When Jonathan Slinger emerged as the evil Gloucester towards the end of Michael Boyd’s incomparable Henry VI trilogy, you expected great things. Here, they never quite materialise.

Slinger’s anticipated performance of “this poisonous, bunch-back’d toad” is certainly original: not so much toad or scheming, scuttling spider as an eager puppy, panting for attention. Bald and bare-headed but for a huge birthmark, his left leg withered and strapped, his dangling foot squirming like his misplaced guilty conscience, he canters through his brief, blood-boltered career. There is complicit laughter, not so much at his villainy as at his vigorous delight in it. Slinger’s extraordinary range of delivery, his weirdly changeable vocal style, gives another layer of complexity: unstable voice, unstable mind.

Yet, comedy and complexity aside, where’s the tragedy? During the nightmare scene, he waddles around in T-shirt and underpants. With his bald head and plump white thighs, he suggests not some evil Machiavel, but Matt Lucas’s Dafydd in Little Britain. Although you accept him initially as a sociopathic, idiotically grinning child, you expect something darker to emerge. It never does. Yes, there’s his spitting aggression and the diabolical black comedy of his asides, but this is still a less obviously psychotic and dangerous Richard. Where are Queen Margaret’s consequences, “bitter, black and tragical”? Where is the worm of conscience begnawing his soul? Where is his fathomless “interior hatred”? Not here. He merely changes from unthreatening puppy to whipped puppy. That exhilarating surge of admiration we ought to feel for the unrepentant monster on his last battlefield, going to hell with satanic pride intact, is entirely absent.

There are things to praise unreservedly. The music, by James Jones and John Woolf, is insistently ominous. There are winning interpolations, as when the terrified Clarence asks the henchmen if they come to murder him. “Ay, ay” is the textually orthodox answer, but here it’s a hilariously nonchalant “Yes, I’m afraid so”. And I love the stylistic convention, carried over from Boyd’s Henry VI, of the slain rising again at the scene’s end and staring at us: baffled and bewildered corpses or lost souls, looking down on this bloody, sublunary world from another and not understanding.

A haunting device.

Of the cast, Ann Ogbomo is outstanding as a statuesque yet passionate Elizabeth, and Katy Stephens is fantastically witchy as Margaret, not least due to a first-class make-up job. With her grey lips, blackened teeth and fingerless mittens, she exudes a palpable sense of madness. Richard, on the other hand, appears in a party hat at one point, which says it all.

Richard III, Three stars
RSC, Courtyard Theatre

Editor's choice

• Harry Potter to overtake James Bond as biggest franchise ever
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette