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BRUSH UP ON YOUR SHAKESPEARE. It's been five years and a turn of the century since the magic words, "Ralph Fiennes," "stage," and "Shakespeare" could be uttered in the same sentence. But this month, when London's Almeida Theatre Company's RICHARD II and CORIOLANUS hit the Brooklyn Academy of Music, they will once again be on everyone's lips. "I missed the immediacy of playing to an audience," says Fiennes, a Royal Shakespeare Company veteran. The result is a double-bill of extraordinary theatre that sees the actor almost single-handedly sweep the audience into the turmoil of two of the Bard's political tragedies.
Like Fiennes 1995 award-winning HAMLET, another Almeida production direcetd by the group's artistic chieftan, Jonathan Kent, RICHARD and CORIOLANUS highlight the star's otherworldly ability to make the playwright's arcane language ring with contemporary relevance. RICHARD is the story of a king so blinded by narcissism he's doomed to lose his throne; CORIOLANUS is an epic about the single-minded pursuit of power. In Fiennes's hands, they both have a startling and timely resonance.
"I've always felt CORIOLANUS was a particularly modern play,"
says Fiennes from London, where the shows were standing room only. "There's
a subversive and aggressive message at its heart about politics and the
fickleness if the mob -- an electorate that changes its mind all the time."
Likewise, Richard, a king who smugly defends his throne until it is wrested
from him, epitomizes "many people today, whether politicians or businessmen
who can't achieve real insight into humanity until their power is taken
away." This election year, be prepared for it to sound all too eerily
familiar.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on August 24, 2000
EL STEPHO