Macbeth

To the average cinemagoer Ralph Fiennes will forever be Voldemort from the Harry Potter series, but he is so much more!

It was Ralph Fiennes’s mother who introduced him to his acting career. He was 8 or 9, lying atop the bunk bed he shared with his younger brother Magnus, when he asked her to tell him a story. The tale she chose was Hamlet.

“She started to tell it in her own words, and I was completely hooked,” Fiennes said, recalling his childhood in a big, arty family northeast of London. “Then she said, ‘I’m going to put on the record player a great actor doing speeches from his plays.” It was Olivier doing Hamlet and, on the flip side, Henry V.

Fiennes began his career in the mid-1980s as a servant with a few lines in an outdoor London production of  Twelfth Night. “My introduction to Shakespeare led me to a love of and the thrill of Shakespeare's language,” he said. “The possibilities, on the level of its poetry, of its dramatic power, of its human richness in the psychology — that has never left me.”

Directed by Simon Godwin, with set and costume design by Frankie Bradshaw and Asaf Zohar’s score, Macbeth is a cinematic, thoughtfully staged production which catapults Shakespeare’s tragedy into the present day. Macbeth was filmed live at a purpose-built theatre space at Dock X in London, giving audiences the chance to be even closer to the action.

In this conception, the play’s infamous trio (Lucy Mangan, Danielle Fiamanya and Lola Shalam) make for fascinating witches who not only forecast Macbeth’s fate, but also serve as commentators on the brutal last days of Macbeth.

At 60, it could be argued that Fiennes is too old to play the Thane of Cawdor. However, Fiennes himself would argue,  “Of course, you can play it younger. But I actually think there’s a lot about ‘Macbeth’ that works if you’re a little older…... When you get to see it as they’re being in the autumnal part of life, I think that it makes sense to me.”