A man for all seasons
Interview Alistair Duncan He’s an actor’s actor, and a director’s director – but will daring Kenneth Branagh be able to convince the world of opera, too? KENNETH BRANAGH IS being remarkably candid about the difficulties he’s had in the past with that most arcane of art forms, opera. “I’d always been unable to find a [...]
Interview Alistair Duncan
He’s an actor’s actor, and a director’s director – but will daring Kenneth Branagh be able to convince the world of opera, too?
KENNETH BRANAGH IS being remarkably candid
about the difficulties he’s had in the past with
that most arcane of art forms, opera. “I’d always
been unable to find a connection personally,” he
confesses. “Performance seemed distant to me – I couldn’t
identify emotionally. Sometimes the language was a problem,
sometimes the plot, sometimes the acting styles were a little,
you know, old-fashioned. For me, at its least meaningful, it
was like being in attendance at an animated concert.”
And now, let’s reveal Kenneth Branagh’s latest project… a
film adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute! Admittedly, it’s
a version re-set in the blood-spattered trenches of the First
World War and given 21st-century assistance with
spectacular computer-generated imagery. But, it
remains unquestionably, categorically an opera.
So why has Branagh – someone who claims
to have only been to the opera “half a dozen
times” and admits that, musically, his heart
belongs to the bell-bottomed sounds of 1970s
pop – now turned to this genre?
alt="Acting opposite Emma Thompson in Much Ado About Nothing"/>
“I wanted to see if I could find a connection,”
he explains. “Of course, if you listen to the music,
you can. The film is produced by the Peter Moores
Foundation, whose aim is to invite people to opera
who don’t feel that it is their favourite thing. The task was
to see if, in a different medium, it can be experienced in a way
that opens it up for them. That was a great challenge.”
Branagh confesses to having been nervous about being
a new boy in the self-contained world of opera. His breadth
of experience as a filmmaker, however, gives him a quiet
self-assurance when approaching this project.
alt="Playing the Prince of Denmark in the 1996 film version of Hamlet"/>
“I was glad to be doing it in film,” he says. “I felt that I met
opera halfway. I thought that if I actually went into the opera
house, I would feel like a complete stranger in a strange land.
But instead, I had to go to opera, and opera people had to go
to film. We met in a nervous, rather bonding middle place.”
It’s not really that surprising that Branagh has opted to
take on a Mozart opera. His career has been defined by
tussling with the classic works of cultural giants – the dramas
of Chekhov or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for instance.
Or, most obviously, the plays of Shakespeare, which he has
returned to again and again throughout his career, both as
actor and director. Is he now setting out to popularise
Mozart in the same way that he did the great Bard?
alt="Branagh as Henry V in his reworking of the Shakespeare play"/>
“Well, I wish I could say that I’m popularising or
broadening the appeal,” he says, in that soft, malleable voice
that has accompanied him through such majestic on-screen
performances as Hamlet and Henry V. “But if you step back
for a second, you realise that 400 years on in Shakespeare’s
case, or 200 years on in Mozart’s, they really don’t need
any help from me. Their appeal is already very wide. That
is why they have survived. What I think is important is
to re-examine these works, as they are reflected by our
ever-so-quickly changing society. These works have to earn
their right to be alive and well in the 21st century. So it’s
not broadening their appeal so much, but being part of the
tradition of explaining why they are classics.”
To be honest, I had expected Branagh to be a charming
and articulate but slightly self-regarding interviewee, partly, I
suppose, due to his enthusiasm for taking on such grand, egoamplifying
fare as Shakespeare. But while he is the former, he
also reveals his humility at every juncture of our conversation
– from his frank admission that he is a “complete novice”
in the vocabulary of opera to claiming that, in spite of his
well-known acting calibre, he “can’t pretend the world bangs
on his door every day” offering him work. And he seems
genuinely pleased when I tell him that one of the things I
enjoyed most about his Magic Flute was its clarity.
