aspects do you want to highlight in your take on Richard III ?

–Calixto Bieito: First of all, I think that without Joaquín, I wouldn't have done this play. He's my greatest inspiration, because of the affection I have for him. But I also think he's the image that opposes Richard III; you think the Hunchback of Notre Dame is going to emerge, a really ugly guy, but it's the opposite. Shakespeare is always contemporary. No matter how you dress him up. Even if the characters are all polar bears, he's always Shakespeare. But we do have this starting point, which is the skeleton of the real Richard III, which was found in a Leicester parking lot. I don't know if that was really true, but the whole situation raises questions. For example: What is truth in history? We know that Shakespeare wrote Richard III to please the Tudors. So, he describes a character he represents as if he were an evil dictator and a colossal monster. How can we relate that to the present? We're now entering an age of uncertainty; we don't know what's true and what's false. We know that history has been systematically manipulated, but is there such a thing as truth? What is evil?

Joaquín Furriel: I had a stroke ten years ago , and the doctor told me: “I have good news and not-so-good news. The good news is that you're healthy, that all the tests were fine, and the bad news is that I don't have an answer for you. This could have been due to stress, or the pressure of the plane (because that's where I had it), but there's no answer.” In general, people need to give an answer. The same thing happens with Shakespeare: everyone adds their own subjectivity, as if it takes over when it takes hold, because it has a much broader dimension. If someone tells me Richard III is a play about a hunchback, I say yes. I'm not interested in doing Richard III based on what's interpreted from the play; what I'm interested in is entering the universe of Calixto. He's a person who premieres shows in Geneva, Rome, and Prague. There aren't many artists who have the opportunity to get to the root of a culture, which is precisely this: being with us these days, directing, and seeing everything we do on stage, with our idiosyncrasies.

–There's an idea you raise in the play that seeks to dissect human evil, which, consciously or unconsciously, is part of our biological and psychological nature. Do you think the evil Shakespeare portrays has mutated over time?

–CB: Evil has changed, as has the concept of morality. Twenty years ago, you couldn't say we're going to eliminate a certain person, but now it is. People talk publicly about eliminating someone, and there's no scandal about it. I don't follow the news much, because it makes me sad, especially war news. But in Europe, it's completely accepted that someone says, "We're going to eliminate this subversive element who's gone to live in London," and a few months later you see that person in the hospital. These things happen, and people go to sleep as if nothing had happened. I try not to judge too much, but I observe the dissolution of the idea of ​​conscience. There are people who sell weapons and then sleep peacefully afterward. It's not that they think, "How bad I've been!" It's assumed that the world works like this. This isn't a criticism. I don't do political or social theater; I present what I see, what I feel on the street.

–JF: There's a cynical behavior that's established as something more standard. Cynicism used to be something for certain sectors, who could afford to play with it. Today I sense that cynicism is already incorporated into any conversation. In Richard III, people think he's evil because he's deformed, and that's not even children's theater. My daughter, when she was a child, was already much more alert and knew that evil doesn't come from that side. Now there are other mechanisms for violence, like destroying and erasing people before justice can prevail, but many of the moments in the play, which are very interesting to me, are texts that were written in the late 1500s for a play that was set in the High Middle Ages, in the late 1400s, and we say them today, and they have the same dimension. We're talking more about our species than a historical moment. I think what's new today is the need for simplification: you're on this side or the other. Things are flat, everything moves in a kind of bipolarization, and when you try to move away from the idea of ​​segmentation, a world appears that, in my case, involves trying to be more relativistic about what's happening and entering a zone of more questions and not so many answers. In any talk, one always wants to be on one side, and the truth is that there are dualities; one isn't just one way, and the audience that comes here will even have the opportunity to laugh at things that make us uncomfortable and at many other emotions. Theater is not a space to direct subjectivity in a flat manner; on the contrary, it's a space to invite possibilities to open up.

The 2012 discovery of the remains of King Richard III of England in a Leicester parking lot was the subject of documentaries and films, including the BBC production The Lost King , released in 2022.

Richard III's reign lasted just over two years, until he died at the age of 32 at the Battle of Bosworth Field (in central England) in 1485, the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. He was the last English king to die in combat. But for centuries, the monarch's life was considered far more interesting than his death, largely because of Shakespeare's portrayal of him as a power-hungry despot.

Richard was the brother of King Edward IV. After Edward IV's death in 1483, Richard deposed the king's 13-year-old son, Edward V, whom he considered illegitimate. As the new king of England, he imprisoned his 10-year-old nephews, Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, in the Tower of London and is believed to have had them murdered to secure the throne.

Soon after, he faced a revolt by his brother's supporters. Then, members of the House of Tudor rose up against him. The Battle of Bosworth Field resulted in the defeat of the Yorkist family, the death of Richard III, the accession of the Tudor family to the throne, and the coronation of Henry VII.

For centuries, Richard's reputation was largely defined by Shakespeare's work. But a group of history buffs calling themselves "Ricardians," eager to rescue his reputation, set out to find out where the king they revered was buried. One of the leaders of this group is Philippa Langley, who contacted archaeologists at the University of Leicester and encouraged them to investigate a site where historians believed the king's remains might lie. In 2005, the discovery of a living descendant of Richard III made the project more feasible than ever. If remains were found, the descendant's DNA could theoretically be used to confirm his identity. This is how they confirmed that these remains belonged to the king. The scoliosis that caused his pronounced hunchback was also identified in the bones.