It shows less in his screen performances, but on the stage outings it’s growing more noticeable. The shoulders hunch slightly, he leads with the forehead, then a couple of rapid shakes of the head and a quaver in the voice, and shazam!, for a second or two, Ralph Fiennes becomes Leonard Rossiter. It’s odd that one of our finest dramatic performers should seem to invoke a legendary comic actor (and one of Stanley Kubrick’s stock supporting players) from a generation ago. Mind you, it was odder still when he was playing Coriolanus; at least the Rossiterian strain of put-upon frustration suits the character of Jack Tanner in Bernard Shaw’s wordy comedy.
    
The main narrative is, deliberately, classically straightforward: a couple of thwarted and ultimately resolved love matches. Shaw, of course, reverses everything so that Fiennes’ Tanner is the one pursued by Indira Varma’s Ann, the master Tanner is in thrall to the knowledge of his chauffeur Straker (and not just his mechanical knowledge: at one point he corrects a French literary reference) and so forth. But my God, it is wordy. Shaw himself cut the third act almost entirely when he directed its 1905 première, but Simon Godwin disdains such tactics which would take this revival’s running time under three hours. There comes a point when one stops admiring Shaw’s intellect and argumentation and wishes he would just edit himself a bit. For me, this point came during that third act (a 45-minute dream sequence which has in the past been staged separately under the title Don Juan In Hell), when it occurred to me that aphorism after untrimmed aphorism, aperçu after metaphysical aperçu were pouring out but to no dramatic end other than the playwright simply getting these observations off his chest.
    
Apart from Fiennes, the standout actors are Faye Castelow, who has to wait until the final act to show her mettle as half of the ingénue romantic couple, and Tim McMullan, who sloughs off his usual onstage languor to swashbuckle as a Spanish brigand and the Devil. McMullan could teach Fiennes a thing or two about rollicking. His attempts at the dynamism and mould-breaking of the Tanner character don’t always come off. At times he stands, one leg slightly forward, leaning slightly back, intending to look raffish but merely seeming as if he is modelling his conspicuously unworn-in jeans. The vigour of Shaw’s dialogue itself is never enough to carry characterisation through. Similarly, Godwin’s decision to stage the play in modern dress (with occasional updates so that at one point Tanner receives a text instead of a note) does not make it either sound or feel contemporary. Still, you always get a lot of Shaw for your money, though that’s not always a plus. In this case, though, it also means a lot of Fiennes… and a generous dash of Rossiter.
    
Written for the Financial Times.