Ralph Fiennes and Simon Godwin: our satanic take on Shaw’s Superman

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/feb/05/ralph-fiennes-simon-godwin-man-and-superman-interview

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Although it may be little consolation, Ralph Fiennes has just been spared a nightmare of either jetlag or frustration. On the 21st and 23rd of this month, he will be on the National’s Lyttelton stage, playing one of the longest roles in theatre, in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. On the intervening night, the 2015 Academy Awards are presented in Los Angeles and, if the actor had received the widely predicted nomination for his wonderfully funny turn as a concierge in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, the movie’s producers would have been looking at teleportation or private planes to get him there and back in time.

However, the Oscar voters surprisingly failed to give Fiennes a third nomination to add to Schindler’s List and The English Patient. Was the speculation distracting? “I tried to ignore it but it was difficult because people kept bringing it up. Anyway, the film has done really well.” Another consolation is that the experience of recently directing two movies, Coriolanus and The Invisible Woman, has made him more sanguine about awards. “Having dipped my toe into the financing of a film, Oscar nominations and Oscar talk don’t actually make a great deal of difference. It doesn’t put you on to the A-list of actors who backers want.”

The consequence is that all Fiennes has to worry about during February is rehearsals with director Simon Godwin for a drama so epic that the full text would take around half of a London-LA flight to perform. The first, second and fourth acts of Man and Superman are a romantic comedy in which Jack Tanner, an upper-class anarchist and descendant of Don Juan, is bested by a proto-feminist woman, but the third act is a lengthy dream sequence in which Tanner turns into his libidinous ancestor and conducts philosophical debates in the Underworld.

This “Don Juan in hell” section was omitted from the 1905 London premiere and most productions since, largely because it takes the running time well past four hours. But Fiennes and Godwin held a reading of the full text last January and chose the satanic option. “Reading the full text,” says the actor, “it was clear that, uncut, it’s unwieldy but we also felt that a lot of the power resides in the third act – and lines make more sense in the fourth act because of it.”

In an interview room at the National before a morning’s rehearsal, Fiennes is eating a healthy bowl of porridge but he has undertaken no particular training regime for the huge speeches. “The only thing I do, with a part like this, is to learn it before rehearsals so I don’t have to worry about that when I’m working on it. But it’s not always the long roles that are the most exhausting. Oedipus, which I did here at the National, wasn’t very long but was draining because you’re in this terrible, contorted world and Sophocles cranks it up. Those Greek plays are short but really roast you.”

It's not always the long plays that are the most exhausting. Sophocles cranks it up … those Greek plays really roast you

Godwin is not the director for theatregoers who want to be home for the 10pm news. His previous production at the National was Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, which lasts around five hours, although Godwin’s trimming of the text and whipping of the pace reduced it to under four in performance and, although the NT website for Man and Superman somewhat ominously notes that “running time will be announced by the first preview”, his hope is to do the Shaw in three and a half. “Under three and a half,” promises Fiennes. “Er, yeah, let’s see,” laughs Godwin nervously.

Godwin’s status as the National’s patron saint of late trains and expensive babysitters is surprising because his early productions at the Royal Court – including Anya Reiss’s The Acid Test and Rachel De-lahay’s Routes – epitomised the 90-minute interval-free shape of much modern theatre. “Attention span in theatre is a question that interests me,” he says. “With the O’Neill, I discovered that audiences in the 30s would have been drinking heavily during several intervals and so plays included lengthy recaps at the start of each act.

“With only one interval at the National, and a rather more sober audience, I realised we didn’t need O’Neill’s regurgitations of where we were. But I think now there’s a cultural negotiation between the joy of the new play that runs straight through for 80 minutes and the opposite need for the experience that is deeper and lengthier and proud to be so. Because our engagement can be greater. So we have to justify each moment of the evening but we also have to honour the fact that Shaw had an epic imagination.”

For all its political and philosophical ambitions, Man and Superman is essentially a comedy and, in his recent movie work from Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges to The Grand Budapest Hotel, comic roles have increasingly become a feature of Fiennes’s CV, although he disputes the critical distinction. “It worries me sometimes this division between comedy and non-comedy. I think great tragedies have elements of comedy and comedic roles can contain great pain and upset. I try to think of it as playing a part rather than ‘doing a comedy’.” Rehearsing comedy, Fiennes has found, requires nerve because lines are repeated so often that cast and crew cease to find them funny: “People don’t laugh at all. You get the odd encouraging titter from the director if you’re lucky.”

Although hoping that his plays would be punctuated by audience laughter, Shaw was also unusually precise about punctuation. I was struck by the astonishing quantity of semi-colons, generally a written rather than spoken convention. “Yes,” says Godwin. “Having done a lot of new plays at the Royal Court, I’d missed the class on directing semi-colons. So we’ve done some work with the head of speech here on what the semi-colon means.”

How does Fiennes act the dot above the comma? “Well, if you look at the dictionary definition, it can replace an ‘and’. But Shaw often puts the ‘and’ as well. I treat them as little hesitations or hiatuses; there’s this and then this and then this.” Godwin notes that there are very few pauses of the sort that Samuel Beckett would subsequently make a key part of Irish drama, and attributes this to Shaw, who had started as a political speaker, having the orator’s horror of losing the audience.

Using an ebook edition, I was startled that more than 20% of the text had elapsed before the play even began – due to Shaw’s habit of lengthy prefaces – while there’s another 15% or so after the final curtain because the dramatist appends the full text of a Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion, supposedly written by Jack Tanner. All performers of Shaw have to decide whether to ignore this verbose scaffolding.

“I’ve read the preface,” says Fiennes. “And the handbook. But the thing is they don’t actually help you get on your feet and do it. People always ask actors about research and I’ve enjoyed reading the Michael Holroyd biography of Shaw, for example. But, in the end, you can have a mass of information that doesn’t help you to solve how to act a scene.”

When the Shaw is over, Fiennes goes back to movies, playing the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge in Gary Oldman’s Flying Horse and making his first full appearance as Judi Dench’s successor as M in the Bond movie Spectre. And on 14 May, the theatre and movie sides of Fiennes’s work will come together when the Shaw production is screened in cinemas around the UK and the world as part of the NT Live scheme. Shaw took the term “Superman” from the philosophical ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. But, as the word was colonised by a superhero franchise three decades later, there may be some confusion when Man and Superman suddenly appears in cinema listings. “Yes, the ultimate prequel,” laughs Godwin. “The origin story.”

• Man and Superman is at the National Theatre, London, from 17 February to 17 May.