Ralph Fiennes Gets an Oedipus Complex???

Ralph Fiennes hopes to return to the London stage in a new production directed by former Almeida joint artistic director Jonathan Kent, whose revival of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer Fiennes is currently starring in on Broadway. According to today’s Daily Mail, Fiennes and Kent will team up for a new version of Oedipus, Sophocles’ classic Greek tragedy about a man who kills his father and has sex with his mother. It’s expected to form part of the National’s season in 2008, after which it may tour to ancient amphitheatres. Fiennes has previously appeared in Kent’s celebrated Almeida productions of Coriolanus and Richard II at Gainsborough Studios in Shoreditch as well as the 1995 Hackney Empire-staged Hamlet, which won him a Tony and a New York Drama Desk Best Actor Award when it transferred to Broadway. The actor was last seen at the National in Christopher Hampton’s 2003 play The Talking Cure and was last seen on the London stage in 2004 leading a 100-strong cast in Deborah Warner’s epic staging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the Barbican. An NT spokesperson told Whatsonstage.com that Oedipus is in the very early stages of development, but is scheduled for an autumn 2008 opening.

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