Two of our greatest actors want to revive our passion for the Bard in the age of TikTok. Here’s how
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 British 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 conceit of Ganymede/Rosalind wooing Orlando.”…
