The telegraph
Ralph Fiennes: ‘I can’t understand the vitriol aimed at JK Rowling’
As an indication that better days are ahead for British theater, there may be few announcements more encouraging than this one. The Telegraph can reveal today exclusively that Ralph Fiennes will be out on the road and hitting the ground in the spring, bringing a new one-man version of TS Eliot’s poetic masterpiece, Four Quartets, to four regional theaters. It is an inspiring gesture to reach the British public in general, helping to reactivate places that have been dark for a long time. Last week, Fiennes, 58, gave me a preview of what’s in store for the public, in a rehearsal studio in Bethnal Green, where he is dressed in a navy blue shirt, baggy blue linen pants and black leather shoes. In contrast to the remote and masterful reading of TS Eliot’s four poems, he takes a colloquial approach and even begins to take delicate steps, evoking a picturesque rustic dance with East Coker’s lines: “On a midnight summer, you you can hear the music / the flute and the drum… ”He has known the piece for decades. His mother had him on an LP, and Fiennes told me that he can connect with his moral and spiritual pursuit. He recorded the poem in 2009, but a year ago decided to get to know each other more intimately. “During the first block, I went straight to the house I rented in Suffolk and thought about learning them. I would walk the paths and paths where I live, familiarizing myself with them. ”With his famous opening sentence at the beginning of East Coker,“ My beginning is my end ”, Eliot’s poem spoke to him, as perhaps he does with everyone in middle age, who may begin to see the end of road. “I think it speaks to people who are” halfway through, “he says. “You have a sense of what the poem really means as you get older.” To reinforce the point, he quotes Little Gidding’s phrases: “The shame of the reasons revealed late and the awareness of things done wrong and done to harm others”. The pandemic, with its suspension from normal activity, life and apparently time itself, combined with the melancholy but comforting contemplation of the work of the vast patterns of existence. “I felt it very strongly, that feeling of being stopped and forced to look back,” he says. Having reflected on the past year, Fiennes, who lives alone (formerly married to Alex Kingston and lived with Francesca Annis for many years), tells me: “It has been peculiar. It’s been weird not being able to see your relatives, not being around the people you’d like to be with. Sure, Fiennes has been seen on stage since the pandemic (in David Hare’s Beat the Devil at the Bridge, making it the first big name to be assigned to indoor and socially distant performances), but he can’t wait things back to normal. He tells me that he has several projects underway and reveals: “The Scottish play is in my sights.” He says: “Theater is the essential arena for an actor and we all hope that he will return, not only with social distance, but so that we can sit together in close proximity. I think it will be extremely exciting. The fact is that, although Fiennes had a stellar film career (Schindler’s List, The English Patient, Voldemort in Harry Potter and M in James Bond), he is one of the few A-listers to consistently return to the theater. He has grown in stature and subtlety since he emerged in RSC in the 1980s, winning applause like Henry VI, causing controversy in London and New York in the mid-1990s as Hamlet and becoming a regular at National, where he was last seen as Antonio . He thrives on tortured strange figures – Ricardo II, Coriolanus, Ibsen’s loners, even the revolutionary bachelor of Oedipus and Shaw, John Tanner in Man and Superman. It combines tireless physical presence with mercury and introspective alertness.