Fiennes fights hard to play man of war


By Benedict Nightingale
Times of London
First Night Review
Britain
June 15, 2000


Coriolanus
Gainsborough Studios, N1




RALPH FIENNES played an elegant, courtly Hamlet for the Almeida five years ago and is currently an interestingly precious, bitchy, smug, vulnerable Richard II at the company's summer quarters, the Gainsborough Studios in Shoreditch.


But the subtleties that qualified him for those roles would seem, on the face of it, to disqualify him for the leading role in the Coriolanus that now joins the English history play in the company's rep.


What, we wondered, would he make of a character whom the most influential academic of my youth summed up as an "iron mechanical warrior" and a "human war-machine", tougher than anyone except his mother, who is able to rule him the way that a lioness might an uppity cub?


The answer is that, yes, Fiennes plays Coriolanus as a relentless
war-machine, but one that is more a sleek jet fighter or a shark-faced submarine than a tank, cruiser or bomber. He strides onstage, hair slicked down, wearing a magnificent sneer that he scarcely removes.


Talk about arrogance, talk about hubris. You almost believe that he has undergone a surgical nose-lift or smelt so many whiffy proletarians that his olfactory organ has moved upwards of its own accord. And though I occasionally thought I caught the tones of the late Leonard Rossiter reacting to rising damp, Fiennes mostly exudes a ringing contempt, a scathing
superciliousness, an ultra-articulate anger.


It is undeniably impressive, but surely even Coriolanus, the most monochrome of Shakespeare's heroes, could do with a bit more colour?


That comes only occasionally, as when he gives a tiny, satisfied smile on being awarded the title of Coriolanus.


But when he yields to his mother Volumnia's pleas to spare Rome, falling to the floor and quietly sobbing, it is too unprepared-for to be wholly plausible. Fiennes has not shown us the unreconstructed boy inside the fighting man who kills for his country, is rejected by it, and joins its foes in an ecstasy of pique.


About Barbara Jefford's Volumnia, though, there can be no cavils. Think of some Amazon handing out white feathers to passing wimps in Harrods or Harvey Nichols, and, no, you still haven't done justice to this monster-mother with her gloating glee in all that's destructive.


And the intensity of her ferocity gives special meaning to Emilia Fox as Virgilia, Coriolanus's neglected wife. She sits silently, gently tending her boy and her embroidery - and her very diffidence is a reproach to the warmongers.


That's one of several apt touches in Jonathan Kent's modern-dress revival, which comes with a peppy Aufidius in Linus Roache, a majestic Cominius in David Burke and a more than usually serious, thoughtful Menenius in Oliver Ford Davies. His production is probably more sympathetic to Rome's balky,
changeable proles and less sympathetic to its senators than Shakespeare, who was no leveller, would have wished - but that's par for the political course nowadays.


A couple of quibbles. Menenius's light blue, dark blue tartan looks so odd amid the nobs' tunics and workers' caps you wonder if he should be called McMenenius. Again, when Fiennes emerges from battle should he look quite so much as if he has done a couple of lengths in the stage gore that half-drowned Peter O'Toole after his Macbeth had murdered Duncan?
But let's not forget the moment in which the gates of besieged Corioli, a slab of rusting metal in the surrounding brickwork, open to a rush of white noise and white light. I haven't seen war so simply yet terrifyingly evoked in ages.

 

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