All Things Ralph
Acting Shakespeare By Ralph Fiennes
Acting Shakespeare By Ralph Fiennes
Arete Magazine (UK) Article, September 2000 (Vol. 3)
I don't know how the words will be, how they will sound when I start to speak.
I try to hear how the sense is working, test particular ways of phrasing. I'm looking for a way in - into the characters, into their way of thinking through the words they speak. I start off being cautious, speaking everything too carefully, like circling a target before committing to striking it.
With repetition a pattern begins.
There's usually a day when something gives and all the words and thoughts behind the words come together in my head. As if I possess them, they become immediate to me and I feel free to chuck them about and kick them around. Something is released. I stop thinking of a particular passage as "that speech" - and it become thoughts the character has to express.
I think there are two states of mind in rehearsals - two ways of relating to the play. The first is a discussion phase. The shape of the play and its characters are talked about. Tricky speeches and scenes are analysed and the various ways of playing them debated. Many interesting ideas, and quite a few uninteresting ones, come up. It's as if the play is something "over there," we're not inside it or in command of it. It's raw material waiting to be grappled with.
The second state of mind comes almost immediately you put the play on its feet. The moment an actor stands up to speak or to reply to another actor - then they are struggling to mould the play into something they can inhabit. Rehearsals are often polarised between moments of analysis and moments of free-fall experiment. "I'm trying something," I'll say. I'll just let the speech happen, free it from the way I thought it should be done.
You have to get your hands dirty. Yes - risk being bad, not just to free yourself, but as a way of hearing the human truth of a moment and the flesh and blood intention behind it. The intention behind a speech may not be simple - but I think only by allowing the moment to take me will I get to the centre of Richard II, or Coriolanus. The process doesn't stop when rehearsals are over. It continues all the way through the playing of the part.
It's possible to "hear" a part differently many times. I talk about "hearing" a part rather than speaking it only because my internal ear hears the way the text is unfolding a split second before I speak it. This listening is anchored in what is being said to me. The springboard for any moment of speech is the moment of reaction to what has just been said. Then allowing that moment to surprise you. Which is a risk. Sometimes when you think "let me be surprised by this moment," you are actually not in the moment. The energy of a play is a like a current in a river. The play is the river. You have to let the current take you. Allow your feet to come off the river bed.
You could say rehearsals are the process of becoming familiar with the river: where there are rocks, where it bends smoothly, where it opens in a still lake. Then there are rapids - relentless iambics churning out brilliant, speedy ideas. This might be Richard II in Act II scene 2. Returning from Ireland he finds his soldiers have deserted him. He copes with the escalating bad news by continually improvising ideas. Ideas about kingship, betrayal, mortality, grief - as if to stave off reality. The strict, insistent regularity of the metre, the compacted ideas suggest to me a relentlessness, a panic disguised by highly charged images. When Coriolanus confronts the tribunes - and insists aggressively, but with great clarity, on disputing their right to represent the people - he is carried forward by a similar momentum, but completely different intention. Unlike Richard, he is not escaping into the proliferation of ideas. He produces ruthless, fixed, rigid philosophy.
At some point in rehearsing his part, an actor makes an essential choice and I believe the audience should receive that "choice" clearly. Emotionally it has to be clear. Of course there must be clarity of speech and thought, but the emotion that underpins what the character thinks or utters has to be discovered and then committed to.
I find this commitment difficult.
I want to keep my options open as long as possible. Sometimes I think "well, Richard could feel this at this moment - or he could feel that - in fact, I don't want to decide what he's feeling. I'll just see how it comes out." So, in rehearsals and in performance, I suppose there's a vacillation between what I consciously decide to make happen and what I think I'm allowing to happen. But this is a peculiar, subjective thing. I think that most actors agree that spontaneity, freshness, the illusion that everything is being said and done for the first time keeps a performance alive. This can only happen if there's a strong alertness that, at any moment, the performance could change - something could be radically different. It doesn't mean it will be radically different. But if I allow myself to listen, let myself (not make myself) listen, if I am alert to what is being said, how the current, the energy of a scene is going in that moment - then there will be changes of pace, inflection, vocal colour. The direction of a speech, or its quality, may alter considerably on a particular night just because a singularly acute state of awareness has allowed the speech to be discovered and spoken as if for the first time.
Plays grow in performance. Performances grow in front of an audience. A first night cannot be the definitive performance. It seems odd to judge a production of a play on one night. The way a play is inhabited and kept alive over a period of time is what the production is. It moves and mutates. Some nights it's flat, uninspired; the next night too energised, too relentless, other nights everything is in harmony. And this is all highly subjective. What has felt flat, not discovered, but emptily repeated can often be received by the audience as immediate and charged. Though of course the reverse can be true and the spontaneous received as jaded and mechanical.
An actor's neurosis, anxiety and fear can play tricks with his perception of what he's doing. It's ironic that actors, whose experience in front of an audience defines them, should so often be fearful of it. But in a funny way that fear is their motor. The moment of stepping onto the stage causes that fear to convert into something else. Blind terror doesn't convert. But adrenaline, a nervous anticipation, is the raw fuel needed.
This anticipation makes you intensely alert. I'm aware of so many things on stage. The surface of the stage - its bumps and cracks. My own spittle. The man in the front row reading his programme, another actor's hair gone slightly awry, a scratch on my hand, the hem of my cloak caught on a piece of metal, my sword scabbard banging into my shin, a frog in my throat. Often these things seem more present and concrete than the words being spoken. Sometimes I think these little physical realities help to earth the performance. When something goes clearly wrong - somebody's cloak tears or a door fails to open or there's a botched music cue - then it can be a bonding agent. The audience notices it and actors have to work around it. The audience is immediately party to the problem - it has to be negotiated and even exploited. I cut my hand quite badly whilst being murdered as Richard II. I remember thinking, "Oh, that doesn't look too good - what's the line? No that's not it - have I cut an artery - no I don't think so - I might as well show the blood - it's real enough. That's it, let them see it. Look look - real blood. Fuck, it hurts."
The beauty of the language spoken by Richard II is the part's biggest trap. Jonathan Kent directing me in the part urged me to find the high-tension, febrile state of mind that gives birth to Richard's words. I felt this was a man born into a role. Like an actor condemned at the age of ten to play only one part. That part - being king - is him. In this role Richard continually seeks to confirm himself. Kingship gives him power and he uses that power - less for even-handed judgement, more to crystallise his sense of himself to himself. This is a kind of madness. Bolingbroke is a threat, and possibly should be banished. But to usurp his inheritance after Gaunt's death is (I believe) an unthought emotional act (much like a child) arising out of fear - fear that his role as king is compromised or challenged. Richard is king. In his mind he is divinely appointed. He can do anything. Anything he does makes him king. When his kingship is threatened and the threat of Bolingbroke is real, Richard's only power resides in language - language used to reflect himself, but also to explore his predicament. Other people are witnesses. The speeches in Act III (hollow crown, Flint castle etc.) are not entirely for himself. Like the literal mirror he requests in the deposition scene, many of Richard's words reflect himself, but he needs an audience. He needs people to listen. As they listen, as he absorbs and tries to make sense of his loss of power and kingship, he becomes in fact less self-dramatising - more direct, more honest about himself - more truly vulnerable.
From Richard's return from Ireland - when he conjures the spiders, toads and adders of England to halt Bolingbroke and then proceeds forcefully to reiterate the idea of himself as the sun-god dispensing justice - right the way through to the end of his farewell to the Queen, Richard's language gets simpler, until finally he suggests that the very state of sorrow should speak for itself.
We make woe wanton with this fond delay.
Once more adieu. The rest let sorrow say.
Four scenes later, Shakespeare allows him his first and only soliloquy. Here he speaks with the greatest insight and there are no witnesses on stage. What is truly brilliant and utterly human about this final speech is that, while Richard does indeed perceive that ultimate peace of mind is only possible in death - in being "nothing--" the wisdom of this doesn't allay his residing grief. He has reached greater wisdom, but his pain is still present. Bolingbroke riding on Barbary distresses him. The very idea of marking time with his thoughts threatens madness. There is no sense of the martyr, only of a man repeating, playing out parts in his head and realising that the role that will give most "ease" is the one of being "nothing."
I've known this final soliloquy by heart for a long time but this has not made it easier to play. If anything, over-familiarity initially made it harder to take the audience through the complex ideas in the speech. It still is hard. I feel that one cough, one scrunching plastic cup cuts right across the delicate strands of thought I'm trying to make clear. Or that one hurried phrase, or even an overly ponderous delivery, will lose the audience. There's a simplicity in the speech, but it's elusive and I have no way of knowing, performance to performance, how to find it.
The thought-to-thought journey of a speech, particularly famous speeches of lyrical power, needs to be continually discovered. It's easy to be lulled by the cadences and rhythms of some of Richard's speeches but harder to keep making them active - or in a state of transition - and stop them becoming musical epigrams. Testing how far I could be anti-lyrical, I sometimes found I was denying something that was intrinsic to the part. Playing Richard repeatedly, I felt there were moments when Richard (or the text that is Richard) is deliberately musical and rhetorical, but this is not an affected thing. It is what Richard does instinctively and especially when threatened, his language is the active expression of his fading kingship.
Unlike Coriolanus, there is a symmetry to the structure of Richard II. The opening scene and the third "list" scene almost demand a staging of this pattern of opposites. Doing both plays together, I've grown more and more aware of the huge difference in the way Shakespeare unfolds both plays. I feel very clearly the precision of structure in Richard and the way scenes arc the way they do, from opening to finish. As with the language itself, I suppose it's easy for actors to feel to comfortable, and lose the sense of anticipation. In fact, I don't think Richard II as a play offers any sense of an abyss. It's a delicate balancing act: Richard and Bolingbroke are like scales, one side rising as the other slowly falls. The audience watch this reversal of power like a perfect circle being drawn slowly.
When we had finally installed both productions at the Gainsborough Studios, Jonathan Kent said how clearly benign Richard II seemed as a play alongside the harsher, more corrosive Coriolanus.
I find Coriolanus an addictive part and a terrifying, unknowable play. The "current" in this play takes no prisoners. It's aggressively public. There's some crazed loneliness in Coriolanus that finds companionship only in combat and death. He's the state's warrior but also the enemy of the state. Playing the battle scenes in the first Act always gives me a huge rush of adrenaline. The fight between Coriolanus and Tullus Aufidius is a frenzied celebration of combat and physical intimacy. Technically it's extremely demanding to vocally negotiate these battle scenes and the fight. I feel my lungs and larynx being tested, as I try to find variations and clarity of intention when I feel the river of the play is relentless and unforgiving. Also, Coriolanus' certainty is more exhausting to play than Richard's vacillations. There's more tension - more confirmed confrontation - which is not released until the final scene with his mother, Volumnia. I want to spit out the words of Coriolanus like harsh pieces of metal. The spleen, the choler of Coriolanus defines him. He is creative in his anger. He is, in the end, unacceptable because what he creates is death.
Death, that dark spirit, in's nervy arm doth lie
Which, being advanced, declines, and then men die.
Dying is not a problem for Coriolanus - so political compromise is something easily rejected by him. We can admire his integrity, his honour, but not what he is being honorable about. We can only try to understand him through his connection with his mother. Of course it's umbilical. He is chained to her by birth and by conditioning. He is trapped, as all are, in one degree or another, by this relationship or the lack of it. Momentarily, he believes he is released from her and bearing arms with (and yes, in the arms of) Tullus he is free. But it is a freedom built on spite and on that childish emotion of "I'll show you." He is at heart still a boy. A lost boy, in a terrible tunnel of childish ignorance - though to himself he is aspiring to be God-like, pure and untouchable. If we understand this emotional entrapment then he is tragic. For all its battles and scenes of public confrontation, Coriolanus refines itself into a domestic drama. The mother-son axis is the kernel of this play. Akin to this is the love-hate bond with Tullus: male affection and rivalry twisting around each other.
Like Richard, I believe Coriolanus embraces death as the only option - the only peace. But unlike Richard, Death has always been his companion. When I had finished the first few performances of Coriolanus I used to open a bottle of champagne. I couldn't believe I had completed the play.
I think I was quite surprised to find the play had ended and I was allowed to go home.
After two performances my voice would be tired and I would think (and probably will still think) "am I pushing? Am I shouting?" Yet whenever I eased off in performance, the high stakes - the unbendingness - would feel diluted. I think that to find the vocal control that carries Coriolanus' rage and insistence - without literally shouting or ranting - is the technical test of Coriolanus. To back-foot the part would be a bit like never driving a Ferrari or a Harley-Davidson over 70 mph. There's a thrill in risking a crash.
After playing Coriolanus, Richard is gentler countryside, but I think the high tensile energy of Coriolanus can usefully feed into the curves and arcs of Richard, while the modulations and speedy changes of thought in Richard II can help vary the relentlessness of the Roman play.
There's no obvious reason why these plays should be performed together, but they seem to complement each other in many ways. Jonathan's productions seem to strip the plays naked - that is how it feels. The high scraped walls of the Gainsborough Studios expose the plays. The very fact that the Gainsborough is not a theatre seems to throw the plays into relief: there have been days when I've sensed a great immediacy of contact between audience and actors. I've thought that perhaps the environment or space that contains a Shakespeare, or any text, is key to the way an audience receives the play. Conventional theatres, often beautiful and acoustically good, re-iterate the habit of playgoing, so that the play has to work harder to have its effect on us: players and audience. The force of Shakespeare, his power, dramatic and linguistic, needs to be continually shaken-up. Audiences have to have their preconceptions disturbed. In a way the best audience for any classical text are people who don't know them, haven't studied them and can experience them as a new play.
The most rewarding comment I heard was from a man who said he didn't go the theatre ever, didn't know and hadn't seen any Shakespeare before and had been completely held by watching Richard II at the Gainsborough Studios. I've also met people who clearly hadn't enjoyed it, who could only comment on how uncomfortable the seats were. The seats were uncomfortable but their occupants had not been transported. Well, what then? I don't think you can write a play, be in a play, direct a play without being some kind of idealist, or at least someone who wants to provoke a response. The ideal might be to provoke - pity, terror, laughter, anger, even ridicule. Provoking boredom, too, is always a risk. In the end it's a gamble.
However practised the part, one never knows as the first breath is taken to speak the first word, how it will come out or what the response will be.
Arete Magazine (UK) Article, September 2000 (Vol. 3)
I don't know how the words will be, how they will sound when I start to speak.
I try to hear how the sense is working, test particular ways of phrasing. I'm looking for a way in - into the characters, into their way of thinking through the words they speak. I start off being cautious, speaking everything too carefully, like circling a target before committing to striking it.
With repetition a pattern begins.
There's usually a day when something gives and all the words and thoughts behind the words come together in my head. As if I possess them, they become immediate to me and I feel free to chuck them about and kick them around. Something is released. I stop thinking of a particular passage as "that speech" - and it become thoughts the character has to express.
I think there are two states of mind in rehearsals - two ways of relating to the play. The first is a discussion phase. The shape of the play and its characters are talked about. Tricky speeches and scenes are analysed and the various ways of playing them debated. Many interesting ideas, and quite a few uninteresting ones, come up. It's as if the play is something "over there," we're not inside it or in command of it. It's raw material waiting to be grappled with.
The second state of mind comes almost immediately you put the play on its feet. The moment an actor stands up to speak or to reply to another actor - then they are struggling to mould the play into something they can inhabit. Rehearsals are often polarised between moments of analysis and moments of free-fall experiment. "I'm trying something," I'll say. I'll just let the speech happen, free it from the way I thought it should be done.
You have to get your hands dirty. Yes - risk being bad, not just to free yourself, but as a way of hearing the human truth of a moment and the flesh and blood intention behind it. The intention behind a speech may not be simple - but I think only by allowing the moment to take me will I get to the centre of Richard II, or Coriolanus. The process doesn't stop when rehearsals are over. It continues all the way through the playing of the part.
It's possible to "hear" a part differently many times. I talk about "hearing" a part rather than speaking it only because my internal ear hears the way the text is unfolding a split second before I speak it. This listening is anchored in what is being said to me. The springboard for any moment of speech is the moment of reaction to what has just been said. Then allowing that moment to surprise you. Which is a risk. Sometimes when you think "let me be surprised by this moment," you are actually not in the moment. The energy of a play is a like a current in a river. The play is the river. You have to let the current take you. Allow your feet to come off the river bed.
You could say rehearsals are the process of becoming familiar with the river: where there are rocks, where it bends smoothly, where it opens in a still lake. Then there are rapids - relentless iambics churning out brilliant, speedy ideas. This might be Richard II in Act II scene 2. Returning from Ireland he finds his soldiers have deserted him. He copes with the escalating bad news by continually improvising ideas. Ideas about kingship, betrayal, mortality, grief - as if to stave off reality. The strict, insistent regularity of the metre, the compacted ideas suggest to me a relentlessness, a panic disguised by highly charged images. When Coriolanus confronts the tribunes - and insists aggressively, but with great clarity, on disputing their right to represent the people - he is carried forward by a similar momentum, but completely different intention. Unlike Richard, he is not escaping into the proliferation of ideas. He produces ruthless, fixed, rigid philosophy.
At some point in rehearsing his part, an actor makes an essential choice and I believe the audience should receive that "choice" clearly. Emotionally it has to be clear. Of course there must be clarity of speech and thought, but the emotion that underpins what the character thinks or utters has to be discovered and then committed to.
I find this commitment difficult.
I want to keep my options open as long as possible. Sometimes I think "well, Richard could feel this at this moment - or he could feel that - in fact, I don't want to decide what he's feeling. I'll just see how it comes out." So, in rehearsals and in performance, I suppose there's a vacillation between what I consciously decide to make happen and what I think I'm allowing to happen. But this is a peculiar, subjective thing. I think that most actors agree that spontaneity, freshness, the illusion that everything is being said and done for the first time keeps a performance alive. This can only happen if there's a strong alertness that, at any moment, the performance could change - something could be radically different. It doesn't mean it will be radically different. But if I allow myself to listen, let myself (not make myself) listen, if I am alert to what is being said, how the current, the energy of a scene is going in that moment - then there will be changes of pace, inflection, vocal colour. The direction of a speech, or its quality, may alter considerably on a particular night just because a singularly acute state of awareness has allowed the speech to be discovered and spoken as if for the first time.
Plays grow in performance. Performances grow in front of an audience. A first night cannot be the definitive performance. It seems odd to judge a production of a play on one night. The way a play is inhabited and kept alive over a period of time is what the production is. It moves and mutates. Some nights it's flat, uninspired; the next night too energised, too relentless, other nights everything is in harmony. And this is all highly subjective. What has felt flat, not discovered, but emptily repeated can often be received by the audience as immediate and charged. Though of course the reverse can be true and the spontaneous received as jaded and mechanical.
An actor's neurosis, anxiety and fear can play tricks with his perception of what he's doing. It's ironic that actors, whose experience in front of an audience defines them, should so often be fearful of it. But in a funny way that fear is their motor. The moment of stepping onto the stage causes that fear to convert into something else. Blind terror doesn't convert. But adrenaline, a nervous anticipation, is the raw fuel needed.
This anticipation makes you intensely alert. I'm aware of so many things on stage. The surface of the stage - its bumps and cracks. My own spittle. The man in the front row reading his programme, another actor's hair gone slightly awry, a scratch on my hand, the hem of my cloak caught on a piece of metal, my sword scabbard banging into my shin, a frog in my throat. Often these things seem more present and concrete than the words being spoken. Sometimes I think these little physical realities help to earth the performance. When something goes clearly wrong - somebody's cloak tears or a door fails to open or there's a botched music cue - then it can be a bonding agent. The audience notices it and actors have to work around it. The audience is immediately party to the problem - it has to be negotiated and even exploited. I cut my hand quite badly whilst being murdered as Richard II. I remember thinking, "Oh, that doesn't look too good - what's the line? No that's not it - have I cut an artery - no I don't think so - I might as well show the blood - it's real enough. That's it, let them see it. Look look - real blood. Fuck, it hurts."
The beauty of the language spoken by Richard II is the part's biggest trap. Jonathan Kent directing me in the part urged me to find the high-tension, febrile state of mind that gives birth to Richard's words. I felt this was a man born into a role. Like an actor condemned at the age of ten to play only one part. That part - being king - is him. In this role Richard continually seeks to confirm himself. Kingship gives him power and he uses that power - less for even-handed judgement, more to crystallise his sense of himself to himself. This is a kind of madness. Bolingbroke is a threat, and possibly should be banished. But to usurp his inheritance after Gaunt's death is (I believe) an unthought emotional act (much like a child) arising out of fear - fear that his role as king is compromised or challenged. Richard is king. In his mind he is divinely appointed. He can do anything. Anything he does makes him king. When his kingship is threatened and the threat of Bolingbroke is real, Richard's only power resides in language - language used to reflect himself, but also to explore his predicament. Other people are witnesses. The speeches in Act III (hollow crown, Flint castle etc.) are not entirely for himself. Like the literal mirror he requests in the deposition scene, many of Richard's words reflect himself, but he needs an audience. He needs people to listen. As they listen, as he absorbs and tries to make sense of his loss of power and kingship, he becomes in fact less self-dramatising - more direct, more honest about himself - more truly vulnerable.
From Richard's return from Ireland - when he conjures the spiders, toads and adders of England to halt Bolingbroke and then proceeds forcefully to reiterate the idea of himself as the sun-god dispensing justice - right the way through to the end of his farewell to the Queen, Richard's language gets simpler, until finally he suggests that the very state of sorrow should speak for itself.
We make woe wanton with this fond delay.
Once more adieu. The rest let sorrow say.
Four scenes later, Shakespeare allows him his first and only soliloquy. Here he speaks with the greatest insight and there are no witnesses on stage. What is truly brilliant and utterly human about this final speech is that, while Richard does indeed perceive that ultimate peace of mind is only possible in death - in being "nothing--" the wisdom of this doesn't allay his residing grief. He has reached greater wisdom, but his pain is still present. Bolingbroke riding on Barbary distresses him. The very idea of marking time with his thoughts threatens madness. There is no sense of the martyr, only of a man repeating, playing out parts in his head and realising that the role that will give most "ease" is the one of being "nothing."
I've known this final soliloquy by heart for a long time but this has not made it easier to play. If anything, over-familiarity initially made it harder to take the audience through the complex ideas in the speech. It still is hard. I feel that one cough, one scrunching plastic cup cuts right across the delicate strands of thought I'm trying to make clear. Or that one hurried phrase, or even an overly ponderous delivery, will lose the audience. There's a simplicity in the speech, but it's elusive and I have no way of knowing, performance to performance, how to find it.
The thought-to-thought journey of a speech, particularly famous speeches of lyrical power, needs to be continually discovered. It's easy to be lulled by the cadences and rhythms of some of Richard's speeches but harder to keep making them active - or in a state of transition - and stop them becoming musical epigrams. Testing how far I could be anti-lyrical, I sometimes found I was denying something that was intrinsic to the part. Playing Richard repeatedly, I felt there were moments when Richard (or the text that is Richard) is deliberately musical and rhetorical, but this is not an affected thing. It is what Richard does instinctively and especially when threatened, his language is the active expression of his fading kingship.
Unlike Coriolanus, there is a symmetry to the structure of Richard II. The opening scene and the third "list" scene almost demand a staging of this pattern of opposites. Doing both plays together, I've grown more and more aware of the huge difference in the way Shakespeare unfolds both plays. I feel very clearly the precision of structure in Richard and the way scenes arc the way they do, from opening to finish. As with the language itself, I suppose it's easy for actors to feel to comfortable, and lose the sense of anticipation. In fact, I don't think Richard II as a play offers any sense of an abyss. It's a delicate balancing act: Richard and Bolingbroke are like scales, one side rising as the other slowly falls. The audience watch this reversal of power like a perfect circle being drawn slowly.
When we had finally installed both productions at the Gainsborough Studios, Jonathan Kent said how clearly benign Richard II seemed as a play alongside the harsher, more corrosive Coriolanus.
I find Coriolanus an addictive part and a terrifying, unknowable play. The "current" in this play takes no prisoners. It's aggressively public. There's some crazed loneliness in Coriolanus that finds companionship only in combat and death. He's the state's warrior but also the enemy of the state. Playing the battle scenes in the first Act always gives me a huge rush of adrenaline. The fight between Coriolanus and Tullus Aufidius is a frenzied celebration of combat and physical intimacy. Technically it's extremely demanding to vocally negotiate these battle scenes and the fight. I feel my lungs and larynx being tested, as I try to find variations and clarity of intention when I feel the river of the play is relentless and unforgiving. Also, Coriolanus' certainty is more exhausting to play than Richard's vacillations. There's more tension - more confirmed confrontation - which is not released until the final scene with his mother, Volumnia. I want to spit out the words of Coriolanus like harsh pieces of metal. The spleen, the choler of Coriolanus defines him. He is creative in his anger. He is, in the end, unacceptable because what he creates is death.
Death, that dark spirit, in's nervy arm doth lie
Which, being advanced, declines, and then men die.
Dying is not a problem for Coriolanus - so political compromise is something easily rejected by him. We can admire his integrity, his honour, but not what he is being honorable about. We can only try to understand him through his connection with his mother. Of course it's umbilical. He is chained to her by birth and by conditioning. He is trapped, as all are, in one degree or another, by this relationship or the lack of it. Momentarily, he believes he is released from her and bearing arms with (and yes, in the arms of) Tullus he is free. But it is a freedom built on spite and on that childish emotion of "I'll show you." He is at heart still a boy. A lost boy, in a terrible tunnel of childish ignorance - though to himself he is aspiring to be God-like, pure and untouchable. If we understand this emotional entrapment then he is tragic. For all its battles and scenes of public confrontation, Coriolanus refines itself into a domestic drama. The mother-son axis is the kernel of this play. Akin to this is the love-hate bond with Tullus: male affection and rivalry twisting around each other.
Like Richard, I believe Coriolanus embraces death as the only option - the only peace. But unlike Richard, Death has always been his companion. When I had finished the first few performances of Coriolanus I used to open a bottle of champagne. I couldn't believe I had completed the play.
I think I was quite surprised to find the play had ended and I was allowed to go home.
After two performances my voice would be tired and I would think (and probably will still think) "am I pushing? Am I shouting?" Yet whenever I eased off in performance, the high stakes - the unbendingness - would feel diluted. I think that to find the vocal control that carries Coriolanus' rage and insistence - without literally shouting or ranting - is the technical test of Coriolanus. To back-foot the part would be a bit like never driving a Ferrari or a Harley-Davidson over 70 mph. There's a thrill in risking a crash.
After playing Coriolanus, Richard is gentler countryside, but I think the high tensile energy of Coriolanus can usefully feed into the curves and arcs of Richard, while the modulations and speedy changes of thought in Richard II can help vary the relentlessness of the Roman play.
There's no obvious reason why these plays should be performed together, but they seem to complement each other in many ways. Jonathan's productions seem to strip the plays naked - that is how it feels. The high scraped walls of the Gainsborough Studios expose the plays. The very fact that the Gainsborough is not a theatre seems to throw the plays into relief: there have been days when I've sensed a great immediacy of contact between audience and actors. I've thought that perhaps the environment or space that contains a Shakespeare, or any text, is key to the way an audience receives the play. Conventional theatres, often beautiful and acoustically good, re-iterate the habit of playgoing, so that the play has to work harder to have its effect on us: players and audience. The force of Shakespeare, his power, dramatic and linguistic, needs to be continually shaken-up. Audiences have to have their preconceptions disturbed. In a way the best audience for any classical text are people who don't know them, haven't studied them and can experience them as a new play.
The most rewarding comment I heard was from a man who said he didn't go the theatre ever, didn't know and hadn't seen any Shakespeare before and had been completely held by watching Richard II at the Gainsborough Studios. I've also met people who clearly hadn't enjoyed it, who could only comment on how uncomfortable the seats were. The seats were uncomfortable but their occupants had not been transported. Well, what then? I don't think you can write a play, be in a play, direct a play without being some kind of idealist, or at least someone who wants to provoke a response. The ideal might be to provoke - pity, terror, laughter, anger, even ridicule. Provoking boredom, too, is always a risk. In the end it's a gamble.
However practised the part, one never knows as the first breath is taken to speak the first word, how it will come out or what the response will be.
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Permalink Reply by trugannini on -
Thank you Liza, fabulous article, just fabulous. :) The date says April this year....has this article been
here all the time and I have missed it. Grrrrrr if it has. Thank you Liza :)
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Permalink Reply by Liza on -
I don't know if there are anymore articles out there written by Mr. Fiennes, but if I find anything I'll be glad to post it.
Trug, I'm sorry you didn't see this sooner! I thought I said something to you about it.
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Permalink Reply by trugannini on
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Liza, I have no doubt in the world that you mentioned it to me. I am starting to show that there are thinning
spots in my brain. No sorries needed. :) Have a lovely gentle weekend :)
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Permalink Reply by Yellowdog on -
YOU KNOW THIS IS A WONDERFUL GENEROUS AMOUNT OF REAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROCESS HE GOES THROUGH. iT WAS SUCH A PLEASURE TO FIND IT HERE. aND OF COURSE MY GREEDY RESPONSE IS.... iS THERE
MORE?......AND OF COURSE i FIND YOU TWO LOVLEY BIRDS HERE...lIZA AND tRU.......GOTTA RUN
THERE IS WORK TO BE DONE...BUT THAT IS A GOOD THING.....
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Permalink Reply by Liza on
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Oh my dear friend, I fear I have a great many thinning areas in my brain. If only it were my waistline!!! LOL
You have a lovely weekend too!! : )
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Permalink Reply by Bernadette on -
Thank you so much,this was a great read!He's very articulate,he could be a writer like his Mother.He's very good with words!
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Permalink Reply by mesi on -
Shakespeare.
Is for me more than astonishingly that he himself writes texts and admits it either or arranges that these appear in his Network. If Fiennes had not held for silly how I would be able, knows him only from the roles. Unfortunately, something strange arises in the often translation word by word: English words are not just translated into German, can absolutely introduce to me that he has himself well-considered to write. The only tragic has written Shakespeare.? Goes for me by the head, while I read again what will act Fiennes on the stage and in films: be evil sadly. One loses the quite natural real actor, besides - in any case, I do it - out of sight. I read dark side inherited, so clearly it what his sisters said about him. . In "Broken dreams", all the same whose dreams I blow up, I describe, how I could not fancy him and again also, is thus my own variation to manage Fiennes statements that scenes just recur, made me already dismayed and sadly. There would be a lot to play if one did not love Shakespeare so as Fiennes must do it. If Fiennes cannot hand over simply the screenplay, it stands there at other place in the worldwide net, than parody according to homage, with the small remarks which he would probably understand. Difficultly to put, to itself an actually stranger before whose play one admires and the real man from whom one anticipates that him was too often hurt emotionally. I will not do it.
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Permalink Reply by mesi on
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Write in "broken dreams" and headword creative fury I can go by the head if he likes this, it should be like that. Neuroses and fear: he would not like to play this seriously in a film? If it has generalised sometimes, however, does not think that he could seriously have neuroses or fear. No, would make him not more unimportant, but does he show these things too really, would one get it with own fear to act, he cannot want really that one is afraid around him, the real man?! This sensation is not necessarily the nicest sensation. If I allow that the actor to me gives in any Wise fear - no matter whether film or if he itself injured on the stage (big deficit, does not go at all, somewhere are borders, but will not interest Fiennes. He did not become an actor to be directed after the taste more different.) then I ask myself: what does this have to do?! And already I rather have a look at a film with Louis de funes, to the big amusing French.
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Permalink Reply by mesi on
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In 1983 he applied with RADA. From there, however, rather earlier: His passion, itself in Shakespeare's pieces (it calls sometimes quietly for me and almost a little bit disrespectfully: let off steam! In mine to me since childhood to known German) Taking sometimes in 1985 as a suitable "entrance year" because he appeared there with Shakespeare's piece "Twelfth Night".... So far, thus famously and for Fiennes nothing new, but all this now I have neither thought up, nor have dreamt. I call it almost such a kind of telepathy if there what comes what deals in any kind with the British classic Shakespeare. (However, Goethe and Schiller must not pack, these are German dimensions, the absolutely attention find.)
Today, begun with television, 3Sat programme and cultural broadcasting. The first info about an author who deals either too much with Shakespeare or not enough. For me would be exciting: is this right at least partially? For Ralph Fiennes who explained Shakespeare certainly to his favorite classic: The shock if one had to suppose that Shakespeare either only one pseudonym was, or that behind this "pitching name" still other authors were hidden? If Fiennes plays these pieces still so with pleasure when he might accept: there one has spent itself as an aristocrat at time of the queen Elisabeth as Shakespeare, because it would have thrown a strange light on him if it under his real name publish would have become? Ralph Fiennes could not like doubts about Shakespeare very much? Or did they would make no difference to him, because to kick his passion on to him about everything would go? For me where I handle with written words, exciting idea which gives, however, the Briton a little, rather nothing at all. But about that think I do, because it to myself the person Shakespeare - or who always it was else (Oxford or non-Oxford, may be here a new question) gives an understanding, not by his works, or not only, rather the private life of a longest the deads whose work allows to roll „golden balls above the stages of this world“, saying not from me.
Was of the Earl of Oxford the author of Shakespeare's works?
The question around William's Shakespeare real identity provides for 200 years for partly bitter partly mockingly controlled debates among scientists. Now the German author Kurt Kreiler Indizien, which Edward wants to have found de ferryman, 17. Earl of Oxford, unquestionably as a writer of Shakespeare's pieces identify. Is the tight decided under the literature riddles with it? "Kulturplatz" about an emotional exchange of the scholars.
Report: Susanne Läng
Kurt Kreiler: «The man Shakespeare invented», island publishing company
External link www.shakespeare.org.uk
Because I suppose not necessarily now that Ralph Fiennes goes through constantly the Internet - neither to read up what one thinks about him nor about Shakespeare - this prehired short segment which amuses me rather. Would Fiennes find it amusing? Or would it put - would it apply then - his work with Shakespeare's pieces to the head what I do not wish him? However, could he feel fine with works which did not come at all from Shakespeare, but from that who invented him (supposedly)? Is Shakespeare a sort of a national hero in England natural what concerns the literature and in this one does not scratch around?! Not to see the questions which I wished, from Ralph Fiennes sometimes answered, why by article.
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