The actor Ralph Fiennes, 45, is best known for his lead role in Anthony
Minghella's The English Patient, alongside his fellow Brit Kristin Scott
Thomas. Adam Phillips, 54, the author of On Flirtation, and On Kissing,
Tickling and Being Bored, has been described as the best psychoanalyst in
Britain. As Fiennes prepares to take on the role of Oedipus - the ill-fated
king of Thebes who unwittingly murders his father and marries his mother,
thus giving his name to Freud's famous psychological complex - in a new,
modern-dress version of Sophocles' play by Frank McGuinness at the National
Theatre, he met Phillips to discuss just how relevant - and close to the
bone - Oedipus still is.
Ralph Fiennes I think my fascination with Oedipus is that he's in all
of us. There's a truth about confronting who you are in Sophocles' play.
There's a misconception [among many people] that Oedipus wants to sleep with
his mother. He doesn't; he's heard that this might happen and he's repulsed
by it, he's taking action against it all the time. Maybe this is too glib a
reduction of it, but you can't escape the fact of your birth. There are all
these questions, about the ambivalence of one's relationship with the
parent, the love and the rejection. There's a Sean Penn film called Into the
Wild about a young boy who rejects his parents. I sympathise with the boy -
lots of people were offended that he rejected the parents, and I thought it
was quite a healthy thing to do.
Adam Phillips The play [Oedipus] seems to me very topical, because lots
of people now believe that parents are a danger to their children and vice
versa. Lots of people believe now that children kill the couple.
RF (nods and smiles ruefully) It couldn't be more prevalent.
AP And here's Oedipus, whose parents actually wanted to kill him, who
became a danger to his parents because they became a danger to him. The
weird thing is, why didn't his mother recognise him? If we think of gender
stereotypes, fathers can be a bit casual with their children, but mothers on
the whole know who their children are. It's suggesting that what goes on in
couples and between parents and children is really bizarre, and has this
ineluctable fatefulness about it. You enact it and then occasionally,
retrospectively, you get glimpses. And if you have too many glimpses, it
becomes really terrifying. whether it's Oedipus or Hamlet or whatever, but I
feel I show a lot there, so I want to hide as myself.
AP But Hamlet is an actor. Oedipus is not. When we watch the play we
think: “Shit, this man is really going through this for the first time.”
RF That's what's so scary about Oedipus, there's no role.
AP He's sort of innocent. Whereas you think Hamlet would have loved to
have gone to see Hamlet, I don't think Oedipus would have liked to see
Oedipus.
Nancy Durrant How do you play a guileless man?
RF I don't know, I'm in the middle of it! It's hard. Earlier in the
year I did a play [God of Carnage] where I was forever eating and on a
mobile phone and had all this stuff, which is great to have. This has
nothing. And the play is frightening.
AP What have been the unique difficulties about playing this particular
part?
RF (long pause) I didn't realise how exposed I would feel. I'm still
learning the play, but I'm feeling unpractised and quite frightened. Actors
have recourse to phrasing, gesture, but I felt I had to unlearn things.
Everyone says of the Greeks, you can't shy away, you can't duck it, the
revulsion, the horror, the fear, the violence. It's having the courage to
take the lid off.
AP Has it made you think about your own family life and yourself as a
son?
RF My mother was a real inspiration for me in deciding to be an actor
and so in everything I do I feel the lack of her being witness. So, of
course, in this that's felt quite acutely. As the woman who gave me
permission to make this choice, I look at the fact that she's not there. At
the same time maybe I'm relieved she isn't. You have to go to an imaginative
place that is quite uncomfortable, but that's my job.
AP That must be true for the spectators. You can take the sleeping with
one's mother as a figurative thing, a picture of an intimacy which has
unforeseen consequences. Everybody must wonder about that. One's earliest
intimacy with one's mother is preverbal. So it must make us wonder, not “Did
I sleep with my mother? Did I want to?”, but “What kind of intimacy did I
have with her? And what was I then left with?”
RF Yes, especially if your mother's dead. I'm constantly imagining what
she would think, feel, how much I would allow her in. I mean it's not a
Jocasta element, it's that this extraordinary woman is gone, and the very
thing she encouraged and allowed, she can't be there [for]. Also, though,
the whole thing about Jocasta is lover and mother. It seems facile but every
woman is tested against the mother. In that way, can we escape our mothers?
AP We leave our mothers and then we try to find them again. If we find
them too much, then it's not going to work, and if we find them too
little... It's got to be enough. As boys growing up, most of us play this
game of distancing our mothers and not letting them in, and inviting them in
and being very needy...
RF Yes!
AP ...and it's a weird, continual distance regulation between oneself
and this woman.
RF Don't you play that out in your future relationships?
AP We must do, it must be repeated, to keep it at arm's length and then
to crave the intimacy that we then fear.
RF All the time, yes. Oedipus emphasises the caring of the daughters.
He says, don't worry about my sons, they're men, they'll manage. “As for my
girls, are they not a pity?” He says to them, no one will marry you, no one
will want to touch you. They are barely adolescent in this production, and
he sees their future (snaps fingers) like that. He sees them ageing, barren,
wrinkled. He sees the whole of their journey, as women, rejected.
AP The question is, what kind of mothers will the daughters be, and the
answer is - not at all. As if to say to be a mother has these terrible
consequences.
RF There seems to be a way in which we behave which is all about - you
get married and you have children. And if you question that, that's quite a
strong thing to say isn't it? People ask why don't you have children, why
don't you get married, we must find you someone... and the idea that you
might say that's a path you don't want to go down [upsets them]. It's
something I take a left turn away from!
AP It's like alcoholics who need everybody to drink. The implication is
that choosing to get married and have children isn't as much of a problem as
choosing not to. But they're different solutions to the same problem- that
family life is too much for us.
RF We [my siblings and I] were all loved by our parents very much, but
I am the eldest of six, and I have a memory of the chaos, the panic, the
uncertainty and I'm not eager to revisit it.
AP I was part of an extended family, so the association always was that
the family was very fraught. As if there was too much emotional intensity.
And so my wish is to do two things at once, which is to have them and not
have them. I associate the family with good things but also a general
feeling that it was just too much feeling, too much undercurrent, too much
said, too much not said, all that stuff that is in this play.
ND Is there anything in the part that you are still struggling with,
Ralph?
RF Trying to have the courage to go into emotional places that feel raw
in a way that is unnerving, and testing oneself against the fear one has of
going into places that might seem not even digestible for an audience, stuff
that you firmly want to keep the rehearsal door closed on. I'm probably
guilty of wanting to overcontrol or overmodulate things, and maybe this is a
part where you can't. You've probably come close to it in your work, Adam.
As a psychoanalyst you must have moments when people go: “This is what I
am!”, tears or rage or maybe catatonic silence.
AP The play is very like an analysis, you have moments when things dawn
on people and they get really freaked out, and are either full of blame or
enraged or they leave.
RF That's Oedipus!
AP That's the basic paradigm of the Oedipal myth, which is that
something dawns on you that is fateful. And you can't know the consequences
of letting yourself know, so there's a huge risk. The process of revelation
in the play is as interesting as what is revealed.
RF I think that's what gives it its drama.
AP Otherwise you'd just put it in a postcard - this is the truth of
human existence: we want to marry our mothers and kill our fathers.
ND Is it cathartic?
RF You feel like you've been hit by a sledgehammer.
AP Catharsis is a sort of cleansing, isn't it? It would be odd if after
seeing Oedipus, you felt: “Phew, I feel a lot better now. I've got that out
of my system.” But at the end of the play he hasn't died and he can't
imagine a future. Not being able to imagine a future could be the first
stage of having a real future.
RF An embracing of nothingness is a positive beginning. (Pauses) I'm
exhausted. I've got to rehearse now!
Oedipus is at the National Theatre, SE1, sponsored by Shell (020-7452 3000;
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk), Oct 15 to Jan 4.
