Ralph Fiennes continues to vary his career, choosing to return to the stage again, under the direction of Jonathan Kent with the Almeida Theatre productions of Richard II and Coriolanus.
After the scheduled run at Gainsborough, the productions will move to the Brooklyn Academy of Music venue in New York in the fall. Tickets for the BAM performances are on sale as of April 1, 2000, and may be ordered online at the BAM website. Order soon, as available seats are disappearing.
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London's Tiny, but Mighty, Almeida
New York Times
23 April 2000
Benedict Nightingale
London -- As a theater reporter for The Times of London wryly wrote the other day, "The Almeida's bid for world domination progresses apace"; and that seems no great exaggeration. Right now, the tiny but hungry playhouse is reaching out from mission control in North London to colonize a bit of East London, a bit of Central London, eventually a bit of New York, and, if NASA ever opens up the planetary system to space thespians, one day no doubt bits of the Moon or Mars or both.
If we discount the much-hyped London debut of Kathleen Turner in a stage version of "The Graduate" -- of which more in a moment -- the Almeida has been gobbling up the London critics' attention in recent weeks. First there was the premiere of Harold Pinter's "Celebration" at the company's grungy headquarters in Islington. Then it presented Nicholas Wright's new "Cressida" in the West End, with a magnificently dilapidated Sir Michael Gambon as a trainer of the boy actors who took female roles in early-17th-century England. And now it has reopened the doors of the East End film studios once used by Alfred Hitchcock and staged "Richard II" with Ralph Fiennes as the king, a production expected at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, along with "Coriolanus," in early September.
'Richard II'
The Almeida has a habit of dispatching major performers across the Atlantic. Mr. Fiennes as Hamlet, Diana Rigg as Euripides' Medea, Liam Neeson in David Hare's "Judas Kiss," Kevin Spacey in O'Neill's "Iceman Cometh": all have appeared in the company's productions in New York, the first two of them picking up Tony Awards for their pains. But most artistic exporter-importers would not regard "Richard II" as an especially valuable addition to that inventory. Shakespeare's inept English king is not, after all, as massive a creative challenge as his emotionally turbulent Danish prince. The surprise at the Gainsborough Studios, then, is that Mr. Fiennes finds almost more in a lesser role.
Actually, it's a double surprise, since there is something about that elegant profile that makes you half-expect a reprise of the graceful, willowy, vocally exquisite Richard with which John Gielgud established his importance in London 70 years ago. But barely has Mr. Fiennes been ferried onstage in his glistening white robe and glistening white throne than he's suggesting why almost all the English nobles will be delighted to see him lose his crown to the usurping Bolingbroke.
He uses his thin smile either to mock them or to seek reassurance from his flatterers, and his tongue to flaunt his wit or, at one bizarre point, to stick out and wiggle at his angry uncle, John of Gaunt. He is disdainful, petulant, malicious and smug.
But there are political as well as personal reasons for dethroning him. Mr. Fiennes's king is clearly improvising public policy as the whim takes him, whether that means taking charge of Irish wars, banishing dangerously influential men, raising taxes, anything. He seizes the exiled Bolingbroke's lands while picking the petals off a flower, and just as casually. Never have I seen a Richard II who made me so aware of how quick and quixotic his key decisions are, and I have seldom seen a production that so lucidly posed a question still alive when Shakespeare wrote: is there a point when mortals are entitled to depose God's deputy on earth, the divinely anointed king?
Jonathan Kent, who directs, brings energy and pace to a play that can seem a classroom slog, getting good supporting performances from Linus Roache, a Bolingbroke with the resolution and the sureness of political touch that Mr. Fiennes's Richard lacks, and Oliver Ford Davies as a Duke of York less torn than dismembered by his conflicting loyalties. But in "Richard II" it's the title character who matters, and, despite his unsentimental interpretation and coldly chiseled profile, you couldn't call Mr. Fiennes inhuman or finally unsympathetic.
Yes, he displays a self-infatuated glee when he steals Bolingbroke's birthright, and, yes, he thrusts his head forward like a venomous cobra when he rejects a man he pretends to love. But adversity brings out more than just self-pitying bluster and manic mood swings. There is unexpected majesty in Mr. Fiennes's outrage when, high on a balcony, he confronts the rebels. There is a moving realism in his recognition that "I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends." And there is a mournful wisdom when, alone in his prison cell, he confesses that "I wasted time and now doth time waste me." Even arrogant, unself-knowing despots can grow -- and Mr. Fiennes's Richard proves it.
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London Times
14 April 2000
Benedict Nightingale sees the Almeida deliver a triumphant Richard II
staged by the Almeida at Hitchcock's old Gainsborough Studios in Shoreditch. Photographs by Donald Cooper
This happy breed of actor For a man with a profile that might have been chiselled for display on some new Parthenon by a contemporary Phidias, Ralph Fiennes is a surprisingly flexible and versatile actor. Here he is in the vast, vaulty Gainsborough Studios in Shoreditch, a mix of old brick, timber, scaffolding and black foam-rubber seats where Alfred Hitchcock shot several of his movies, playing Richard II for the Almeida, the same company that staged his fine, courtly Hamlet five years ago; and somehow he succeeds in giving a more various, multi-coloured performance in what everyone would agree to be a less rich and rewarding part.
In he comes, borne on a white throne as on a sedan chair, right up to the rectangle of tufty grass that serves as a stage and presumably symbolises "this blessed plot, this earth, this realm": ie, the England he has omitted to keep properly tended and mown.
Notwithstanding the peculiar yellow cycling trousers just visible beneath his shimmering gown, he looks and sounds every inch the monarch. But then he proceeds to step down, and from that moment we sense the volatile blend of preciosity, humour, weakness, bitchiness, arrogance, smugness, sarcasm and sheer folly that eventually loses him his throne to Linus Roache's Bolingbroke.
In Richard II, more than any other of Shakespeare's plays, a key conundrum is posed. The king is God's representative on earth, untouchable. He is also a man, fallible. What is to be done when the man contrives to subvert the divine deputy? Fiennes offers us some genuinely regal moments, notably when he emerges on a balcony high above his emblematic slice of England, and with all the charisma at his formidable command gives the usurping lords an all-too-prophetic warning of the results of their blasphemy and hubris. But he is far more frequently a spoilt man with an unreconstructed child somewhere inside him.
After all, what are his subjects to do with a king who skims with such shallow ease from mood to mood, instant idea to impromptu decision? For instance, Fiennes's Richard finances his ill-considered Irish wars by formulating a punitive tax policy in the time it would take Gordon Brown to take a couple of sips of water in mid-budget speech. And what are the English nobles to make of his lightly disguised distaste and half-open mockery of so many of them? He grins at his flatterers, he waggles his tongue at the dying John of Gaunt, he seizes the dead man's goods while he casually picks and discards petals from a flower. Beside him, Roache's Bolingbroke, incisive yet not insensitive, strong yet deeply troubled by the close of the play, is in every respect but the divinely sanctioned one the better equipped to rule.
Jonathan Kent's production is brisk and pacey, and offers especially good supporting performances in Oliver Ford Davies's flummoxed York, a not-very-good swimmer trying to maintain equilibrium in a tank of warring piranhas, and from David Burke's Gaunt, who not only gives his famous elegy for England the political significance it demands but transforms it into a pained and wistful lament for his own imminent death. But finally any Richard II must be judged by its Richard II, and in the play's later stages Fiennes moves beyond imperious bluster, mandarin self-pity, toffy-nosed ire and all such things.
In his prison he is, as he should be, a man but no longer the same sort of man. There he stands, alone in a thin yellow light, occasionally succumbing to bitterness, yet also mournfully but carefully enunciating the simple syllables in which he acknowledges his blasted aspirations and wasted life. He seems physically to have withered - but also to have done what Shakespeare wanted. He has grown.
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The Express
20 February 2000
Mark Jagasia
Sam and Ralph are the men who would be King Richard
By one of those strange theatrical coincidences, two brightly burning lights of British stage and screen are going head to head in productions of one of Shakespeare's less performed history plays.
Ralph Fiennes for the Almeida Theatre, and Sam West for the RSC in Stratford, will be offering their takes on Richard II, the Plantagenet king who was deposed and murdered in a 14th century coup d'état.
Fiennes alone would be enough to attract interest. Buoyed by a series of fine celluloid performances in The End Of The Affair, Onegin and the forth-coming art-house epic, Sunshine, Fiennes is not only a star but an actor of physical and intellectual gusto.
But the added tang of having 30-year-old West in a rival performance at the same time has theatrical connoisseurs intrigued.
While West, son of Prunella Scales and Timothy West, has faded - perhaps deliberately - from the movie radar since his leading role in Howard's End, he is a highly sought presence on television, radio and the stage. He has never been modish like Ewan McGregor or Jude Law, but has quietly established himself as a pillar of the orthodox acting establishment.
The chance to compare and contrast the two actors' Richards is therefore a rare treat for fans of such things.
In the Shakespearean version of medieval history, Richard was a watery dreamer. Given to long soliloquies, he is introspective, poetic and totally unsuited to kingship. It is a complex part, but not one to cast chisel-jawed actors in an heroic light.
"That's what makes it interesting," says Kenneth Branagh, a friend of both men and an actor for whom the works of the Bard are something akin to a personal fiefdom. "I fully intend to catch both Sam and Ralph doing Richard as they are both first-rate classic actors.
"The interpretation will be fascinating. I don't think either will be a wimpish Richard, though the part can be seen as such. Both Sam and Ralph have the lyricism, both have something of the poet in them and both have the cheekbones - which I wish I could say myself. But Richard does have a lot to say and there's skill needed to manoeuvre through the soliloquies."
Although Richard's character is profoundly flawed, it seems that neither of the actors are prepared to play him as an anaemic drip.
"It's more the case of playing a man totally miscast," says West, who began rehearsals in Stratford last month. "He is the king forced to play a role he's completely unsuited for."
But West insists that the play retains a relevance beyond its protagonist's central human drama. "I can tell people I'm doing a play about poll tax riots, the Irish question and whether we should be a republic or not, and they'll assume it's set in 1999 not 1399," he says.
Perhaps for this reason, both productions appear to eschew chain mail and tapestries for a more contemporary setting.
"We're working in a white minimalist space and I'm pretty certain it won't be done in medieval costume," says West.
Of Fiennes's production - to be staged by Jonathan Kent in East London's Gainsborough Studios along with Coriolanus in which Fiennes also stars - a production insider says: "It's going to have a fairly modern setting - imperial Austrian, not quite Ruritanian but that sort of thing. The set is a very large space, which Ralph's a bit concerned about. I think Sam's doing it in a smaller setting.
"Ralph's going to do a harder Richard than usual, not weepy and wet. It's the flip side of his Coriolanus. He says they each show a deeply flawed leader, but if you combined them you'd have the ideal monarch - both aggressive and ameliorative".
Though comparisons between the two Richards will be fascinating, West is keen to stress there is no professional rivalry between the pair. "I don't like the idea that we're in competition with each other because of course we're not," he says. "In fact, I've already delivered a card to the theatre. It says, 'I hear we're both going to be playing Richard. Good luck to us both'."
Richard II at RSC Stratford (01789 403403) from March 20; Richard II at Gainsborough Studios, London N1 (0171- 359 4404) from March 30.
(Thanks to Claire and Ngoc, and to Isabel, Georgiana and Claire for the photos.)
For a back issue featuring Rufus Sewell as Macbeth, click here.
For interviews and articles about Fiennes, click here.
For the New Yorker article about Pushkin which Fiennes wrote, click here.
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