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As Mr. Kent sat down, Mr. Fiennes, his expression suddenly lightened, worried out loud about his self-professed lack of cogency, prompting an instant reply: 'If you can be articulate about it, what's the point of acting?' Mr. Kent said.
In fact, the struggle for Ralph Fiennes (pronounce rafe fines) had been a game one and successful: he was quite clear, in the end, in his analysis of the Danish prince. The conflict in Hamlet, he said, 'is between what's expected of him as a prince, a man of action, a leader who should take good, pure, strong action for the good of the state, and the most simple human confusions, pieties, frustrations and angers, which are rooted in the child in him, as a son.'
Dressed in khakis and layered drab-colored T-shirts, his hair lank and a few days' growth of beard on his face, Mr. Fiennes looked the part -- an intense actor both consumed and tired. No one in the business-like lunch crowd at Capsouto Freres, a restaurant in TriBeCa near the loft he has rented for the play's 14-week run, appeared to recognize him. He spoke softly (he is trying to conserve his voice, he said) and haltingly.
Staring off, his pale green eyes engaging only now and then across the table, he occasionally sliced the air with a flat hand or clenched his brow. If Hamlet feels spun about and profoundly vexed by his fratricidal uncle, Claudius; his lustful mother Gertrude, and the unrequited Ophelia, it would appear that Mr. Fiennes is sufferening sympathetically.
'It's hard for me to articulate these things,' he said, appearing frustrated to the point of near bitterness. 'They only exist for me in the moment of playing them.'
The anger directed at himself was relevant to what he said about the character he has been living with since preparations for the play began in earnest last October in east london, where the Almeida Theatre Company production first opened.
'I've always been drawn to the distress of Hamlet,' Mr. Fiennes said. 'I'm much clearer now about the struggle he has with himself about not being able to kill Claudius. I'm much clearer about his rage, his frustration with himself.'
Indeed, Mr. Fiennes's Hamlet is no melancholy Dane. He is antice in his mockery of the King (played by James Laurenson) and his court; acid in his witty rants at Polonius (Peter Eyre); harshly, even obscenely aggressive in his tormenting of Ophelia (Tara Fitzgerald); brutal and seductive with Gertrude (Francesca Annis) in the closet scene. Most pertinently, in the soliloquies, his self-loathing is palpable.
'High Voltage Hamlet' crowed a headline over Nicholas de Jongh's review in The London Evening Standard. John Peter wrote in The Sunday Times: 'This is certainly not a sweet prince. This is a harsh, unlyrical reading, savage and ruthless, giving no hostages to affection or romantic admiration.'
What he hadn't been aware of when he started working on the play, Mr. Fiennes said, was how Hamlet's rage motivates him. 'People say, my God, here's a man for three hours deciding what to do, and the play doesn't move. But I think it curiously does move. Every time he has a moment of frustration or hestitation there is also a forward momentum.
'There's a book by Ted Hughes about Shakespeare where he says Hamlet is driving a truck toward the edge of a cliff with all the characters in the play aboard. He has his foot on the brake, but he has his foot on the gas equally.'
English critics noted the speed with which Mr. Fiennes delivered the 'to be or not to be' soliloquy, and many of the longer speeches are made almost conversational by a kind of antideclamatory style. There are none of the heaving, Shakespearean breaths that actors often use to fortify themselves.
Mr. Kent said Mr. Fiennes has 'astonishing breath control.' Mr. Fiennes himself added modestly: "If you've sorted out your thoughts and where they come from in the first place, and they're tied in to your emotion, your breath is there.'
In a production that is starkly designed and lighted, like Mr. Kent's 'Medea' of last season starring Diana Rigg, with every scene addressed as a heightened drama in and of itself, Mr. Fiennes's reading has been clearly conceived in kind. The attempt is to have the elements combine, as they did in 'Medea,' to give the play an urgent modern sensibility.
'The terrible thing about soliloquies,' said Mr. Kent, 'is that everybody sits back and Hamlet comes forward and does a, you know, "a famous speech," inverted commas. What we aspired to is not to ever put the play in inverted commas. The great thing about Ralph is that he's got phenomenal classical technique. He can speak in heightened verse as if that were they only way he could express himself.'
About his own work, he said, laughing: 'I only direct contemporary plays. They happen to have been written 400 years ago or 2,000 years ago.'
It makes contemporary Broadway sense as well as traditional theater sense, of course, that Ralph Fiennes has brought 'Hamlet' to New York, a glamorous actor in a glamorous role in America's most glamorous theatrical venue. The production of perhaps the most famous of Shakespeare's plays was two and a half years in the making, and though it ran in London to general if not overwhelming acclaim, the primary reason it has crossed the Atlantic is the man playing the title part.
In the wake of two highly visible film roles -- the brutal Nazi Amon Goeth in Steven Spielberg's 'Schindler's List' and the fallen pop icon Charles Van Doren in Robert Redford's 'Quiz Show' -- Mr. Fiennes, 32, is suddenly a movie star. And, with his handsome, brooding visage, he is in the natural line of British descent that includes Olivier and Gielgud and Burton and, more recently, Jonathan Pryce, Kenneth Branagh and Daniel Day-Lewis, those leading men who have measured themselves against the Danish prince.
'He is exciting, he is powerful, he has great vitality,' said Bonnie Timmerman, the casting director of 'Quiz Show,' about Mr. Fiennes. 'I think both men and women love him. He can do Cary Grant roles, yet he can do villains. And he's just beginning.'
Mr. Fiennes would rather dismiss the notion of lineage. The idea was to clear away the mythology and the baggage that the play carries, 'and to do it as if it were a new play and had never been performed before,' he said.
Asked if so many charismatic actors were attracted to the role because Hamlet himself is charismatic, he dismissed that notion too. 'Hamlet doesn't think he's a star,' he said. 'Hamlet is who he is, and he is whoever the actor is who is playing him. The extraordinary genius of the role is that it can mutate in so many different directions. I've seen Daniel Day-Lewis, who was very charismatic and striking looking, and I've seen Alan Cumming, an English actor who's Hamlet was awkward and adolescent and quite funny. And I think the Hamlets I've liked have been actors who are true to themselves.'
Mr. Fiennes has never palyed the role before, thought he auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art with the 'O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!' soliloquy and was around a number of princely Danes during his time at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where, between 1988 and 1990, he appeared in title roles in 'Henry IV' and 'Troilus and Cressida,' as Edmund in 'King Lear' and Berowne in 'Love's Labour's Lost.' But if Mr. Fiennes's own nature informs his Hamlet, it began doing so long before that.
Born in Sussex, north of London, he was the eldest of six children in an artistic, somewhat bohemian family that moved about frequently in England and Ireland. His father, Mark, was a photographer-turned-home-restorer. His mother, Jini, whom he revered, was a novelist. It was she who introduced him to Hamlet by telling him the story before he was 10.
'I remember being very fascinated by it, my mind even then trying to embrace the idea of parental betrayal,' he said. 'As in any story you're told, there's a point at which you identify with one of the protagonists. One tries to imagine: What would it be like if I were that person? I think that's the basis for most acting anyway.'
The first thing he and Mr. Kent agreed on, Mr. Fiennes said, was Hamlet's sense of spirituality. 'We wanted to give weight to the sense of there being a heaven and a hell,' he said. 'Heaven, hell, these are not just explanantions. These are definitive places, spiritual places.'
Mr. Fiennes himself is familiar with those places, again, apparently, through his mother. 'She wrote an unpublished children's story, which I remember she read to us in sequels as she was writing it,' he said. 'I hate reducing the story to one sentence, but it's about a group of young children who witness a force or a light, called 'Silencia,' which expresses itself in an intense kind of blue and is a force of tranquillity, of good, really. And it is set against a force of cacaphony, a yellow light, which brings with it environmental destruction and greed and ambition.'
Jini Fiennes died of cancer 17 months ago. She lived long enough to see her oldest son't marriage to Alex Kingston, an actress, but not long enough to see him play Hamlet, though she knew the project had begun with a phone call from Mr. Fiennes's agent, before 'Quiz Show' and 'Schindler's List,' to a man Mr. Fiennes had never met, Jonathan Kent.
'I think Ralph took it on for personal reasons,' Mr. Kent said, after Mr. Fiennes had left for a nap before the evening performance. 'He told me the story of his mother telling him 'Hamlet' when he was 8 or something, and I think it became encoded in their relationship. I'm diffident about talking about this -- it's his territory to talk about -- but I think that's what informs his performance. I think he is doing it for her.'
As Hamlet finds it in him to act decisively in the end, so Mr. Fiennes, before making his restaurant exit, found his cogency over dessert. Hamlet's path to action, he said, begins to take shape when the traveling players arrive at Elsinore: 'The players come on, he listens to them, then addresses the audience, quite clearly says how he's been unable to take action. But he takes a step forward; he will use the players; they become, in effect, a foothold for him in trying to clarify his situation.'
Throughout the play, Mr. Fiennes said, he found similar clues propelling Hamlet incrementally to action. Yet, he acknowledged, 'the area that is still difficult to negotiate is that once he's killed Polonius and spoken to his mother, he doesn't pick up a sword and go and kill Claudius. He allows himself to be taken off to England. That's what Shakespeare has written, bit it's something I'm not quite sure of because it's the moment of most release for him. He doesn't restrain his tongue at all from humiliating and jibing at Claudius.'
Mr. Fiennes said his own explanation for the character's immobility at that juncture is that Claudius is surrounded by guards and that Hamlet himself is almost a prisoner. It takes his encounter with Fortinbras, the cold-blooded young prince of Norway, to finally move him.
Fortinbras offers Hamlet and example of a man of action of his own age and station, Mr. Fiennes said. And even though Hamlet still questions the notion of a just murder, he is fortified to set up the killing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and, finally, to dispatch Claudius.
'When Hamlet dies, he's at peace,' Mr. Fiennes said. 'He embraces death, actually, so he goes on this great parabola. When you come offstage, you've gone through something and you've sealed it off. And that's a great feeling.'
As if on cue, that's when Mr. Kent came in.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on September 13, 1998
EL STEPHO