Most productions cut a whole act from Man and Superman. But Ralph Fiennes and director Simon Godwin plan to unleash its full Nietzschean powerAlthough 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.”It's not always the long plays that are the most exhausting. Sophocles cranks it up … those Greek plays really roast you Continue reading...
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