Big casts aren’t limited to large venues, as Kerry Ann Eustice discovers when talking to Mark Leipacher about his production of Richard III

Epic ambitions have led theFaction theatre company to assemble the biggest cast the south east London fringe has probably ever seen.

It’s certainly a first for the Brockley Jack Theatre, the playhouse hosting this ambitious and curious production.

The cast of 26 is tackling Shakespeare’s Richard III, the play last in the history series which charts the rise and fall of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a devious and deformed anti-hero who’ll do anything to take the throne, doing away with enemies, allies and supposed loved ones included.

As well as the piece being ‘muscular’ enough to allow for a large ensemble, Blackheath-hailing director Mark Leipacher had other motivations.

“The idea was to do something epic and ambitious. Just because it is fringe doesn’t mean you can’t have ambition or scale.

“It’s a place for opportunity and risk taking. I just wanted to work with actors and the space.”

Fed up of seeing stage work where one performer will play four or five characters, Mark was keen for this production to be one actor to each role.

“The focus would be more on how a character needs to be different from the others, rather than having four rounded characters,” said Mark of doubling up.

“For this it’s important to have character with specificity, economy and clarity. They have been buzz words for us in the rehearsal room.

“Richard III is a play about divided loyalties and who trusts who. By using the ensemble in this way and having the fully-rounded characters it really opens the play up.”

He continued: “Often it will be one person as Richard and then everybody else, but this way we follow everybody’s storyline.”

In the spirit of breaking new ground, Mark’s vision for the style of the production is also a leap from the norm.

Extravagances made with cast are balanced with a pared-down staging; a stripped back set, non-descript costumes and zero props.

“It’s going to be really freeing,” said Mark. “With no formalities — the costumes, set and props — we can do whatever we like.

“But it’s all still true to the work, language, text and telling the story.

“Having a large company means we can have a physical language to match Shakespeare’s language.”

By ‘physical language’ Mark is referring to a very theFaction motif — using his actors to fill the gaps using no props leaves.

“We are using the bodies to create physical language,” he said. “It’s not a dance piece, it’s definitely Richard III.

“For example, there is a Tower of London represented by bodies and a horse of bodies.

“Chairs, tables and thrones — anything needed is a body.”

“Richard’s physicality is so important,” continued Mark, explaining the depths of his idea. “So we have this heavily deformed person amidst all those bodies.”

Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? It’s a concept which has proved so appealing the director managed to get much of his cast to commit to notoriously-frugal fringe rates and squeeze the project into already bulging schedules.

“The scheduling has been like traffic control,” he joked, showing me a series of timetables more organised than Anthea Turner.

“It’s an ambitious project people want to work on. Actors want to be involved.”

This will be Mark’s second foray into Shakespeare for the delectation of Brockley Jack audience — he directed Coriolanus too, but with a far more frugal cast of seven. Sure, he’s done the classics before and had a few stabs at new writing too, but says nothing matches the Bard when it comes to material.

“They’re always exciting and engaging,” he said. “It’s always very challenging. It requires a lot of you, more than other material does. You have to be better to be good enough to do it and improve yourself to handle it.

“It’s a great show,” he continued of his current project. “We like the anti hero, don’t we? There’s something very Hannibal Lecter about Richard. He does terrible things but we don’t mind, in fact, we secretly enjoy it. Stories like that have been around for a long time, there’s a reason for that.”

Richard III, until Nov 8 at Brockley Jack Theatre, Brockley Road. 0844 847 2454.