Ralph Fiennes In Coriolanus- Review from London Performances
Fearsome
Fiennes fails to chill Coriolanus
Dir: Jonathan Kent
by Nicholas de Jongh Ralph
Fiennes cut a strangely unthreatening figure as Coriolanus, Shakespeare's brutal Roman warrior with a testosterone surplus, overweening pride and a mother-fixation.
He chilled no blood of mine, however loud he raised a big voice. His aggressive drive to power never ceased to be thoroughly middle-of-the-road as he steered a haughty course through Jonathan Kent's modern-dress production. In common with Ian McKellen, Antony Sher and Derek Jacobi, who have been cast as Shakespearian warriors or villains and proved themselves less than ideal casting, Fiennes is unsuited to playing Shakespearian toughs and roughs. His charisma is otherwise inclined.
This Coriolanus best and powerfully convinces when he reveals the war-leader to be at heart a little boy lost, downcast under the domineering heel of his mother, Volumnia, whom Barbara Jefford dazzlingly plays as a ferocious, cold-hearted matron eager for her son's martial glory. Kent's production, however, still manages to convey the play's excitements, its battle of wills and wiles between crude democracy and Coriolanus's hubristic authoritarianism. There's no precise political slanting or points of comparison with any modern regime, despite the black-hued costumes that have vague 20th century associations about them.
It's Paul Brown's scene-setting that gives the evening its initial impetus. The stage, with a frosted glass floor at the centre, is even barer and bleaker than it was for Richard II. The great fissure running all down the dilapidated back wall, with its windowless cavities, now suggests a precarious Roman world rent by internal argument. When the Romans and the Volscians resort to warfare, the wall drips blood and the glass floor gleams red. Coriolanus slips through a horizontally sliding barrier that slams down with all the force of great city gates closing.
So vast is the playing area, so numerous its platforms, doors, stairs and watching-posts that a 20-strong company easily manages to convey an idea of Coriolanus everywhere beset by angry citizenry. But the standard of speaking is often so ragged it's hard to follow the argument of revolting citizens and tribunes, not to mention the nasal, diplomatic inveiglings of Oliver Ford Davies's Menenius Agrippa and David Burke's bellowing general.
It is, however, Coriolanus's psychological battles that matter most in Kent's production. Fiennes's warrior-politician, very much born with a silver spoon in his mouth and eager to keep his nose in the air, wears a constant scowl. He looks interesting - like some furtive Dickensian character whose haughtiness masks a nasty inner life. But as warrior and sneering despiser of citizens, he's disconcertingly undangerous. There's too little macho or intemperate about him. He's certainly full of oratorical sound and fury, but his powers are as nothing compared with the likes of Michael Heseltine or Tony Benn. And Linus Roache's devious Tullus Aufidius bristles and seethes with far more convincing aggression. But both men underplay the mutual homoerotic attraction that proves Coriolanus's undoing.
As Volumnia the septuagenarian Barbara Jefford is an emotional knock-out and the production's sole, first-rate Shakespeare speaker. Bristling and bustling in a long grey dress, she commands the stage with energy, imperious scorn and demanding mother love. And Fiennes is at last inspired to tremendous, truthful acting when he suitably collapses broken and tearful at Miss Jefford's feet.
Now Playing The Almeida at Gainsborough Studios Jun 1-3, 5-10, 12-13, 15-17, 19-20, 23, 28-30, Jul 5-7, 12-14, 19-21, 26-28, Aug 2-4, 7.30pm, Jun 3, 10, 17, 24, Jul 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, Aug 5, 1.30pm, Jun 14, 6.30pm £3.50-£30, concs available
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From Electronic Telegraph, 06/16/00
Lightning,
but too few sparks
Almeida Shakespeare in Shoreditch Society
Charles Spencer reviews Almeida's Coriolanus at the Gainsborough Studios in
Shoreditch
A FAINT feeling of anticlimax attended the opening of Richard II, the first play in the Almeida's ambitious Shakespeare in Shoreditch season starring Ralph Fiennes. Yes, the long-abandoned Gainsborough Studios, where Hitchcock shot his early films, made for a splendidly dialapidated and atmospheric new venue; and yes, the design, with a vast stage turfed with real grass and a huge, lightning-flash-like fissure hewn out of the auditorium's brick back wall, was spectacular.
Jonathan Kent's production seemed untypically old-fashioned and pedestrian, however and, though it was intelligent and intermittently touching, Fiennes's Richard never quite rose to greatness. The Gainsborough Studios may once have been used as a power station, but the event lacked that electric charge for which the Almeida is famous.
My hunch was that Fiennes was likely to prove more happily cast as the arrogantly macho Coriolanus than as the arrogantly wimpish Richard II. Yet, although there are undoubtedly some good things both in the production and Fiennes's central performance, once again the dramatic sparks fly only intermittently.
Part of the problem is the Gainsborough Studios themselves. The space is so vast and cavernous that it often overwhelms the events on stage.What's more, in this most public and political of plays, it doesn't help that Kent has only a handful of actors to impersonate the rabble who play such a vital part in the action. The massive stage, now stripped of its turf, often seems absurdly underpopulated. The director has simply given up when it comes to staging the battle scenes, keeping them off-stage and relying instead on smoke and flashy sound and lightning effects.
Though the costumes are a mixture of modern chic with trappings of ancient Rome, there is once again something old-fashioned about the production. There is little feeling here of Shakespeare being our contemporary, or of the director drawing parallels with the current political scene. The play seems to be taking place in a vacuum.
Fiennes is first rate when it comes to drawling sneers, and he displays his aquiline profile to splendid effect. He also memorably suggests the undeveloped heart of the eternal public-school hero, in total thrall to the battleaxe of a mother who has so warped his personality.
Barbara Jefford is magnificent in this role, delivering Volumnia's lines with clarity and bite, while chillingly capturing a matriarchal monster who gets a hideous kick out of both her son's injuries and his psychopathic tendencies. It is when she is on stage that the play truly grips; the great scene at the end, when she finally reduces her son to the flood of tears he has dammed for so long, provides this otherwise frigid production with a deeply affecting emotional heart.
Elsewhere, Fiennes's performance seems surprisingly limited. He may effortlessly capture the character's contempt for common humanity, but there is little sense of the reckless danger, or the sexual magnetism, that Toby Stephens brought to the role for the RSC a few years ago.
Worse still, when he's in sarky mode, Fiennes often bears a startling physical and vocal resemblance to Leonard Rossiter in Rising Damp. Once you've made this deeply distracting comparison with the immortal Mr Rigsby, it becomes hard to take Fiennes quite as seriously as he evidently does himself. At any moment you expect him to start making advances on Valeria and calling her "Miss Jones".
There's strong support, especially from Oliver Ford Davies, whose wily politician, Menenius, isn't nearly as affable as he seems, and from a dark, brooding Linus Roache as Coriolanus's great enemy, Tullus Aufidius. Nevertheless, by the Almeida's high-flying standards, the Shakespeare in Shoreditch season has proved surprisingly pedestrian.
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From The Times- 06/15/00
First Night Review
- Benedict Nightingale
Fiennes fights hard to play man of war 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.