Ralph Fiennes and Harriet Walter: our mission to make us love Shakespeare again

Times

20 hours ago

'All the world's a stage' runs the line from the Seven Ages of Man speech in As You Like It, but it's the West Country stage that's at the centre of Ralph Fiennes's life right now. In genteel Georgian Bath he's directing a production of the tale of love, longing and exile in the Forest of Arden, with Harriet Walter as an androgynous version of the nobleman Jaques.
The venture is part of Fiennes's emergence, at the age of 62, as an actor-manager, not unlike Henry Irving, the subject of Grace Pervades, the new drama by David Hare that opened the actor's much anticipated mini-season at the Theatre Royal in June. Fiennes himself starred in that one, and he has persuaded a host of weighty, unexpected names to join him. The stand-up comedian Dylan Moran is playing the jester Touchstone in As You Like It. And in Small Hotel, a new play by the American writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Fiennes will be appearing alongside a former partner of his, the elegant Francesca Annis.
'I've always harboured the desire to direct Shakespeare on the stage, having directed Coriolanus as a film,' the studiously courteous Fiennes explains when he and Walter take a break from rehearsals in studios in London. 'I didn't want to do a dark tragedy or a heavy history. As You Like It came to me as a first choice because of the wonderful ambiguity around gender that's central to it, with the conceited Ganymede/Rosalind wooing Orlando.'
Both actors see As You Like It as an opportunity to blow the dust off a sacred text. Walter believes that one reason so many people find Shakespeare daunting is that they are often introduced to his work in the wrong way at school. (That was certainly my own experience in the classroom at my comprehensive, where drama was reduced to a dreary checklist of metaphors, onomatopoeia and so on.)
'That's what they often do,' laments Walter, 74, who recalls that her own experience of learning Shakespeare at Cranborne Chase, a boarding school in Dorset, was less than inspirational. 'What they always do is go around the classroom and nobody can read it properly. We mustn't underestimate the excitement of being in the presence of people pretending to be someone else and creating a forest that isn't really there.'
Are Fiennes and Walter worried that in the age of TikTok it's harder to bring young people to work that demands a greater level of concentration? Fiennes certainly hasn't given up hope. 'It's a challenge. I remain optimistic,' he says. 'When I did Macbeth recently we made a point of going to schools and interacting with young people, and their curiosity and alertness and interest were very palpable. Of course, there are some who will zone out. I think it's not that young people aren't interested. I think a lot of it is about just offering clarity in productions.'
Fiennes has fond memories of the teacher at his grammar school, Bishop Wordsworth's, in Salisbury, who cast him in a production of Love's Labour's Lost. Yet he remembers that his O-level course on the Scottish play was 'very dry'. Lots of pupils, he recalls, were bored because their imaginations weren't tested. 'It's very, very hard to get people to be engaged with the plays as a text,' Fiennes says. 'They're not; they're written to be performed. The drama is about engagement and listening and receiving. It involves social skills. It doesn't have to mean we're all going to be actors, but young people need to enjoy what it means to play a scene.'
Walter is planning to do her own bit to make amends next year by launching a programme that will take Shakespeare into schools and prisons. She's reluctant to discuss details as yet, but from the excitement in her voice it's clear she's passionate about the prospect.
And it's obvious, as well, that these two actors, who have reached a huge audience through film and TV, still find special inspiration in working in front of a live audience. They joke about getting close-up views of the absurd hierarchies in big-screen projects where A-list actors are treated as a breed apart. In a play's rehearsal room there's much more of a sense of community.
In Walter's view theatre is where talent can be stretched to its limit. 'Shakespeare is not immediately easy,' she explains. 'But then I think working through things that aren't easy is more rewarding in the end than something that drops into your lap without you thinking.' She's still grateful that her drama school teachers pushed her to embrace complexity in all its forms. 'It's about juggling all those balls,' she says. 'You see something like Hamilton, where people are dancing, singing and articulating very extraordinary language. I see a link. I don't see it as a separate thing, but I do see it as more difficult and more complex than regular naturalistic TV acting.'
It's not the first time Fiennes and the Theatre Royal's director, Danny Moar, have worked together. Four years ago, when theatreland was still inching its way back to normality after lockdown, Fiennes chose the Theatre Royal to launch one of his most quixotic projects, a 75-minute solo performance, which he directed himself, of TS Eliot's often bewilderingly dense Four Quartets. Other regional dates and a London run and regional dates followed. An actor who had conquered the heights of Hollywood — nominated for three Oscars, for Schindler's List, The English Patient and Conclave — was reaffirming his faith in the power of live performance at a critical moment. A return to Bath was soon mooted, as Fiennes recalls: 'Danny asked what I thought of running a season and I said yes. It was exciting. No one had asked me to do that before.'
The collaboration signals Fiennes's belief in the central importance of regional theatre. Funding cuts have left many local venues in a precarious position. This year, when Gary Oldman decided to perform Beckett's solo piece Krapp's Last Tape in a run at York Theatre Royal, where he began his career in 1979, he was making a point about creating opportunities for the next generation. Fiennes did his bit too in 2023 when he went on the road in a military fatigues production of Macbeth at warehouse-style venues in Liverpool and Edinburgh as well as the London Docklands, far from the usual haunts of West End boulevardiers.
As Walter points out, there's a hard-headed economic argument for keeping theatre at the centre of everyone's life: 'People keep arguing about not wanting to appear pro-elitist. It's something we've been talking about for years, this idea of art subsidy. Subsidy is a misnomer. It sounds like you want charity, but actually it pays back fivefold. It's a very productive, remunerative part of British life. We've got ourselves in such a mess by following the pure logic of the market. The bit we've neglected is our hearts and our souls and our minds.'
Fiennes agrees. 'There seems to me to be a blind spot,' he says, 'about the value of the arts and the performing art about what it does to the quality of people's lives, their inner lives, their imaginations.'
Will there be another Fiennes season in Bath next year? He confines himself to replying that he's 'cautiously optimistic'. In an ideal world, where money and time were no object, he would love to put together a company of actors to take Shakespeare into schools. What we need, he says, is to invoke the spirit of Hector, the idealistic if louche teacher in Alan Bennett's The History Boys (immortalised by Richard Griffiths in the 2006 film), and introduce the young to as many facets of the arts as possible. His mother, he says, played the Hector role in his early years, taking him off to see new films and Waiting for Godot. Fiennes asks: 'Where are all the Hectors in government, who say it's important that you see this film, it's important that you go to these places?'
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As for his immediate plans, he is preparing to take another directorial leap into the unknown, this time at the Paris Opera, where he'll be overseeing Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in January. It's not his first encounter with Pushkin's tragic tale: he played the title role in the film Onegin, directed by his sister Martha, in 1999. Still, he admits to feeling 'excited and scared in equal measure' after the conductor Semyon Bychkov came up with the suggestion five years ago.
'I just thought, that's an amazing thing, and I could run a mile, but I could just go for it,' he says. 'I knew the background material, having made the film and steeped myself in Pushkin's works. So I had the baggage of the story, not the opera, which I had seen a few times. And I just thought, yeah, I might have a few bumps, but I would hate to live and think I said no.'
As You Like It runs at Theatre Royal Bath, Aug 15 to Sept 6. The Ralph Fiennes season ends in Oct with Small Hotel, theatreroyal.org.uk
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