The Telegraph
Ralph Fiennes: ‘I do not understand the vitriol addressed to JK Rowling’
As a morale-boosting indication that there are better days ahead for British theater, there can be few pleasant announcements than that. The Telegraph can exclusively reveal today that Ralph Fiennes will be on his way and stepping on the shelves in the spring, bringing a new one-man rendition of TS Eliot’s late poetic masterpiece Four Quartets to four regional theaters. It’s an inspiring gesture to reach out to the wider British public, helping to make places that have been dark for too long work again. Last week, Fiennes, 58, gave me a taste of what the public has in store at a rehearsal studio in Bethnal Green, where he is dressed in a dark blue shirt, bag blue linen pants and black leather shoes. In contrast to TS Eliot’s remote, schoolmasterly reading of the four poems, he follows a conversational approach, and even begins to take posh steps, invoking a peculiarly rustic dance to the rules of East Coker: ‘On a summer at midnight you can hear the music / of the weak pipe and the drum … ”He has known the piece for decades. His mother had it on a long-playing record, and Fiennes tells me he can join in the moral and spiritual pursuit of it. He recorded the poem in 2009, but a year ago he decided to meet more intimately. ‘During the first exclusion, I went straight to the cottage I was renting in Suffolk, and I thought I would learn it. I will walk across the roads and highways where I live, and become familiar with it. With his famous opening line, at the beginning of East Coker, ‘In my beginning is my end’, Eliot’s poem spoke to him, as it might do to all in the middle of life, which is the end of the road can start to see. “I think it speaks to people who are ‘in the middle way,'” he says. “You have an idea of what the poem really means as you get older.” To reinforce the point, he quotes lines from Little Gidding: “The shame of motives that were revealed late, and the awareness of things that were done badly and that harmed others.” The pandemic, with the suspension of normal activities, life and the apparent time itself, was marked by the melancholy, yet reassuring contemplation of the work on the great patterns of existence. “I felt it very strongly, the feeling that I was stopped and forced to look back,” he says. After reflecting on the past year, Fiennes, who lives alone (he was previously married to Alex Kingston and lived with Francesca Annis for many years) says: ‘It was strange. It was weird not being able to see your relationships, not being close to the people you wanted to be. Of course, Fiennes has been on stage since the pandemic (in David Hare’s Beat the Devil at the Bridge, making him the first big name to be attached to indoor, social distance shows), but he can’t wait for things to return. not to normal. He tells me he has several projects underway and reveals: “The Scottish play is in my sights.” He says: ‘Theater is the most important arena for an actor and we all hope that it will come back, not only with social distance, but so that we can sit close. I think it will be terribly emotional. The fact is that although Fiennes has 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 return to the theater throughout. He has grown in stature and subtle growth since appearing at the RSC in the 1980s, winning the accolades as Henry VI, which caused a stir in London and New York in the mid-1990s as Hamlet and a regular at the National, where he was last seen as Antony. He thrives on tortured outsiders – Richard II, Coriolanus, Ibsen’s singles, even Oedipus and Shaw’s revolutionary bachelor John Tanner in Man and Superman. He combines unchanging physical presence with mercury and introspective vigilance.