Kenneth Branagh
returned to his hometown of Belfast for a work that shows that you can do burlesque
and
Shakespeare
The first thing I did when Kenneth Branagh, returned to his hometown of Belfast two weeks ago was to visit his former home. It was a red brick terrace Mont Collier Road in an area north of Protestant Belfast, where Branagh had lived with his parents and his older brother, Bill, to nine years and the family moved to a new life England.
Now 41 years later, Branagh still remember the streets of his childhood, how he used to walk to school and that everyone knew his name. "When they were called for tea, if you could not see his mother, the cry of the door for you drums jungle fashion," he said. "Someone just two streets that tell you they wanted to go home." But when it came to the mountain of Collier Road, Branagh found that the house was gone. "It was like a desert, surrounded by a fence was not small park in front of the school remember paced, but I went to school -.. Nothing "He stops, takes a sip of coffee. "As my grandmother would say, I could feel full."
backBelfast Branagh has been moving for several reasons. There is a sense of home, to come to terms with things that have changed and adolescence he left behind. Branagh When he went to England in 1970, problems began just one year before the Battle of the Bogside between residents and protesters faithful Catholics in Derry had been suppressed by the British Army. Now, four decades later, the province is at peace, more or less, and Branagh has returned to a country very different. "There is a much stronger sense that Northern Ireland is part of the world today," he said. "I used to feel that there was a kind of siege mentality light for some reason, a small pie thing going on sometimes. But there is an energy feels very, very positive about the place. " turned 50 last December, is in a particular stage of the contemplative life. "We are looking in two directions. I feel as young as I felt, but at the same time, I have a 30-year career and I look back through it and see ... just want a large extent, make the most of things if they pan "- she gestures to a huge raspberry and white chocolate cake on the table -". program or whatever "
"The show" is
The Painkiller at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, a new comedy directed by Sean Foley, who adapted the work of a French farce has hired a killer and a suicidal divorcee originally written by Francis Veber. Branagh and Foley have worked together before - the duo won an Olivier for
The game I wrote in 2002, which Branagh directed and Foley co-wrote and starred in - and clearly share the same love of burlesque.
The Painkiller , who co-stars, Rob Brydon, it's worth 80 minutes of an effervescent energy pratfalls and falling pants as the two main characters happen to cross the adjacent hotel rooms.
Branagh's easy to forget that is good in comedy. It is still suspended in the public consciousness as a Shakespearean actor, a classical luvv who spends his life in his pants and wigs. It is true that Branagh made his debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 80's and continued to direct and star in a series of adaptations of Shakespeare to great success for the big screen, including Oscar-nominated
Enrique V
(1989),
Much Ado About Nothing
(1993) and Hamlet
(1996). More recently, he was praised for his portrayal of Detective Kurt Wallander of the adaptation of the novels of Henning Mankell BBC1. The Painkiller is his first appearance on stage and in turn, hailed by critics as the title role in Chekhov's melancholy
Ivanov Wyndham Theatre in London in 2008. People are surprised when you find that you have a lighter side?
"Yes, yes, I am surprised," he says when we meet in the lobby of the letter in the morning after a performance. "I think I'll move on to a kind of category." His eyes are tired and pouchy, but otherwise it looks slim and finished. It is lighter than it appears on the stage and screen, with a boyish face and tiny hands than just a shock when you shake. It's his voice, I realize - the liquid, the combination resonance of the oil and dust - which gives Branagh's presence and charisma. Listening to him can be quite hypnotic. Every sentence he utters seems to come with pre-formed their own pace, as if he had thought a lot about how to say something, even if the issue has requested "I have always loved pure comedy, silly antics," he says. "It always makes me laugh is
You've been frameda Saturday night -. My wife [Branagh was married to art director Lindsay Brunnock since 2003] laugh because I am powerless against it. It's just people down and is so horrible, because it is so cruel, but who laugh when someone mounted on a skateboard wall. I really do not know why it is not funny to some people but for me it is. "
He sees the same "underbeat of violence" in The Painkiller
. "It keeps the kind of hysteria in the evening - the work seems necessary - because you're always one step horrible damage that is covered in bruises from him .. "
Branagh is clear that the major sports. At some point in the game, his character is accidentally injected with tranquilizers and stunning semi-comatose on stage Branagh is one of the highlights of the night. The race is sold and Belfast, it seems, is more than happy to find it. At night, I see
The Painkiller
, Branagh is happy when he entered as a series in primetime gameshow. Is it good to be back? His face remains static, but her eyes I film. "I find it very emotional to be back here." But then, spent a lot in the intervening years.
Branagh is the son of a Protestant working-class parents. His father, William, was a carpenter who worked in England for long periods. "This is where the work was," says Branagh. "He came home every weekend and it was not the best for the stability of the family."
In 1970 the family moved to Reading after an offer of a rented house, is part of a job. His mother was pregnant with younger sister Joyce Branagh. "My mother never wanted to move. None of us wanted, "he said. "But the offer of a house came when we had the experience of the riots in the street while he was away. It was scary because at night, a peaceful solution, mixed Protestant-Catholic the street has become a spectacular landscape in the future where all the stones were raised by the neighbors to put a barricade at both ends. "A group of Shankill Road had arrived and checked all the houses of Catholic people and throwing bricks at them, just to say:" We know where you are. "It was a kind of manic, suddenly scary warning shots and that meant a lot of Catholic families left. Suddenly we were in a street where the guy who was the factor was now a night watchman. There were men with clubs start construction improvised armored cars after dark. I remember being really a radical transformation of what had previously been a place where you felt very, very, very safe. "
In reading, Branagh fell with his Irish accent to avoid being bullied at school. Coincidentally, I had almost exactly the same experience as a child, but in reverse: I was born in England and moved to Derry for four years. My accent marked me and I never liked speaking in public, preferring to see people and listen. I wonder if Branagh felt the same, if the observation of others is what indirectly led him to become an actor?
"I think a fascinating idea," he said. "I think if you are a child and is between two lives, it is very difficult to understand how it affects your character, but I 'm sure you do not ... I pulled out of Ireland, far from their roots, and possibly have a complicated relationship with him, but I think the sense of character development seemed to be in Ireland in the mid-large family gatherings, where people entertain , sang, told stories ... so there was a sense that part of what we grew up with people singing and telling stories was normal. "
After appearing in a couple of school productions, Branagh went to Rada. One of his first jobs was to record graduation
TheBilly plays for the BBC, written and Belfast. From there he went to the CBC, then co-founded the success of the Renaissance Theatre Company in 1987. Appearing on stage as Hamlet, a year later, Branagh was hailed as "the next Laurence Olivier," a label that has been ongoing since then ("The whole world was once again Olivier," he says dryly).
There was no doubt of his precocity. At the age of 28 years, he directed his own version of the film
Henry V and won a Bafta . In the same year he married Emma Thompson and for a time the two have become media shorthand for a certain type of over-thespishness seriously. "We went up there and prominent, and I am sure guilty of saying stupid things, but really do not know what is imagined by luvviedom intense. If it's inside and outside the Ivy have parts where no one had a name, everyone called "daaahling," which was not and is not the truth. I also like a small theater with the best jokes of them, but I always had a kind of feeling that sometimes it actually feels like a good job. "
time that Branagh was 29, had published his autobiography. At 33, Robert De Niro directed and Helena Bonham Carter in his version of Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
Joe Queenan
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น