Ann Noble in Richard III by Daniel Reichert.
Ann Noble has been circling Richard III for decades. She has played many of the women in the play. She has directed other actors performing its scenes. She knows every corner of the play.
What she did not expect was ever to be handed the crown.
“I wasn’t sure that just me being a woman, that that would be something they would be willing to jump into,” Noble said in an interview. “And they were.”
When A Noise Within’s production opens Sunday at the company’s 324-seat thrust stage in East Pasadena, Noble will join a small cohort of women who have claimed a role men have dominated for more than four centuries. But her interpretation pivots on a more radical proposition than simply gender: she refuses to play Richard as a villain at all.
“The first thing is not to look at him as a villain,” she said. This is not naïveté. It is strategy—and it may be the production’s most unsettling gambit.
Director Guillermo Cienfuegos has set the action in 1970s Britain and described the staging as ‘cinematic,’ comparing its velocity and grittiness to films. The production, he said, “will feel more … like a Martin Scorsese or a Quentin Tarantino film, and move like a freight train.”
But Noble’s approach operates on a different frequency. Rather than leaning into Richard’s monstrousness, she has built her performance around a discomfiting question: What really separates the audience from the man onstage?
“We all like to think we’re people who don’t cross lines — and don’t cross boundaries,” she said, “But we do.”
The Outsider’s Advantage
The casting itself became a rehearsal tool. In scenes where Noble found herself the only woman among male actors, she channeled that feeling of difference directly into the character.
“When I’m sitting in a rehearsal and there are only male actors on the stage with me, I do feel a little like an outsider just because I’m a woman. I feel a little different,” she said, “and I can put that right into Richard because that’s how he feels. He feels like an outsider.”
Shakespeare’s text describes Richard as deformed and reviled—a figure whose body becomes a weapon his enemies use against him when they cannot best his intellect. Noble reads the slurs hurled at Richard not as description, but as desperation.
“His enemies are trying to put him down, or to attack him for his behavior, but because he’s so clever and they’re unable to attack him in a more constructive way, they use these name-calling tactics as a way to fight back,” she said.
The question of Richard’s physicality required careful negotiation. A Noise Within chose flexibility over literalism: in this production, Richard has a nonfunctioning arm, a curved spine resembling scoliosis, and a leg that does not fully work—adaptations Noble and Cienfuegos developed to fit her body. A quick glance might not reveal them.
“If that was the case, they would’ve gone with an actor who had that life experience,” Noble said of making physical deformity the production’s focus. The differences are present, she explained, but not emphasized—characteristics Richard would have adapted to from childhood, woven into who he is rather than performed as affliction.
The approach places the production within a fraught ongoing debate. When Shakespeare’s Globe announced in 2024 that its artistic director, Michelle Terry, would play Richard, the Disabled Artists Alliance issued an open letter signed by more than 100 disabled theater professionals calling for “an immediate recast.” Mat Fraser, a disabled actor who played Richard III in 2017 to critical acclaim, told The Guardian that the Globe casting made him feel “really depressed—and tired.”
Complicity as Experience
Cienfuegos, who won both Ovation and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for Best Director for his production of “Henry V” at Pacific Resident Theatre, returns to A Noise Within after directing “Much Ado About Nothing”—a production The Los Angeles Times included in its “Top 9 Best productions of 2023.” He currently serves as co-artistic director at Rogue Machine Theatre.
The promotional materials promise that audiences will become Richard’s “unwitting accomplices.” Noble and Cienfuegos have worked extensively on that direct relationship—the way Richard draws spectators into his scheming, making them hungry to see what happens next.
“Audiences are curious and everyone wants to know what’s going to happen,” Noble said. “We like watching people plan things. It’s fun.”
The cinematic pacing leaves no room for hesitation.
“There’s no ice skating on this one,” Noble said. “We have to dig into every moment. It has to be very, very clear to work this quickly and work this gritty.”
Co-artistic director Geoff Elliott noted the production’s unexpected humor. “People don’t realize how funny this play is,” Elliott said. “Richard is one of Shakespeare’s most darkly comic characters.”
A Career Realigned
For Noble, the role represents something personal: a chance for her energy to finally match her opportunity.
“For a lot of my career, my energy did not match my looks,” she said. Early on, casting directors called her in for sweet young women. “I look young and I have this sort of cute face, especially when I was younger. I’d get called in for very sweet, cute characters, and then I would walk in the room and be like, hi.”
Her energy, she said, did not fit.
Noble earned a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award nomination last season for “The Skin of Our Teeth” at A Noise Within, where she was among 85 finalists from 21 shows considered by LADCC voting members in 2024. She won the 2024 LADCC Award for Lead Performance for her work in “Crevasse” at Son of Semele and Victory Theatre Center.
She described A Noise Within as possessing a tight-knit, repertory-style atmosphere rare in contemporary American theater. Founded in 1991, the company is one of the only theaters on the continent performing three productions in a true rotating repertory.
“It really feels like you’re going into a community that loves theater, wants to see the classics done in new ways,” Noble said of Pasadena’s theater scene. “It is not a community that likes everything to stay the same.”
The Challenge
Noble said she hopes the production prompts a kind of moral self-examination—particularly now, when she observes people retreating to their corners.
“I hope that audiences may ask themselves some tough questions,” she said. “Maybe look inside themselves to think, oh wow, maybe I sometimes do compromise my morals a little bit.”
She argues that theater permits an expansiveness in casting that film and television struggle to achieve. The logic is simple and unsparing.
“Look, I’m not a 15th-century royal monarch, but neither is a guy,” Noble said. “Neither is a guy. We’re playing pretend. Let’s really play pretend and see who and what we can be.”
Richard III runs Feb. 8 through March 8 at A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. Previews begin Feb. 8; opening night is Feb. 14 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets and information: anoisewithin.org
