Fiennes Is Fine In Tales of 2 Kings







By Linda Winer
Staff Writer
Newsday
September 11, 2000


Seen Thursday [September 7] and Saturday [September 9] evenings.




British star adds some royalty to Brooklyn theater




Ralph Fiennes has always had a cool, heroic quality. Even when
inhabiting the icy skin of a Nazi in "Schindler's List" or the conflicted psyche of his Tony Award-winning Hamlet, the English actor has projected reserves of unreadable mystery behind his birdlike alertness and patrician intelligence.


However tantalizing we have found his introspective gifts, nothing has prepared us for the unbridled, wildly wide-ranging classic brilliance he brings to two flawed kings under two of Shakespeare's most hollow crowns.

For the next three weeks, Fiennes will be both attention-getting device and repertory player in the title roles of Almeida Theatre Company's "Richard II" and "Coriolanus" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater. The Almeida's Jonathan Kent, whose "Hamlet" with Fiennes and "Medea" and Racine
cycle with Diana Rigg struck us as more serviceable than inspired, has staged these problematic power plays with a shrewd, blazing emotional specificity that belies their settings of indeterminate modernity.


"Coriolanus" is a more fully realized production, with a stronger
supporting ensemble. But "Richard II" has the more startling revelations about Fiennes. Never have we seen the actor so far out in a character who wears his nervous system perilously close to his skin. This Richard is not just an inbred brat with a divine-right complex. He is also an intensely complicated fellow, a playful piece of work who knows how to wear canary
pants under his mandarin white gown without losing his dignity, who can tend to the folds of his frock while finding just the right precious tone for banishing his warring courtiers. When he says "Go" to Bolingbroke (Linus Roache), thus digging his own downfall, the life-altering command is issued as if a child were hissing "Boo." When this king eventually must turn over
his crown to his rival, he first pretends nonchalance of a host passing a candy dish, then grabs it back with the ferocity of mortality. Though his Richard offers a rare stretch into petulant, flashy neurosis, his Coriolanus may actually be the greater achievement.

Richard, the king, must learn to be a man. But Coriolanus, the man, does not allow himself to show more than sour contempt as he tries to learn to be a king. As fearless warrior, the man can handle anything.

When he must flatter the populace to win their support, however, he buries his emotions in rudeness as a turtle retreats to his armor. Reaching out feels like pandering to a debonair fellow who only knows how to be a thug.

Both productions-staged first in a former London film studio-are raw, unpretty affairs, delivered with a small company on Paul Brown's raked stage with a catwalk above. "Richard" is more lush, with its real grass stage and Shakespeare's far more intricate language.

Except for the wickedly smart Oliver Ford Davis as Richard's uncle, the Duke of York, however, the actors are surprisingly bland. In "Coriolanus," the stage is starker but the acting is more alive. Davis, again, makes the most out of another aging counselor, Menenius. But, this time, Roache matches Fiennes' chemical energy as another king's rival. And, while
"Richard" is male-driven, "Coriolanus" gives us Barbara Jefford as the deliriously ambitious mother whose presence allows shafts of light into her son's dark soul. "Coriolanus" also has some of the more horrifying battle scenes, exquisitely suggested offstage beyond a huge garage door.

Both productions have costumes by Paul Brown that suggest modern dress with a hint of Buck Rogers futurism and a drape of ancient pomp. In "Richard," the court, in white, seems almost to come from a different planet than the disdained populace in heavy layers of browns and blacks. In "Coriolanus," the people are blue-collar workers gearing up for a strike. Shakespeare considered this dense exploration a tragedy.

Shaw thought it was a comedy. Kenneth Tynan called it "more a public meeting than a play."

In Brooklyn through Oct 1, it begins the new theater season at the top.

 

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