Fiennes tears down walls to shake up Shakespeare

Nigel Reynolds on the night that Hollywood came to Shoreditch


By Nigel Reynolds
The Daily Telegraph
April 14, 2000




THE badlands of Shoreditch in east London twinkled like Hollywood, with some of the biggest names in films picking their way through the council estates. Glenn Close, Cate Blanchett, Miranda Richardson and Donald Sutherland were among those heading for one of the most ambitious theatre projects undertaken in London for years.

In the teeming rain on Wednesday night, they came to a derelict Edwardian warehouse and stayed, many of them celebrating beyond midnight, bearing witness to the box office pull of the British actor Ralph Fiennes.

At a cost of pounds 2.3 million, the cavernous Gainsborough Studios has been converted into a temporary theatre as a vehicle for the Oscar- winning Fiennes to play two Shakespeares back-to-back, Richard II and Coriolanus, every night from now until early August.

Fiennes got good-to-mixed reviews for the first, Richard II, yesterday but if there was a real star, it was the warehouse, seating and standing 850 people and fit for the best party.

A huge stage, almost 100ft across, was covered with turf and trees. Great fissures had been hacked in the brick walls. Through these Fiennes and his team, including Linus Roache, Emilia Fox and Oliver Ford Davies (all of them on the very sub-West End rate of around pounds 500 a week), could enter and exit the stage.

"It's an absolutely amazing place," said Sir Cameron Mackintosh, the West End impresario, at the party afterwards. "I've often driven past it but never knew what was inside."

He continued: "It's wild and weird and almost a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I've only had a buzz like this in a theatre once before, 20 years ago when I saw Peter Brook's Carmen in Paris in his Bouffes du Nord."

Glenn Close, in England filming 102 Dalmatians at Shepperton, said she had come because she was a good friend of Fiennes.

Dressed in a black Armani cape and sandals, she looked out of place next to the peeling walls of the studios. "I've only seen Richard II once before, at Stratford," she said. "This production was amazing. Ralph was wonderful and this theatre is the most extraordinary place I have ever been to."

Prominent cheerleaders for Fiennes were his girlfriend, Francesca Annis, and his actor brother, Joe.

The production is the brainchild of the fashionable Almeida Theatre in Islington, which wanted a dramatic setting for the two Shakespeares. Fiennes and the Almeida had previously linked up to stage Hamlet at the Hackney Empire.

After a string of films, including The End of the Affair, Fiennes is giving eight and a half months to the two plays. Rehearsals started in early February. Coriolanus opens in June, then both plays go to New York followed by Japan, with the very last night on Oct 29 in Tokyo.

Shoreditch has had its fashionable moments before. England's very first playhouse, James Burbage's Theatre, was opened there in 1576. Many actors lived in the area and are buried in the parish church. The dramatist Ben Jonson fought a duel in the local park in 1598.

For a while this century, the warehouse was even known as Hollywood on the Canal because it served as Alfred Hitchcock's film studio when Will Hay and Margaret Lockwood were the stars of the day.

Now Shoreditch is being cast as one of London's hippest residential areas. But when Richard II and Coriolanus go abroad in August, the last great days of the Gainsborough Studios will be over. A small film studio will be built there but the vast auditorium will be demolished to make way for apartments.





 

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