Manic Monarch




By Julie Kavanagh
Talk Magazine
September 2000



The hottest ticket in London comes to New York this fall: Ralph Fiennes's brilliant interpretation of Richard II and Coriolanus.




On a beautiful day last August, Ralph Fiennes sat sipping sherry with Sir John Gielgud and talking about Shakespeare. Fiennes said he'd like another go at Hamlet --"I think constantly of things I should have done"; Gielgud said his first was definitely his best. They both remembered the impact of Paul Scofield's Prospero, the way he could hold the audience entranced by a single gesture, and they discussed Richard II, the role that (together with Hamlet) made Gielgud's name and that Fiennes was beginning to prepare. The Almeida Theatre's Jonathan Kent, who directed Fiennes in his 1995 Hamlet, had just acquired temporary use of the Gainsborough Studios in northeast London. This studio, once a late Victorian power station, where Alfred Hitchcock's first films were made; it had been derelict for 50 years. By late March, after remaking it into a remarkably effective, semiruined space, Kent opened with a four month season there with Richard II, followed by Coriolanus. "They seemed an interesting match," says Kent, "having the same preoccupations with power and the way it can destroy you." Running in tandem throughout the summer, the two plays (which will come to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on September 6 and run though October 1) have taken what Kent calls, "the status of an event;" Celebrities in town, including Julianne Moore, Mick Jagger, Donald Sutherland and Glenn Close, pilgrimaged to dismal Shoreditch, braving portable toilets and the numbing makeshift seats to see Fiennes five what The Guardian called "an unequivocal star performance." Audience size, as of press time, had reached almost 800 a night, with standing room only for the more popular Richard II -- "a part," according to Kent, "which people have always expected Ralph to play."

"You must look at the Wilton Diptych, "Gielgud remarked enigmatically, and Fiennes, who'd already been to the National Gallery to see this medieval masterpiece, knew why. "It was to give me a glimpse into the mind of a man who would commission a work of such extraordinary beauty." The work cleverly inspired Fiennes's portrayal of the king as a fastidious young dilettante costumed in exotic yellow hand-embroidered satin trousers -- "I wanted something that would reflect Richard's delight in exquisite detail" --who makes his first entrance carried on a litter, illuminated like a religious icon.

Richard was a boy of 10 when he inherited the throne from his grandfather, Edward III, in 1377. Consecrated at Westminster Abbey, he was regarded as a child messiah who'd usher in a golden age, and over the years he became obsessed with his own omnipotence, believing that no amount of unstable or impolitic behaviour could "wash the balm off an anointed king," Shakespeare's Richard II is about the deposition of a lawful king unfit to rule; the usurper, who seizes Richard's crown and orders him killed, is his cousin, Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV.

Before starting production, Kent spoke to Simon Schama (author of the forthcoming History Of Britain, which includes a compelling chapter on Richard's reign) to confirm the historical accuracy of presenting Richard not only as "rather a fancy nancy boy," in Schama's words, but also as a man subject to severe mood swings. The standard interpretation presents an elegiac figure studying his own emotions in a series of beautiful soliloquies, but Fiennes presents a character who's pettish, snarky, and dangerously capricious. "Some people are alienated; others find it quite entertaining," says the actor. "But there is justification for making him quite mad." For Fiennes, the great set pieces that follow the King's return from Ireland are deceptively beguiling: "He's just as self-obsessed and manipulative as he was before. It's only at the end, when his language gets simpler, that Shakespeare gives him a wonderful insight into himself, and the audience sees him for the first time as a tragic hero. To me, the key lines are:

"Tis very true, my grief lies all within,
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortur'd
soul. There lies the substance.


"That's when he suddenly starts to admit his own fallibility and realizes that real grief is inexplicable, that everything else was just a show."

By the end of the play, Fiennes himself, as London Times theatre critic Benedict Nightingale commented, seems to have diminished in size -- "but also to have done what Shakespeare wanted. He has grown." The actor admits that playing Richard back to back with the violently confrontational Coriolanus has been a formidable challenge; with a tour of Japan following the BAM season, the physical toll will be even greater. "Every day is about pacing myself, and I don't have much of a life outside the theatre. But I just love being in front of an audience, and Jonathan has given me such license to explore. I feel free, really free."




 

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