All The World's A Stage - The Work of Ralph Fiennes

[Mary Frances]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/oct/19/frankmcguinness-theatre

Oedipus should be more complexA loud, impressive yet empty

By Susannah Clapp
The Observer, Sunday
October 19 2008

Olivier, London SE1

He does full-throttle howling: straight out to the audience, mouth gaping like a Messerschmitt head. His bellows of pain reverberate, magnified, from the depths of the palace. As he takes in further bad news, he goes a bit baggy at the knees and elbows but remains still, as if he were carefully carrying a great weight on his shoulders. He speaks very, very slowly.

As Oedipus in Jonathan Kent's modern-dress production of Sophocles (by way of Frank McGuinness), Ralph Fiennes gives it his all: he's statuesque; he's sometimes impressive. Yet neither his carved face nor his tight voice suggest he is discovering the truth about himself. City-suited from the beginning, blood-spattered at the end, he moves from sneering power to exclusion. It's an external not an internal journey: to watch it is like seeing a banker realise the contours of his world have changed. Not so much the Oedipus complex as the Oedipus simple.

This leaves a hollow in the production. Nevertheless, Kent has created something imposing. He has a gift, rare among contemporary directors, for the grand scale. Together with designer Paul Brown and the composer Jonathan Dove, he co-opts the big reaches of the Olivier without trying to domesticate them. In front of magnificent copper-coloured doors, spattered with verdigris, the stage tilts, as if about to tip the cast into the depths. Panels slide back to show a Waiting for Godot landscape with leaden sky and blasted tree. Alan Howard's Teiresias comes out of this scenery like Pozzo, led on a chain by a boy. Warbling, intermittently Irish, glumly mischievous, he is the perfect counterfoil to Jasper Britton's purposeful, brusque Creon, the bristling new broom.

Germaine Greer is, though bilious, right about Frank McGuinness's new version (which can't be called a translation as it's not done straight from the Greek). It's not right. It often sounds hard to speak and it too often chirrups: 'Dead and gone, done and dusted.' Still, it doesn't much get in the way. Alfred Burke, as the old shepherd who took pity on the baby Oedipus, makes it sound clear and plain. You can witness a life being wiped out by attending to Clare Higgins's Jocasta, the only woman on the stage: the realisation of her husband's identity spreads across her face like a stain. And the Chorus is an almost unprecedented success: carried on the wings of Dove's music, it swells gradually into unaccompanied, rumble-voiced chant. It's a striking occasion, this Oedipus, but monumental rather than moving.

[Mary Frances]

Complex and enduring

On page and on stage, the devastating message of Oedipus the King remains as forceful as ever

By Charlotte Higgins
The Guardian
October 24 2008

Like all the greatest plays in history, Sophocles's Oedipus the King is a masterpiece because on every encounter it offers us something new. Sigmund Freud's interpretation of the play - about the man who kills his father and marries his mother - needs no rehearsal. When I re-read the play recently, I was drawn to a quite different aspect of the drama: its status as the first great piece of crime fiction, a detective story in which, harrowingly, investigator and perpetrator are revealed as the same person.

Every question Oedipus asks - how can we stop the plague that harrows Thebes? Who was the killer of Laius? What happened to Jocasta's baby? - is eventually answered with the same word: Oedipus. The story works because of its watertight construction and formal beauty. Scene by scene, it entangles its protagonist a little more chokingly and, through the dreadful force of its own internal logic, brings down Oedipus as simply and inevitably as a spider might trap a fly.

Frank McGuinness, who has adapted Oedipus the King for Jonathan Kent's National Theatre production, has also spoken about his relationship with the play. What springs most grippingly out of the drama for him is the tragedy of a son who loses his father, and of a father who loses his children. There can be few more devastating and yet unsentimental moments in theatre as when Oedipus, self-blinded and about to be driven from his home as a polluted exile, bids farewell to his children, by now revealed as the product of an incestuous marriage. There is real tenderness here.

Oedipus must also grapple with the loss of his birth father, Laius, whom he unknowingly murdered; and with that of his adoptive father, Polybus, whom he always feared he might kill. These are the real bones and sinews of life. By outliving our parents, we kill them. This is the harsh metaphorical truth that Oedipus the King brings us.

The National Theatre's production deals in the coin of all these interpretations, and yet the most forceful message it throws out shows a play that captures our times with uncanny vividness. When Ralph Fiennes, as Oedipus, walks on stage, he is dressed in a business suit. He addresses the audience: "The city, why is it sore with weeping? / Why is this whole city suffering?" It is impossible not to be reminded in a flash of the economic travails of the moment.

But more powerfully, and more profoundly, Kent's production and Fiennes's performance show us precisely, relentlessly and in great detail what it looks and feels like when a person's life unravels. Oedipus is a highly effective, powerful ruler; he loves his wife and children; he has the trust of his associates and people; he saved the city from the curse of the Sphinx; he is blessed. After an hour and 40 minutes of weighing and sifting evidence - of probing witnesses, of outbursts of anger, and of a final deafening crescendo of understanding - he is completely undone: no kingdom, no power, no family, no home, no honour, no dignity, and no sight.

The play ends with the line: "Call no man fortunate until he is dead." In other words, you cannot judge a life to have been happy until it has ended. Sophocles warns us that fortunes can change in a day; that however prosperous and safe you are, it could all end tomorrow; that no one is safe from disaster. This is the deadly, timely message of the play. "Human happiness never remains long in the same place," wrote Sophocles's contemporary, the historian Herodotus. The comfort, cold as it is, is that Oedipus lives. He goes on, he takes his stick, and he walks away from Thebes - a wiser man.

[Mary Frances]

Haughty - but nice; RELATIVE DANGER: Ralph Fiennes and Clare Higgins in Oedipus.

By Georgina Brown
The Mail On Sunday
October 19, 2008

Rating: **** stars

Oedipus Olivier, National Theatre, London 1hr 40 mins (no interval)

Oedipus must be one of the toughest parts to play. The tragic hero created by Sophocles 2,300 years ago is not a character like Hamlet or Othello whom one can identify with, and he's certainly not Freud's messed-up man who kills his father because he wants to sleep with his mother. The problem is he's a process not a person.

Frank McGuinness's new take reveals Oedipus, like a patient on an analyst's couch, as a figure coming to terms with the unbearable reality of who he truly is and the horror of what he has done.

The audience discovers this early on when blind Teiresias tells Oedipus: 'You are who you are seeking.' But it takes Oedipus an inordinately long time for the penny to drop.

McGuinness's writing could not be plainer, but it gives Jonathan Kent's austere modern-dress production a savage and commendable clarity. Kent has turned the Greek chorus into a sonorous male choir, which fills the vast Olivier very effectively, while Paul Brown's stark design has echoes of Beckett in the glimpses of trees with snapped trunks.

Ralph Fiennes's performance as a haughty Oedipus cruising blindly for a bruising is enormously impressive, and he even pulls off that most difficult feat - an almost silent scream. But Fiennes's evident intelligence makes it hard to accept Oedipus's slow grasp of the truth.

Meanwhile, Clare Higgins brings both majesty and humanity to her Jocasta, Alan Howard's Teiresias is vocally thrilling and Jasper Britton's Creon, Jocasta's brother, has enormous presence.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.newstatesman.com/theatre/2008/10/despair-oedipus-london-fiennes

Many a man's mad dream

Ralph Fiennes is magnificent as the doomed king, but only in despair

By Andrew Billen
New Statesman
October 30, 2008

Oedipus
Olivier Theatre, London SE1


Fatal attraction: Oedipus (Ralph Fiennes) and his mother/wife Jocasta (Clare Higgins)

Problems besiege any production of the west's best known tragedy. Oedipus Rex is static, its terrible acts of violence happening either offstage, in the past, or in reported speech (a movie director would be using flashbacks all over the place). Its dialogue, even in a translation as accessible as this new one by Frank McGuinness, is non-naturalistic: characters declaim to us as much as they talk to one another. And it lacks that oil of all drama, humour. I counted just one laugh in the 100 minutes of Jonathan Kent's production: Oedipus tells the annoyingly opaque truth-teller, Teiresias, to buzz off: "Go and die. Do it quickly."

But most of all, to a 21st-century audience, the play draws the wrong conclusions about the universe. Oedipus and his wife/mother Jocasta are modern, rational people. "No man has second sight. No such thing as prophecy," says Jocasta, and later: "Nothing is ordained, no rhyme or reason. Our life is all random." Rock on sister. Oedipus, after his initial spell of blaming messengers, heroically demands to know his biological provenance although he is already pretty sure the truth will prove him guilty of patricide and incest: "Let whatever happens happen. I wish to know who I am." (A programme note, illuminating the play in terms of Freud's Oedipus complex, compares its progress to that of a course of psychoanalysis.) And for this, Jocasta ends up hanging herself and Oedipus mauls out his eyes?

A Martian would look at this revered text and see propaganda for gods, clairvoyants and a form of theocratic thought control that denies character any part in destiny. What was Oedipus guilty of? He went so far out of his way to avoid fulfilling the prediction that he would kill his father, that he left Corinth for Thebes. He is, our ET would conclude, merely a victim of bad luck. For those who look to art to tell truths about the human condition, Oedipus is a dead loss. But that does not mean a production cannot be eerily enthralling and plunge you into a distant world whose truths were utterly different from ours.

My feeling about this production is that it tries too hard to make it modern, relevant and psychologically readable. Kent would have been better to dress his cast in togas, or space suits, than the dark grey Armani suits he chose. They make for the drabbest production since Michael Frayn's business-suited Democracy (about the Willy Brandt government) five years ago.

When Oedipus's children come on the stage at the end they are dressed in short grey trousers like the Famous Five circa 1959. They look ridiculous, although I did enjoy the crumpled white linen suit chosen for Alan Howard's Teiresias. With his dark glasses and doomy rhetoric, he brought Harold Pinter to mind.

If the intention with the suits was to make us think of the cast as City of London bankers or Westminster politicians, it fails. The western economy is in a mess, sure but, as yet, the meat is not turning to manure in our mouths and women are not giving birth to buckets of blood, as in Thebes under the rule of Oedipus. Nor do our financiers, unlike this chorus, sing their lines like members of an outsized barbershop quartet.

Psychologically, there is some textual justification for finding a Freudian Oedipal complex in Oedipus Rex. Jocasta tells him that marrying their mother is "many a man's mad dream". Unfortunately, there is desperately little sexual chemistry between Clare Higgins as Jocasta and Ralph Fiennes as her son/husband. Never for a moment do you feel that Oedipus is battling fate on one side and an intense passion for Jocasta on the other.

Fiennes starts off poorly with the pretentious actor's trick of chopping up his lines so they. Make. No sense. He is not helped by the idiolect McGuinness has chosen for Oedipus, a combination of clichés and banality ("The wine was flowing once - nine sheets to the wind"; "We would as soon get blood from a stone"). He is the second-rater whose greatness has been forced upon him. Fiennes's Oedipus is magnificent only in despair. When he learns about his history, he keens like a seagull. From then on his speech develops a tragic rhythm, as does the production. By the end, the play hits you with terrible force, even if it makes you hesitate and ask: the force of what?

[Mary Frances]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/461c5a3e-9cac-11dd-a42e-000077b07658.html

Oedipus

By Ian Shuttleworth
Financial Times
October 18 2008

Rating: **** stars

The Actor's Wail is one of the enduring clichés of theatre. The queeny old thesps in Blackadder suggested that every big speech should begin with a wail but, in practice, few roles can accommodate one. There's Shylock, Lear, of course, and indubitably Oedipus. In the title role here, Ralph Fiennes gets two wails. The second is a miked-up roar from offstage before he re-enters at the end, having blinded himself. The first, though, as he realises he has failed to evade his destiny and has indeed murdered his father and slept with his mother, is a remarkable creation, building up from an emphysemic wheeze, through annoyed seagull to air-raid siren before subsiding into an exhausted growl. It did, on the press night, elicit one or two sniggers in the audience but I think that on the whole he pulled it off.

Fiennes is quite a "naked" actor: he gives a clear view of his character's inner workings. This suits well with Sophocles' play, which is equally unadorned in the terrifying inevitability of its story as Oedipus sets out to identify the source of the plague afflicting Thebes only to discover that it is he himself.

Frank McGuinness's versions of Greek tragedies are similarly spare and magnificent, the topsoil of ornamentation washed away to leave the astounding bedrock of the text. Paul Brown's set, too, is bare: a low, broad hump of verdigrised bronze surmounted by a huge pair of doors. The hump and doors revolve with excruciating slowness through the play, as Oedipus's world also goes full circle, returning him to his starting point with a new and unendurable knowledge.

Director Jonathan Kent enjoys Rolls-Royce casting: Malcolm Storry and Alfred Burke as elderly shepherds, a brisk Jasper Britton as Oedipus's brother-in-law (and uncle) Creon, a puzzlingly accented Alan Howard as Teiresias, and Claire Higgins as wife/mother/queen Jocasta. One should always watch Jocasta when the first shepherd-messenger tells Oedipus he was found as a babe on the mountain; this is when she realises, ahead of him, that he is grown from the infant she had tried to put to death.

Higgins is terrific here: quietly, she all but freezes, eyes closed and mouth open, then slowly begins to tremble in mute horror. This is the moment at which the queen outranks the prince of wails.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.bexleytimes.co.uk/content/bromley/times/whatson/story.aspx?brand=BMLYTOnline&category=whatsontheatre&tBrand=northlondon24&tCategory=whatsonbmlyt&itemid=WeED06%20Nov%202008%2011%3A57%3A53%3A277


Haunted Ralph in Fienne form

Bexley Times
November 6, 2008

A RESOUNDING performance of Oedipus at The National ensured a silence among the audience which grew deeper by the minute, writes Melody Foreman.

Like the riddle this Greek hero solved to banish the sphinx from the gates of Thebes so did this production espouse the many brutal layers of human darkness.

Indeed, what walks on four legs in the morning, on two at midday, and on three in the evening? "Man," replied Sophocles' character who was cursed from the day he was born.

"Man crawls as an infant, walks upright as an adult, and uses a stick in old age."

Directed by Jonathan Kent and starring the intensely enigmatic Ralph Fiennes as Oedipus, the production proved to be the full on stupendous drama that plundered the mind and the soul.

Actor Fiennes' preparation for the role of the king who unwittingly killed his own father, married his own mother (Jocasta) and has children with her, included various sessions with a leading psychoanalyst. The daunting realisation who we are is never really what we are gets thrown up time and time again in this play as Oedipus reaches the ultimate crisis in his life that no amount of reasoning is going to explain.

It is during such crises of no answer and no return most of us turn to psychoanalysis. For Oedipus, his agonies are so public and the magnitude of his torture so great when uncovering the truth behind the myth of his birth that we watch Fiennes running about the stage like the possessed man he couldn't face becoming.

The production saw the cast of 28 in modern dress. The men of Thebes in sombre grey formed a chorus to admonish and support their champion as he questions his own worth and abilities to lead.

Oedipus wore a suit and tie at the start of the play, discarding the jacket and tie as his quest for the truth begins to suffocate him. His queen who also turns out to be his mother is Jocasta. She is played with the type of sophistication we can expect of an actress of Clare Higgins' experience. Her approach to the role was sympathetic even though the character was apt to go into denial over Oedipus' much ranted suspicions over his parentage and the brutally truthful suggestion Jocasta and her then husband (his father) the King of Thebes gave him away at birth.

Acted out on a slowly revolving stage with a huge two pillared doorway designed by Paul Brown, there was some beautiful uses of Neil Austin's creative lighting effects that gave us bare spindly trees on a background of white during any significant change of atmosphere.

When the famous moment came for Oedipus to declare he wanted a life of darkness he goes off stage. Seconds later we are told by one of his advisors how Jocasta is dead and Oedipus, their hero of a king who once slain the meddlesome sphinx, has stabbed out his own eyes with the pins on the brooches from Jocasta's dress.

Blood soaked and stained and curled up foetal-like centre stage, Oedipus calls for his children and declares his daughters have also been cursed because of his own terrible fate.

Big, bold and dramatic, this ninety minute long production of Oedipus must be seen.

* Oedipus is at the National Theatre until January 4.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/RNToedipus-rev.htm

Oedipus

By Sophocles, in a new version by Frank McGuinness
RNT Lyttelton

by Philip Fisher
British Theatre Guide
2008

Jonathan Kent has not had the greatest year at the Theatre Royal Haymarket but he more than redeems himself with this exhilarating, modern dress revival that might just throw the now somewhat neglected genre of Greek Tragedy back into the mainstream.

With the assistance of a slangy but highly effective contemporary translation from Frank McGuinness, he makes Oedipus Rex, the first play of a Trilogy that ends with Antigone, into something that seems entirely fresh, even though, throughout, everyone in the house knows exactly what will happen next.

He is aided by a cast that is fronted by Ralph Fiennes and Claire Higgins but has tremendous depth not only in the major parts but also a fifteen strong chorus. These ageing men not only advance the plot but regularly transform themselves into an excellent male voice choir, most adept at two and three part harmonies.

The Olivier stage has been transformed by Paul Brown into a bulging, tarnished copper circle with a partial revolve that slowly takes a pair of 20 foot high doors, also in copper, in a full circle like some gigantic sundial inevitably zeroing in on a symbolic, dark midnight.

During the hundred minutes of its cycle, the shaven-headed, designer-dressed Fiennes as the initially unemotional but proud Oedipus, King of the Thebans, fulfils a destiny that is almost too terrible to contemplate or take in.

One by one, the pieces of an intricate jigsaw are put into place as individuals, each of whom knows part of the story but none the whole, impart information to the King, as if plunging nails into the coffin to which by the end of the play he would dearly love to retire.

Slowly, the man who had been became combative with his brother-in-law, Jasper Britton's nattily-suited Creon, and triumphal when he thought his troubles were over, becomes cowed by the knowledge of his unwitting and unnatural misdeeds. These eventually condemn both his natural parents to death and plunge the kingdom into the kind of terrifying darkness that Oedipus suffers after blinding himself.

This has all been predicted by the seemingly mad old seer Teiresius, on this occasion played by Alan Howard, who, when Peter Hall produced Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus together at the National a dozen or so years ago, had the leading part in a memorable production complete with traditional masks.

Sharing the glory with Fiennes is that wonderful actress Claire Higgins, playing his wife-mother Jocasta. As proud and fiery as her husband, the Queen is also both maternal and protective, quick to denounce suggestions that Oedipus might be the mysterious man who killed his father. However, the seer's prognostications are finally confirmed as two other fine actors, both playing shepherds, Malcolm Storry and Alfred Burke, put the final pieces of the puzzle together.

All builds to an unbearable and deeply affecting ending, as Fiennes moves into top gear in an evening that proves that he is a really wonderful stage actor, who can hold an audience in the palm of his hand. Then, with blood streaming out of his eyes, Oedipus raises an unholy ascending wail, which must have scared the four young children cast as his offspring even more than it did a full house quaking in the auditorium.

It will be no surprise if Ralph Fiennes gets nominated for a number of best actor awards over the next few months, while Claire Higgins' support also deserves recognition. Perhaps though, the man who should get most credit is Jonathan Kent, without whose epic vision an absolutely stunning, in all senses of the word, evening would never have been created.

[Mary Frances]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122903284075499533.html?mod=rss_topics_davos

London Theater

By Paul Levy
Wall Street Journal
December 11, 2008

The face of Ralph Fiennes graces the book cover of Frank McGuinness's limpid, mellifluous new version of Sophocles's "Oedipus," and Mr. Fiennes heads the cast of the tragedy at the National Theatre. The Lyttelton auditorium's thrust stage is bare, except for designer Paul Brown's trestle table and huge metal doors that implant us firmly in the Bronze Age. But the business suits in which he's costumed the actors and chorus like so many contemporary bankers make effortless parallels between ancient Thebes and today's Wall Street.

Perhaps the best thing about director Jonathan Kent's striking production is the 15-strong chorus of mostly middle-aged men, who confidently sing (rather than speak) most of their lines a cappella to Jonathan Dove's impressive music.

Mr. Fiennes, of course, gives a grand performance, starting as a slightly cocky, besuited businessman, exuding confidence and well-being, then showing himself a competent executive as he sets about to discover why his city is suffering. He eventually sheds bits of clothing as he discovers more of the awful truth about himself, until the chief feature of his costume is his untucked, bloody shirt. He does the scream of the blind Oedipus in two parts: the first like a howling dog, the second half more like a whimpering infant. It's more imposing than moving, though.

Aristotle (in his Poetics) chose this particular play as his prime example of tragedy, because Oedipus, though a king whose fate educes our awe, is enough like us, the audience, to evoke our pity as well. Mr. Fiennes certainly excites awe, but his commanding performance, in the end distancing himself from us and from the events on stage, is a touch pitiless. It's a performance that will be remembered, and talked about, as is Lawrence Olivier's in the same role. But fine as it is, it lacks that element of real tragedy.

Perhaps it's the fault of the production, for pushing the contemporary-parallel button a bit too hard: It's difficult to feel pity for reversals of fortune happening to characters whose annual bonuses exceed most people's estates at death. Maybe this is a small quibble, but it can't be beyond Mr. Fiennes' skill to make us feel just a little sorry for him.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/oct/17/theatre-oedipus-ralphfiennes

What to say about ... Oedipus at the National TheatreWondering how to respond to this famous Greek tragedy? Mark Espiner does a very Fiennes search through reviews to avoid uttering the blindingly obvious

By Mark Espiner
Guardian.co.uk
October 17, 2008


Oh mother ... Ralph Fiennes and Claire Higgins in Oedipus.
Photograph: Tristram Kenton

So you find yourself, for your sins, in a social setting, the Spectator pre-Christmas cocktails, say, or the London's Mayor's Save Our Bankers fundraising party, where everyone only reads the Telegraph and the conversation falls to Ralph Fiennes's performance as Oedipus. How to deal with that organ's chief critic's disappointment at the show and his bitter dismantling of the production?

It's amazing, you say first up, how modern Greek tragedy can be. Jonathan Kent's production, which dresses Fiennes's Oedipus and the chorus of 14 men in suits to resemble "anguished city investors who have just learned that their hedge fund has gone bust" in the Telegraph, proceeds with "an intensity that bangs home the conclusion Sophocles wanted and, in our own, way, we're relearning: that life is unnervingly precarious, desperately insecure" in the Times. as Benedict Nightingale then adds that it, "is a mini-opera of horror and suffering", that is relevant for us and our own credit crunch catastrophe. "It happened to Thebes. Could something analogous happen to us?" you ask.

By that you don't mean that some estranged royal could suddenly come back to save the City and the crisis besetting it, end up killing the Duke of Edinburgh and shagging the Queen and then be so overwhelmed at his crime that he blinds himself. Of course not. No. It's just that according to What's on Stage, this production "unravels with the gripping fervour of a courtroom drama" and succeeds, says the Guardian, because "it shows Oedipus not as the gods' puppet but as a man whose suffering is related to his character flaws; which is the classic definition of tragedy".

You may chuckle at Charles Spencer's assessment of the performance of Ralph Fiennes, whose first name you are careful to rhyme with "safe". But you don't agree that this Oedipus, "with his sinister shaved head looks disconcertingly like the pub landlord, Al Murray, and who occasionally lapses into his old mannerism of sounding like Rigsby in Rising Damp, isn't up to the task." Instead, you bring in the Guardian's Michael Billington to support your case. Fiennes "radiates an instinctive hauteur which underscores Oedipus's purblind pride." He is, you go on, borrowing from Michael Coveney's review in What's on Stage, "superb throughout – enigmatic, tense, compelling - and particularly good at expressing his grasp of unwelcome news in the embrace of the chorus."

This new version by Frank McGuinness helps. Coveney says it is "terrific" and is not, as the Telegraph would have it, "an uneasy blend of stark poetry and sudden eruptions of banal colloquialism". The Guardian says his text has Sophocles's hero as an "arrogant, hubristic figure who achieves humility through suffering" and it "brings out the play's tragic trajectory", then adds more.

Alan Howard's blind prophet Teiresias deserves a mention. He gives the role a "Beckettian resonance" you observe. Toss in here as an aside, as all the critics do, that Howard himself played Oedipus in Peter Hall's production 12 years ago - on the same stage. And then hint at the play's dark sexual undertones that so fascinated Freud by citing Clare Higgins's performance as Jocasta, who plays her relationship with her son Oedipus as "overtly sexual" and has a great moment when she realises the terrible truth and her face darkens "like a city suddenly deprived of illumination".

That should have them all spitting in their martinis, as you rush off to actually get a ticket for the show that you haven't yet seen.

Do say: It's blindingly good
Don't say: It's all Greek to me
Reviews reviewed: A Fiennes tragedy for our times