Tango at the End of Winter (1991)

Brani estratti da:

TOUGH ACTOR TO FOLLOW
By Ann McFerran
(Entertainment Weekly August 8, 1991)

But Rickman, who is in his early 40s, has not returned home to wallow in his hour as conquering movie star: He is here to rehearse a play, his first since his portrayal of the arch-seducer Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses propelled him to fame and film offers four years ago. Rickman will play the leading role in Kunio Shimizu's Tango at the End of Winter, directed by Japan's top theater director, Yukio Ninagawa. The production will debut at Scotland's Edinburgh Festival this month and later transfer to London's West End.
Rickman's decision to abandon Hollywood for the stage just as his film career is soaring has left his American friends baffled. "Coming back to do a play at a Scottish festival must seem very perverse," he admits in his rich baritone. "Even I thought I was mad. A lot of the time I hate the theater," he goes on. "You think, I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight. Oh, the theater is a scary place to be." But Rickman never really doubted his decision: "There was just this inner voice in me saying, 'It's time to go onstage.' There are particular muscles which go flabby if you don't use them."
Rickman's new workout place is a huge film studio bearing the play's elaborate set, a skeletal re-creation of a movie house. Tango takes place in an old cinema, where an actor-Rickman returns to explore his past and his psyche, having lost the nerve to go onstage. "That's the thudding irony," says Rickman, with masochistic delight.
In rehearsal, the actors appear to have taken their sartorial cue from the Japanese director, who is dressed totally in black. Ninagawa speaks no English, so an interpreter shadows him. Wearing black jeans and T-shirt under a loose gray jacket, Rickman sits at the back of the stage, his head in his hands, as the scene begins. Then, to a seductive tango, he takes the hand of co-star Beatie Edney, and the man who was so comically unappealing in Robin Hood exudes a feline sexiness. The couple dances, their legs, arms, and bodies moving in balletic unison. As Rickman pulls Edney toward him, she entwines her body around his. It is a moment of palpable eroticism.
The rehearsal continues with stops and starts until, in the final scene, young actors appear from every corner, waving and cheering-commotion the director means to symbolize the spirit of youth. Though Rickman reveres the director-"to work with Ninagawa is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,"he gushes-he is concerned. He raised his hand. "Just one question, "he says. "Are we supposed to like those young people?"
Through the interpreter, the director replies affirmatively.
"It's just that in England, we have these things called football hooligans...,"Rickman says, and the cast and crew collapse with laughter. "And I think that's slightly what I'm seeing."
The phenomenon of drunken soccer fans is translated into Japanese-with difficulty, since such behavior is almost unimaginable in that country and Ninagawa ponders it. "No, they're not hooligans," he replies. Rickman smiles his quizzical halfsmile-one senses he still has his doubts-and work resumes.

REVIVAL MEETINGS (1991)
By James Christopher
(Time Out August 12-14, 1991)

Qui la traduzione

To complete a busy month, Rickman is also preparing for a prodigious return to the London stage. He plays the lead in Yukio Ninagawa's production of Kunio Shimizu's "Tango at the End of Winter", a modern Japanese play Ninagawa directed for the 1988 Tokyo season. It's an intriguing departure of this near-legendary Japanese director, who known for his ability to cross-fertilize culture and demolish barriers between Theatre forms. " Tango at the End of Winter" is Ninagawa's first London production of a contemporary Japanese play after flirtations with Macbeth, Medea, the Tempest, and Suicide for Love. The director was keen to explore a more naturalistic approach-hence his debut with a European cast.

"It's a very hard play to be articulate about because it touches all sorts of nerve ends," says Rickman. "It does have a narrative but, as Ninagawa says: "We find out about this play by doing it." Shimizu's script centers on an acting community in Japan which values European traditions-rather in the manner, I suspect, that Ninagawa chooses to interpret his classical Japanese productions. Curiously, however, the focus is on a particularly Japanese notion of an ageing leading actor: the actor (Rickman) who gets to 40 and panics about his fading career because that's when, in Japanese tradition, his power diminishes. Japanese actresses can go on forever, it seems, but the appeal of their actors fades with time. Unlike the RSC's production of Mephisto (Rickman again played an actor), which was firmly rooted in politics, this production concentrates on the actor's personal dreams and nightmares. It is full of those dangerously indulgent games actors like to play with themselves.

"One of the concerns I had about his role was that the play is from a culture which puts its actors on pedestals" says Rickman. "Delving around inside an actor's psyche and paranoia is therefore an intrinsically interesting activity. This, of course, is not true in Britain, where actors spend a lot of time working on rubbish tips, standing in dole queues and on whatever the opposite of a pedestal is. But I hope the audience will see the play as more than just applicable to actors. It's also about lying, and how close acting is to madness. It's also a curious thing to be doing because the actor I play has not been on stage for three years. I haven't been on stage for four. There are a lot of gremlins out there for both of us."

Edited by Arwen68 - 3/7/2022, 21:54