Bell Shakespeare's Richard 3 comes to Canberra with Kate Mulvany

But Peter Evans, the company's artistic director and the director of 2017's Richard 3 (thus styled to "make it more contemporary"), says the impetus for the new production was artistic rather than political: he wanted to cast Kate Mulvany as Richard.

"We've been working together over many years," he days. She's played Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, the maid Dorine in Tartuffe and Cassius in Julius Caesar under his direction. They were looking for something else they could do together and thought Richard would be a good role for her.

"The thing about Richard is, he's very funny," Evans says, adding that while the character can be absolutely brutal he can also be very candid about it, and like of a lot of Shakespeare's characters he is a very relatable figure. Like Mulvany, Richard has scoliosis, and the resulting spinal curvature has influenced the lives of both character and actor.

"They're all qualities Kate has ... It's a fantastic role for an actor I enjoy working with and I have deep respect for," Evans says.

He was, he says, mindful about the notion of gender-swap casting for its own sake - "I have to weight it up - is it going to serve the play?" - but thinks that ultimately talent won out. With Cassius - another Shakespearean male role - Mulvaney's portrayal could have been read as a man or woman, but with Richard, she is playing the character as a man which they're not going out of their way to disguise - a fact that, he says, provokes interesting questions.

"Richard is a misogynist - dismissive of the women in his life or blaming them for the difficulties in his life - which when spoken by her becomes even more troubling."

Having Mulvany speak such lines deepens the character and makes the words even more effective and troubling, he says.

While Richard is infamous for his smiling charisma as he takes the audience into his confidence right from the start and his lack of guilt as he carries out his evil deeds - he's no angst-ridden neurotic like Macbeth, obsessing from the start over the consequences of his actions - Evans points out there are a couple of moments towards the end when he displays some self-reflection, pointing the way towards some of Shakespeare's later works, where he realises how alone he is and how empty and unsatisfying his life is.

This has been heightened by the interpolation by Evans and Mulvaney (who acted as dramaturg) of a speech by Richard from another Shakespeare play, Henry VI, Part III. to provide Richard with a final monologue.

"It provides a beautiful insight into the character."

But, Evans says, in a sense it's too little too late: by this point the audience wants to see him destroyed. He's lost control of the narrative by this time and while he thinks Richard 3 is a tragedy rather than a history play, it's not a personal tragedy of a man undone by his flaws, but one of wider dimensions, that of "a society that consumes itself - you get the leaders you deserve".

The sets and costumes were designed to be very glamorous, he says, and evoke the rise of fascism in the 20th century without being absolutely period-specific. And, he says, there was no need to be explicit about linking it to the present - indeed, it would be a reduction of the play to do so.

"Any audience can draw any parallels from it," he says.

Set and costume designer Anna Cordingley has worked with both Evans and Mulvaney on Bell Shakespeare productions as well as many others since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2003.

She says her approach to a play is dependent, firstly, on multiple close readings of the text. She familiarises herself with the story and characters and to familiarise herself with the story and characters and, working in consultation with the director, develops ideas about the settings, costumes and props that will be required.

Often there's a striking image that will be used as a starting point - in the case of Richard 3 it was the "poignant" one of Mulvany's body, its spine distorted from the radiation she had been exposed to as a child, which had obvious parallels to the experiences of the so-called "Richard Crookback".

This is evoked, subtly, in a Victorian contraption of spinal curvature such as might be found in Florence's Uffizi Gallery, seen in an antechamber at the back of the set. But Cordingley says Evans' main inspiration was drawn from elsewhere.

"He was drawn to the decadence of a [Luis} Bunuel film, The Exterminating Angel."

In that dark 1962 comedy, a group of wealthy people are in a kind of purgatory: they are at a dinner party from which they find themselves unable to depart. Using a similarly opulent but ominous style,she says, Evans wants to make the audience aware of how much Richard 3 is like a slice of Shakespeare's history plays and the wars they often depict. All the actors remain onstage throughout, moving forward and withdrawing as required, and most of the female actors, unlike the males, don't play multiple roles - the mortality rate among the women in the play is a lot lower, since they tend to be used and dismissed by Richard rather than perceived as a threat.

"They do survive but the female characters in Richard 3 are carrying the burden of their dead children - it's just horrific."

One of the visual inspirations for the production was Truman Capote's 1966 Black and White Ball, held in the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York City and seen as one of the monuments of decadence and excess as well as glamour and pop culture in that period.

For the set, she used the aluminium polythene composite Alucobond for its apt thematic representation of a meretricious facade hiding a bleaker reality.

"It's unbelievably shiny, a little bit too perfect," she says.

"There's nothing human about it."

Another inspiration for the production was Sanctuary, a book by photographer Gregory Crewdson featuring images of the Italian Cinecitta film studios - where film-makers Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini worked - with old sets fallen into ruin and overrun by nature; another case of former glory gone to ruin.

As the costumes, most of the men's suits were bought but the waistcoats and the women's gowns were made especially for the production.

"There's a timelessness to people in black tie and ball gowns," Cordingley says.

Cordingley says that to play Richard, Mulvany had to unlearn the habits of many years onstage and adopt her regular offstage posture , not making the efforrt to straighten her posture.

"We didn't want to make her a woman at all," Cordingley says, so all Mulvany's clothes had to be fitted both to suit the contours of her unstraightened body and to make her look appropriately masculine.

Queen Elizabeth (played by Meredith Penman) wears a satin and lace dress modelled after one Joan Fontaine wore in the 1956 film Serenade. It had to be specially constructed both to look good and to ensure it could accommodate the character's storyline and the actor's performance as it unfolds.

"She does get some pretty violent moments," Cordingley says.

"The picture does start to fragment...her status is absolutely destroyed."

Richard 3 is on at The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre from April 6 to 15. Bookings: canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 62752700.