Steven's Pimlott's production begins as it means to continue: pretty unusually. Out from the rough timbering at the back of the stage limps, lopes, struts and clatters David Troughton's bulky, twisted Richard, and proceeds to slice the famous opening monologue into two distinct halves.

The stuff about the winter of discontent becoming glorious summer is for public consumption, fake-cheerfully delivered to the lords and ladies prancing in their finery above him. The bit about determining to be a villian is a baleful confidence put across with a menancing wink and a big, scornful grin.

It sounds tricksy, especially as Troughton is dressed in a bizarre, brick-red costume: a sort of embroidered Elizabethan bomber-jacket with Agassi-type shorts and stockings to match, the whole topped off with a jester's cap and bells. But it serves to emphasise how thorough-going a play-actor Crookback is. It also introduces Troughton with a bang, a sign of the manic explosions and psychotic mood-swings to come.

 His is a terrific performance and, for those who chronicle the RSC's evolution, a particularly rewarding one. Private Troughton has risen, via Bottom and Caliban and a score of supporting parts, to become King Troughton. His acting has a sort of fierce starkness that distinguishes it from the merely forceful and direct. Add that vast slab-face of his and white-ball eyes he seems to be juggling from somewhere below, and we have a monster to relish.

 Caricature stuff ? In a way. But then Richard III is a broad, rhetorical piece, with a black villian, a golden hero and curses and lamentations galore. Not only does this justify the 15th-century blend of Ubu and Mr. Punch that Troughton gives us: it explains why Pimlott is more at ease with the play than with some of the subtler work the RSC has asked him to direct.

 His is a big, florid production that constantly shifts from relative realism realism to gaudy opera. Mauve-white ghosts gather on the edge of the yellow rubble that weirdly litters Tobias Hoheisel's set. A brass band accompanies Troughton when he is carried in by what look like Ku-Klux-Klansmen in black. Although the costumes are mainly garish Elizabethan (Susan Brown's Queen looks like a primrose-coloured four-poster), the London citizenry might have wandered in from 1930s Wigan or Widnes. The ending, in which spooks watch Troughton glumly repeating his stuff about winters of discontent, is ostentatiously spurious.

 The effect is more melodrama than tragedy or history - but what a melodrama ! The supporting performers, from Michael Siberry's Clarence to Jennifer Ehle's Lady Anne, are full-blooded and whole-hearted, excepting only John Nettles's Buckingham, a man frighteningly lacking in either blood or heart.

But when it comes to commitment, Troughton is in a category of his own. True, he is not very moving in despair and defeat; but that, surely, is because Shakespeare was some years away from creating a Macbeth. Instead, he gives us malevolent glee, depraved infantilism, paranoia, frustration, fury, and fun. Watch him roar and stamp and salivate all over Paul Bentall's stupefied Hastings and, a bit later, stick his knife in the chap's severed head and casually drop it on a quaking Lord Mayor. It is, believe me, a lot larger than life.

 In recent years we have seen Richard III as "bottled spider", with Antony Sher scuttling across the stage on crutches, and Richard III as "poisonous bunch-backed toad" in Simon Russell Beale's squat and icily malvolent performance. Rarely, however, can the most celebrated baddie in English literature have been played as an endearingly buffoonish stand-up comedian.

The amazing thing about David Troughton's performance is that it mostly works. It's certainly not a fully rounded portrait of the man who murdered his way to the English crown, but it is compelling and, more remarkably, poignant.

 This is a Richard who is always aware that he is playing to an audience. He makes his first entrance in the camp, conspiratorial manner of Frankie Howerd, silently surveying the house as if calculating the box-office takings. The first half of the "Now is the winter of our discontent" speech, delivered in a jester's outfit, is a variety turn performed for the victorious House of York, complete with silly walks, massively bulging eyes and exaggerated rhymes.

 Halfway through, however, the rest of the court freezes and Troughton begins to take the audience into his confidence, describing his devilish plans with a mischievous, infectious glee. How could one fail to warm to someone who combines such ouspoken candor with the clumsy, potato-faced charm of Tommy Cooper ?

There have been funny Richards before, of course - it's a great comic role - but Troughton comines broad, often very broad, comedy with a touching vulnerablity. It seems psychologically plausible to me that a deformed and unloved child shoudl play the fool to mask his feelings of hurt. And Troughton is particularly good at portraying Richard's anguished relationship with the mother who has always despised him.

 When she discovers him sizing up the throne after the death of Edward, he starts like a schoolboy caught smoking. When he has won the crown, he puts his head expectantly in her lap, waiting for the praise he has been denied for so long. Instead she curses him, and his face becomes a silent scream of agony.

 The trouble, of course, is that this is only half the story. Troughton's Richard provokes laughter and pity, but he hardly ever frightens. There is no sense of corrosive evil, even as he commits the most appalling atrocities. The only moment when we realise we are in the presence of a psychopath is when he turns furiously on Hastings and pummels a bag of strawberries into pulp. Even the wooing scene with Lady Anne lacks the required sense of perverse sexuality.

 Troughton is excellent, however, in the final act, when laughter gives way to exhausted futility. Here is a man who has rendered life meaningless by his crimes: he gives up without a fight, wanly reprising broken lines from earlier in the play (and even Henry VI) as he is haunted by the ghosts of those he has butchered. The usually anguished cry of "My kingdom for a horse" becomes a weary sigh at the absurdity of his situation, and when Richmon delivers his speech of victory, Troughton is still lurking in the wings, sarcastically applauding his successor.

 Director Steven Pimlott has lumbered himself with a naff design (Tobias Hoheisel), featuring a grim interior setting that trundles awkwardly to the front of the stage, and a landscape of bilious green rocks and a dead tree that look as though they've been salvaged from an earlier production of Waiting for Gogot.

But there are impressive supporting performances: most notably from John Nettles as Buckingham, the straight man to Troughton's comedian and exuding the glib fluency of a PR executive, while the grieving queens are played with a formalised, Greek chorus-like intensity by Susan Brown, Diana Coupland, Jennifer Ehle and Cherry Morris.

 The production will undoubtably be remembered, though , for Troughton's performance - original, occasionally misguided, but never less than fascinating.

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