First Love

[The Wild Harp]

aber länger als 45 min würde ich vermutlich nicht aushalten. das ist bestimmt gesundheitsschädlich

Unter Ralphomaniegesichtspunkten hast Du bestimmt recht. Aber ich hätte ihm noch stundenlang zuhören/zuschauen können.

[The Wild Harp]

Hier ein Artikel. Ist ziemlich lang, deshalb habe ich den entscheidenen Teil zitiert.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/stars-dazzle-in-bleak-beckett/2007/01/16/1168709741286.html

In First Love, the most unromantic love story ever written, Ralph Fiennes plays a vagrant who meets a prostitute on a park bench, falls in love, moves in with her, gets her pregnant, and leaves while she's in labour.

Fiennes plays the ultimate solipsist. "The mistake one makes is to speak to people," as his character says. But the vagrant's desire to achieve complete detachment from the world is doomed to failure. And Fiennes' performance relishes the hideous consequences, and their perversion of traditional conceptions of love.

For someone so famous for his portrayal of tortured romantic leads, this anti-romance presents a true challenge. Wringing the most from its shocking humour, Fiennes approaches his monologue as if he were lancing a boil in an embarrassing place, his rendition full of ugliness, hilarity, and pain.

The Gate Theatre has once again demonstrated its mastery of all things Beckettian, and these three virtuosic performances will be talked about for years to come. We can only lament the fact that they won't be coming to Melbourne any time soon.

[The Wild Harp]

Und noch einer.

The Daily Telegraph
First Love review
By Simon Ferguson


RALPH Fiennes made 55 minutes feel like a lingering moment last night in a fluid, flawless opening of First Love.

With the simplest of sets and the drabbest of costumes, the masterful actor brought vigour, humour and languid venom to the densely woven Beckett prose.

He plays a curiously likeable loser who tells how he was first made homeless on his father's death and then meets and falls in love with a prostitute.

He moves in with her, she has their child, and he leaves at the moment of its birth.

Its not quite Waiting For Godot, but Beckett's blackly humourless nihilism and his way of negating ideas as they arise are strong and constant throughout.

Gate Theatres' Michael Colgan has long laboured to spark recognition of Beckett as Irish rather than French, and human rather than bleak.

Lately he has branched into seeing it more as his work than his crusade.

He's taken to choosing his pick of great actors, letting Beckett breathe to a wider audience.

In Fiennes, with this adaption he has forged a rendition of Beckett's written prose that burns and lives on the stage.

It seems amazing that someone could more than memorise something as long as this, enough to deliver it as honestly as Fiennes.

But Colgan tells a story about how he thought Fiennes was reading Beckett to him on the phone soon after they agreed to stage his world premiere performance and he heard traffic noise and he realised Fiennes wasn't reading at all, he'd memorised the book in a matter of days and was reciting it on the run.

His grasp of the text is palpable and powerful.

Chaos and caution collide in Fiennes' Lonely Man.

Fiennes is not Fiennes. He is a skinny, forlorn, selfish, pathetic and querulous man stepping straight from the pages of Beckett's novella onto the stage at NIDA's Parade.

Fiennes' delivery of the difficult writing is infused with the vital Irish rhythms that marked Beckett's work even after being translated from the French that he insisted it was written with.

"I have no bones to pick with graveyards.

"Who cares how things pass, provided they pass," he says later.

By the times Fiennes delivers the final lines, the audience is completely enveloped in his character.

"There it is," he says. "You either love or you don't."

Anyone who loves language and acting should love this play, a coup for the Sydney Festival and a treat for discerning Sydneysiders.

NIDA Parade Theatres

Second preview tonight 7pm then January 11, 16 and 19 at 7pm and January 14, 17 and 21 at 9pm.

Sold out but $25 tickets available on the day from festival booth in Martin Place

But Colgan tells a story about how he thought Fiennes was reading Beckett to him on the phone soon after they agreed to stage his world premiere performance and he heard traffic noise and he realised Fiennes wasn't reading at all, he'd memorised the book in a matter of days and was reciting it on the run.

Das liebe ich so an Ralph. Wenn er einmal von etwas begeistert ist, dann geht er voll darin auf. Ich kann ihn mir bildlich vorstellen, wie er durch London geht und den Text ins Handy spricht.

[Ophelia]

Das liebe ich so an Ralph. Wenn er einmal von etwas begeistert ist, dann geht er voll darin auf. Ich kann ihn mir bildlich vorstellen, wie er durch London geht und den Text ins Handy spricht.

Da stimme ich dir zu!!

[Dolarhyde]

so oft wie er theater spielt, merkt man schon, dass er 'ne absolute rampensau ist was meinst du wie lange braucht er bis er den kompletten text drauf hat? ich meine einen 55-minuten-monolog zu lernen

[Ophelia]

Bei seiner Motivation hat er's sicher relativ schnell drin

[Dolarhyde]

selbst wenn meine motivation ganz groß war *schwör* , hab ich schon probs schul-gedichte auswendig zu lernen aber ralph scheint auf dem gebiet ein genie zu sein

ist eigentlich bekannt, ob er schon mal einen richtigen blackout auf der bühne hatte?

[AmonFan]

was meinst du wie lange braucht er bis er den kompletten text drauf hat? ich meine einen 55-minuten-monolog zu lernen

mir gruselts schon wenn ich nur daran denke solche texte auswendig lernen zu müssen...aber wenn ich es mir mal so überlege...ich muss ja schulbedingt zu jedem zipfel ne präsentation halten...da bin ich auch eifrig am auswendig lernen...na ja aber das ist alles nicht zu vergleichen mit dem was er da tut...und dann noch, ich meine das muss man sich mal vorstellen, texte aus hamlet auswendig zu können nachdem das alles schon 11 jahre zurückliegt....mein respekt....

ist eigentlich bekannt, ob er schon mal einen richtigen blackout auf der bühne hatte?

ich weiß nix von einem blackout...mir fallen nur ganz spontan die rotgepunkteten boxershorts ein!!!

[Dolarhyde]

ich weiß nix von einem blackout...mir fallen nur ganz spontan die rotgepunkteten boxershorts ein!!!

die geschichte ist auch peinlicher als jeder geistige blackout

[AmonFan]

die geschichte ist auch peinlicher als jeder geistige blackout

oh ja aber er kann drüber lachen!!!^^

[Dolarhyde]

... und wir auch!

[The Wild Harp]

Bei seiner Motivation hat er's sicher relativ schnell drin

Das denke ich auch.

und dann noch, ich meine das muss man sich mal vorstellen, texte aus hamlet auswendig zu können nachdem das alles schon 11 jahre zurückliegt....mein respekt....

Was er am Telefon/Handy zitiert hat, war First Love von Beckett, also das Stück, das er aktuell spielt.

ist eigentlich bekannt, ob er schon mal einen richtigen blackout auf der bühne hatte?

Ein Blackout ist mir auch nicht bekannt. Ich kenne auch nur die Geschichte mit den Boxershorts.

[AmonFan]

Zitat:
und dann noch, ich meine das muss man sich mal vorstellen, texte aus hamlet auswendig zu können nachdem das alles schon 11 jahre zurückliegt....mein respekt....


think
Was er am Telefon/Handy zitiert hat, war First Love von Beckett, also das Stück, das er aktuell spielt.

remember inside the actors studio???....darauf hab ich angespielt.....

[The Wild Harp]

Ach so. Das hab' ich leider nicht gesehen.

[The Wild Harp]

Er spielt in Sydney ja nicht nur in dem Stück, sondern macht auch Beckett-Lesungen. An einem Abend konnte er wohl aus irgendwelchen Gründen nicht, und Lou Reed ist für ihn eingesprungen. Ziemlich ärgerlich für Leute, die ein Ticket für diesen Abend hatten, um ihn zu sehen. Ich frage mich, was er so wichtiges vorhatte?

Irgendwelche Ideen?

http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/sydney-festival-diary/2007/01/21/1169330763063.html

A single seat to Lou Reed's Berlin reached $350 on eBay, but a lucky audience saw him for an eighth of that on Saturday as the rock legend appeared as a last- minute stand-in for the actor Ralph Fiennes.

So where was Fiennes? The audience at the Parade Theatre for a reading of Samuel Beckett's work was not told, but a festival spokeswoman said yesterday there was "a clash in his schedule ... he needed a day off".

Fiennes, who gave his final performance of Beckett's First Love yesterday, was seen sloping through the foyer before the Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill show at the City Recital Hall on Thursday night. He seemed to be doing his best to avoid notice, eyes down and chewing a toothpick. Wearing a lovely sky-blue shirt, though.

OK, he is not in movie glamour mode, as an audience was reminded at the festival's Eat Drink Talk Art chat.

Michael Colgan, artistic director of the Gate Theatre in Dublin, which produced the festival's Beckett season, told the audience: "My daughter said to me today, 'I think Ralph Fiennes is a great guy but do you think all this Beckett is having an effect on him?' I said, 'What do you mean, Sophie?' and she said, 'I'd love to hang out with him when he was making Maid in Manhattan'."