SOURCE: Brantley, Ben. “Uneasy Leaders Whose Downfall Lay Within Themselves.” New York Times (11 September 2000): E1, E5.

[In the following review, Brantley evaluates the New York staging of Jonathan Kent's production of Coriolanus, starring Ralph Fiennes. Brantley observes that Fiennes's performance was accomplished but lacked depth, and that the production as a whole was engaging but failed to offer a deep investigation of the play's issues.]

If anyone could elevate petulance to the status of tragic flaw, Ralph Fiennes would seem to be the man. Throughout his fertile career in movies as the bluestocking's hearthrob, he has consistently found the combustibility in being sullen, taciturn and socially ill at ease. Think of those unhappy adulterers he played in “The English Patient” and “The End of the Affair,” in which he struck erotic sparks just by peevishly knitting his brow.

So the idea of casting Mr. Fiennes in the title roles of both “Richard II” and “Coriolanus,” Shakespeare's most pout-prone heroes, does make inspired sense. That Mr. Fiennes, who cut his actor's teeth on the classical stage and won a Tony for his “Hamlet” six years ago, is thoroughly at home with long blank verse soliloquies is beyond doubt. Who better, among his generation, to claim sympathy for two self-destructing sulkers who make Hamlet seem like a charm school recruiter?

Mr. Fiennes boldly took on both Richard, that most ineffectual of Shakespearean monarchs, and Coriolanus, the contempt-driven Roman warrior, in repertory for the Almeida Theater in London this summer. New Yorkers can now assess the results, if they can still get tickets, at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the company is in residence through Oct. 1. Be advised, though, to lower your expectations a notch. As marriages of actors and roles go, these turn out to have been made not so much in heaven as in an upper tier of purgatory. Unlike many film stars, accustomed to courting the camera at close range, Mr. Fiennes doesn't shrink as a presence onstage. Those who know him largely through his subtle, inward work on film may be jolted by the brazenly exterior performances he is giving here, especially in the more soul-searching role of Richard. The actor's signature moodiness is certainly in evidence, but stylized, enlarged and spotlighted, as though part of some public monument.

His energy, charisma and command of language are formidable. Yet he only rarely seems to dig beneath his characters' skins, or at least to take you there with him. You know what he's trying to convey—the signals go off like flares—but you don't necessarily feel it.

Similarly, as staged by the Almeida's artistic director, Jonathan Kent, both the “Richard” and “Coriolanus” are strong in their pacing and accessibility, and they make persuasive cases for the enduring relevance of Shakespeare's vision of the harsh vagaries of politics. But deeper interpretive revelations are faint, as is any sure emotional grip. It is telling that the melancholy “Richard II” often registers as cynical comedy. The productions engage your interest, but they don't hold it captive.

The tragedies, written a dozen years apart, are not obvious soul mates, any more than their heroes, on the surface, would appear to be. “Richard II” is an elegiac, strangely static play written entirely in verse; its title character is correspondingly contemplative, a decadent monarch who loses his crown to find himself as a philosopher of dispossession. “Coriolanus” is far more dynamic and plain-spoken, befitting a martial leader who is allergic to introspection and comes fully alive only in battle.

Yet the works share more than you might first think: elitist central figures undone by their unwillingness to court the common populace; and a questioning, even despairing overview on the government of nations. In politics, according to Shakespeare here (and who these days would disagree?), clear-cut heroes don't exist.

The plays refuse to take unconditional sides: with Richard or his pragmatic usurper, Bolingbroke (later Henry IV); with Coriolanus or the plebeians he antagonizes. And there is throughout an awareness of the ever-present “slippery turns,” as Coriolanus puts it, of a world in which alliances and friendships shift with the winds of self-interest.

Mr. Kent, who directed Mr. Fiennes in “Hamlet,” presents the realpolitik aspect of both plays with clarity and vigor. Paul Brown's spare sets—originally designed for the vast, hauntingly derelict former Gainsborough film studio in London—have of necessity been scaled down for the Harvey. But both his grassy Eden for “Richard II” (in which a single tree symbolically sheds its apples) and his industrial temple for “Coriolanus” retain the sense of empires under siege.

Though their costumes (also Mr. Brown's work) irritatingly suggest something culled from the expensively bohemian departments of Barney's the ensemble members effectively highlight the plays' back-and-forth rhythms of changing allegiances: of both the fickle, frightened mobs of “Coriolanus” and the uncertain, opportunistic aristocrats of “Richard II.” Twenty-first-century political pollsters, transported to the eras of these plays, would find the daily, even hourly, changes in popular opinion all too familiar.

To Mr. Fiennes fall the tasks of embodying the principal causes of such vacillation. He makes it thunderingly clear that the protagonists of both works are political blunderbusses. They are both doomed by their arrogance and childishness, though the forms these traits assume are as opposite as yin and yang. Mr. Fiennes's aggrieved scowl and haughty profile turn out to be serviceable for either side of the equation.

In the opening acts of “Richard II” his monarch is rendered with extravagant effeteness, almost to the point of caricature. Arbitrating a dispute between feuding noblemen in the play's opening scenes, he regards the proceedings with the distaste of a debutante dissecting a frog in biology class. His arched fingers hover restlessly over the buttons of his embroidered white robe; his eyes roll skyward.

It is all a bit too much, as is Mr. Fiennes's trilling giddiness as Richard discusses with his cronies the prospects of appropriating the lucre of a dying lord. These affectations pay off, at least partly, when Richard learns that his subjects have turned against him. Though stung and sorrowful, this wayward king also appears to be experiencing something like relief at being able to drop a pose unnatural to him.

It is at this point, well into the third act, that Mr. Fiennes's performance finally glides toward the empyrean. Freed of the blinders of his royal identity, this Richard discovers a knack for metaphysical speculation, and he surprises himself with his skill at it.

Mr. Fiennes luxuriates in the character's exquisite monologues, like a precocious teenager introduced to the bleak pleasures of existential philosophy. When this Richard's considerations of life inevitably lead him to the nothingness of death, he scares himself, but he also enjoys his fear.

It is great fun to watch Mr. Fiennes work his way through this process, but the pleasure is almost entirely intellectual. Because there is no convincing emotional bridge between Richard with and without his crown, you don't feel moved by his suffering. Nor do you ever believe in his relationships with anyone else onstage: most crucially, with his queen (the stilted Emilia Fox) and his canny rival, Bolingbroke (Linus Roache, best known as the star of the movie “Priest”).

The production as a whole often keeps its characters (especially inept connivers like Oliver Ryan's Aumerle) at a satiric distance. Among the supporting players Oliver Ford Davies, as a duke whose high principles turn out to be all too adaptable, and Barbara Jefford, as his feisty duchess, provide the most warming notes of humanity.

Ms. Jefford, whose career as a classical actress spans half a century, also appears in “Coriolanus” and all but walks away with it. As Volumnia, the mother of the title character and the ultimate domineering Roman matron, she gives the play its harrowing soul of patrician pride and military blood lust. When she speaks of her son's battle wounds or the numbers of men he has killed, she emanates a sexual thrill even as she maintains her soldier-straight posture.

Mr. Fiennes, on the other hand, never really conveys that essential love of warfare. Coriolanus's disdain for the common people of Rome, which ultimately leads to his banishment, is etched with poisonous precision. But it is hard to credit him as a inspiring, testosterone-flooded leader of soldiers. When he returns from battle drenched in blood, he suggests a “Brideshead”-era university student who has crashed the Rolls after too much Champagne.

His sustained intensity, again, is impressive, but the performance sorely needs more variety. Nor does Mr. Roache's Aufidius, the soldier who is both Coriolanus's spiritual brother and his nemesis, provide the necessary electric machismo.

Like his Bolingbroke, his Aufidius comes across as politically shrewd, with eyes that always seem to be looking toward the next strategic step. But in both roles, he lacks the fire and imposing stature of a born leader of men. And the homoerotic chemistry between Aufidius and Coriolanus, while underscored by the staging here, is never persuasive. Mr. Fiennes's performance, in any case, is too rigid to admit such undercurrents.

This “Coriolanus” doesn't bore. Mr. Kent brings a brisk physicality to the portrayal of Rome's political vicissitudes, and the supporting cast, among both the patricians and the plebeians, is much sharper than in “Richard II.” And toward its end this “Coriolanus” delivers a scene that is the high point of both productions.

This occurs when Coriolanus, having defected to the Volsci after his banishment, is confronted with the unseemly spectacle of Volumnia on her knees, begging him to spare Rome. Posture speaks volumes here, as both mother and son literally unbend for the first time in the play. Against the odds, your heart suddenly goes out to these two human monsters, crippled by their own arrogance. It is the only moment, in either production, in which such feelings are aroused.