Peter Viney's Blog

By Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Directed by Holly Race Roughan
Set design Bob Crowley
Costume Design Loren Elstein
Video design Luke Hall
Composer & sound design Max Pappenheim

Ralph Fiennes Season
Bath Theatre Royal
Saturday 11th October 2025  14.30

CAST
Ralph Fiennes – Larry, talk show host
Francesca Annis – Athena, Larry’s mother
Rosalind Eleazar – Marianne
Rachel Tucker – Ava

The first two minutes. Flashing video. A bar. He doesn’t have a credit card. Only Reward cards. Can’t get a drink. Ralph Fiennes with a shirt with a big blob of red plastic affixed to represent blood. A figure in black with a black eye patch. Is this Charon? The boatman across the River Styx.

Stage revolve. Is he in Limbo? Fiennes changes blood blob shirt to identical blue one. They do a slow motion tap dance. The stage revolves, a pianist comes on with grand piano for thirty seconds (the pianist will not be seen or heard again until the curtain call) while Rachel Tucker (as the woman in black) sings the Rodgers and Hart song There’s A Small Hotel. It all looks confusing and a bit deeply meaningful. I shuffle in my seat. Hmm, I thought. I bet we’re seeing the end at the beginning, we’ll go through and get back here …

I wish I’d read Domenic Cavendish’s review in The Telegraph before I saw it. He points out the biographical references to Fiennes, which if I’d known them would have made more sense of it. Rebecca Lenkiewicz points out in the programme that Fiennes commissioned her to write the play for the season. Once Cavendish led me to look up his biography on Wiki, I imagine he gave her a plot outline first and asked her to write it. Is the play an exercise in exorcising personal demons? Is it based on opposites? A play about a fading star, featuring a man with three Academy Award nominations, the most recent just in the last year for Conclave (he should have won). At the height of success, everyone fears the downturn. I can relate to it. I remember when an ELT magazine listed the ten best selling ELT videos of the year. OUP had nine of the ten. We’d written eight of them, including 1 to 7. There is a point then where you (rightly) realise, ‘Uh, oh … it’s not going up from here.’ Mind you, Ralph Fiennes has stayed at ‘the height of his career’ for thirty plus years.

The play stars Ralph Fiennes as Larry a fading TV talk show host, and Francesca Annis as his mother. I don’t read celeb gossip so only know Fiennes’ work, not his biography. It was pointed out that Fiennes played Hamlet to her Gertrude on Broadway in 1995. He won the Tony Award for Best Actor. She was eighteen years older than him. Their subsequent affair lasted eleven years and broke up nearly twenty years ago.

In the play Larry wants Marianne (Rosalind Eleazar) on his chat show. They have not met since their affair ended twenty years ago. He was (about) eighteen years older than her. Now she is a major award winning film star, with an Oscar and several Tony Awards. She mentions an episode in their past where he had an unfortunate quickie with someone. Google ‘Fiennes Qantas.’ I nearly wrote it’s a kind of reversal, but let’s cross out ‘kind of.’

The Bath Theatre Royal trailer:
Ralph Fiennes: The play deals with intimacy and it deals with past relationships. It’s really the story of reconnecting with a past lover and the crisis that that meeting brings about.

Larry is a talk show host. He has been dropped by the major channel, served a spell on the Shopping Channel and ended up on ‘another channel.’ Marianne agrees to appear on the show, and they cause a scandal when she sits on his lap and then they start openly snogging on screen on live TV. In The Guardian, Arifa Akbar wrote It is rather a stretch that she is drawn back to Larry, who has all the energy and charisma of a punctured tyre. This is a central flaw, together with equating Larry with “Showbiz” with the attempts to tap dance throughout. A tap dancer? That conjures up Bruce Forsyth, but he was a compere not a talk show host. The major TV chat show hosts were / are immensely likeable and can rapidly establish rapport: Michael Parkinson (journalist), David Letterman (radio show host), Terry Wogan (disc jockey), Conan O’Brien (scriptwriter, comedian), Graham Norton and James Corden (actors). Even the ‘spoof ones’ like Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everidge and Caroline Ahearne as Mrs Merton had that ability. Larry has absolutely none of that. His mother refers to his talk show as Celebrity Shags. If only.

The actual interview is funny. Larry doesn’t listen when Marianne starts to say something interesting, he fails to go with it and goes back to the boring stuff on his prompt cards. We used to do a comedy sketch just like that. Ours went something like:

Host: Tell me about The Story of Samson..
Actor: That was one crap film. The director was so drunk he fell off his chair and started snoring in the sex scene, and then at the after show party, Marlon Brando leapt on the table with Marilyn Monroe, so Marlon dropped his trousers and Marilyn said …
Host: Did you read the Milton version before you accepted the role?

None of the listed chat show hosts would have done that. A mild puzzle was that Larry and Marianne met in New York. She lived in LA, then San Francisco. One would assume from the text that she was American but she has a British accent. It doesn’t matter, she convinced as a major actor. There is a school of thought that actors should not “put on” accents but work in their natural one. I understand it, though it has broken down on a couple of Shakespeare where an actor has decided his unadulterated Glaswegian should be retained.

Anyway, they have dinner together. He asks to go back to her hotel (I don’t think a Hollywood megastar would be in a small hotel). Things progress. She goes to see his mum.

Then there’s the family thing. Fiennes has plenty of stellar family. In the play Larry has a twin brother, Richard, who is self-isolating because of immune disorders. Richard is seen projected (I couldn’t see what it was projected on, but it was crystal clear). So Fiennes is acting with his own pre-filmed image (with added beard, hair and glasses, though in the theatre trailer film he was bearded so that was probably when they filmed it). The projected image was full stage height, which meant a giant Richard dwarfs Larry in the scene. That feels unbalanced, though you do get the detail of his expressions. He is after all, a consummate film actor.

At the end, he plays Richard live on stage in a scene with Marianne. How he got a convincing beard on that quickly, I cannot imagine.

There are two long scenes with his mother, Athena, played by Francesca Annis. After the problem with the chat show snog, he has been canned by the TV company. He has to go to his mum.

She calls Larry Richard, and calls Richard Larry. The scenes with Mum are the high points of the play. We felt that the writer really got involved and inspired when writing Athena’s part, and Francesca Annis was easily the best thing in the production when she delivered the lines.

Athena has named herself after the goddess of wisdom (her real name is Debbie). She swigs wine, smokes marijuana, and tells tales of being Sectioned (legally sent to a mental hospital). She is facing an amputation because she refuses to stop smoking. She offers Marianne a joint.

She is very funny, and her near monologues are excellent scriptwriting, and stand out in a play where much of the rest is not.

The projection was interesting throughout, but the amount of fizzy wiggly lines create havoc with Karen’s occassional double vision, which is light stimulated. This affects her rating.

I’m not doing the ending, but there is a coda on the showbiz theme where Rachel Tucker (as Ava, the woman in black with eye patch) does a slow motion tap dance which breaks up into a final fall, while a high stepping chorus line is projected behind her.

The showbiz / tap dance is a weird series of intervals throughout. Fiennes can’t tap dance at any Bruce Forsyth showbiz level. The Daily Mail cattily pointed out that he dances in this while his ex-wife is appearing on Strictly Come Dancing.

The same week Ms Kingston, 62, graced Strictly, Fiennes released a trailer of him dancing with former love Francesca Annis in rehearsals for their play Small Hotel. So perhaps it was karmic retribution when Fiennes’ opening night at Theatre Royal Bath last Friday descended into chaos as the revolving stage broke down with a crunching sound when the play reached its climax.

The showbiz reference just doesn’t fit talk shows, apart from them being in the same department at the BBC for years.

LENGTH: Another 90 minute play with no break. We’re torn between ‘Good, we’ll be home by 6.30 in daylight’ and feeling shortchanged after a two hour plus drive each way to see it.

It was also over-priced for a four person play at a provincial theatre matinee in uncomfortable seats at £56.67 each. The price of Fiennes? He has said he’d like to do another Bath season. He’s put plenty of bums on seats – the theatre looked full, and prices were higher than normal. He’s been profitable. Grace Pervades from the season is about to open in the West End after this production. I gave that a 4 star rating. The trouble is As You Like It was mediocre to us (***) in a year when the RSC, The Globe, and Chichester were all having outstanding years for Shakespeare productions. Two of the three plays in his Bath season this year have seen Ralph Fiennes and the female lead playing performers / actors.

Here for Small Hotel the applause was muted, polite. From a packed house for a major star, I’d say it was lukewarm. No whistling or cheering, no hands up in the air, no one stood to applaud. On the steps going down a woman said Well, I have no idea what that was about.

We did our one or two word summaries walking to the car park.
Me: Pretentious
Karen: Atrocious

I was thinking of Charon, the tap dancing and the interspersed haikus. (Why?) I thought with the biography added, ‘Up itself’ was a two word review. It gets two stars because all the actors perform well (as you would expect) and some comedy lines are good, mainly emanating from Francesca Annis.

**

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

I used to say if you get two stars from The Guardian AND The Telegraph, it’s two stars.

Four stars
Kris Hallett, What’s On Stage ****

Three stars
Cheryl Markovsky, Broadway World ***
Small Hotel offers way too many exciting ideas – alas, none of which string together coherently into an easy-to-comprehend piece. By the time we reached the end (and let’s not talk about the ending, which I didn’t feel paid off at all), we felt distinctly cheated and a bit dissatisfied that a new play with plenty of encouraging elements never coalesced into something special.

Two stars
Arifa Akbar, The Guardian **
Small Hotel is a play that defies category, or even explanation. This might be a work of outlandish genius, or a devised end of year A-level project featuring world-class actors (led by Ralph Fiennes and Francesca Annis). It is very funny, although perhaps it doesn’t always mean to be, and well acted, despite the ropey material.

Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph, **
As Larry he gives a performance without vanity – he often looks drained and pained, ‘yesterday’s man made flesh.’ All the same a crucial sense of psychological depth, and the whole thing mattering, is missing. Despite everyone’s efforts, a whimper not a bang of a finale.

Holly O’Mahony, The Stage **

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

RALPH FIENNES

Small Hotel, Bath 2025
As You Like It, Bath 2025 (DIRECTOR)
Grace Pervades, Bath 2025 (Henry Irving)
Conclave (film)
Richard III, Almedia 2016 (Richard III)
Man & Superman, National Theatre
The Grand Budapest Hotel (film)
Cemetery Junction (film)
Hail Caesar! (film)
The King’s Man (film)
The Dig (film)

HOLLY RACE ROUGHAN (DIRECTOR)
The New Real, by David Edgar, RSC The Other Place, 2024
The House Party by Laura Thomas, Chichester 2024
A View From The Bridge, Chichester 2023 
Hedda Tesman, Chichester 2019

RACHEL TUCKER
Sunset Boulevard, Savoy Theatre, 2023
Communicating Doors, Alan Ayckbourn, Menier Chocolate Factory 2015