Q:  But some good work along the way.  You were at the National in what most people regard as its glory days. 

DJ:  I think so!  I was there for eight and a half years, and it was the “Golden Age.”  I was there from ’63 to ’71 and it was wonderful.

Q:  Were you overawed by it all?

DJ:  Oh yes.  We started out in Chichester the summer of  ’63.  I shall never forget it because that company became the first National Company, and it opened on my birthday, in October ’63 with Hamlet.  O’Toole’s Hamlet.  I was playing Laertes. By chance, because Jeremy Brett had gone to Hollywood.  I shall never forget the last days at Chichester when the entire company had to be interviewed by Sir Laurence and co.  We went, in five minute intervals, over to the offices at Chichester which were just a bit apart from the theatre.  So all one day there was a continuous stream of actors going to be told whether they’d be employed at the National.  It was a hideous way of doing it, because you saw from the actor coming back whether they were, and you were passing them on your way.  About five didn’t get in, and the rest of us did.  It was lucky that I had that rejection from the RSC.  I think it worked out best that way.

I, Claudius, 1976

Q:  Do you remember your first meeting with Olivier? 

DJ:  Yes!  The first time ever was in a rehearsal room in Chelsea called Pettit House where we’d all assembled for……(pauses) No, I’m lying.  The first meeting was in the dressing room at Birmingham when he saw Henry VIII.    He came to a matinee, and I was playing Henry VIII.   I was sharing a dressing room with Wolsey.  Wolsey always stayed between shows, and I always used to go out between shows in those days.  Go to the Kardomah Café for tea and egg on toast.  I used to get out of my make-up very quickly- I still do that!  You don’t see me for dust after the show.  I remember, as Henry, I had the padding, and the wigs, and the facial hair.  Anyway, he came round.  We were told halfway through the afternoon that he was out there- of course we all turned to water, to jelly- and that he would like to come round afterwards.  He came round, and he came into our dressing room and I was changed and I was ready to go.  He came in and he said to me, “Hello, well done!”  Then he went to Wolsey, Arthur Pentelow, and enthused over Arthur’s performance.  I kind of stood there.  He’s just said “well done” to me, and he was going on to Arthur.  Eventually he said “Thank you both very much.” and left.  And I breathed again.  Well, I was a bit miffed; I was a bit upset because he hadn’t said anything more to me.  But then there was a knock on the door and we said, “Come in.”, and this head came round the door, and it was Sir Laurence.  He said, “You played Henry!”  He must have said to someone outside, “Who was that?” I said, “Yes, sir.”  He said “Well done!”, and he locked eyes with me and left.  In the next few days I got a letter offering me a job at Chichester.  That was wonderful, because I thought he’d really hated it, but in fact he hadn’t recognised me.  And for a man who’d spent a lot of his career putting noses on, and disguising himself I thought (chalks one in the air) that was good.  That was something.  That was the first time I’d met him.

Q:  Then what happened in those rehearsal rooms?

DJ:  It was pretty scary.  I thought that was the first time I’d met him because he made such an impression on me.  He came in with Joan Plowright, and we were all lined up, and he came down the line like a king, shaking hands with us all and saying a word to us, with Joan at his side.  Joan was wearing dark glasses, and a little hat, a kind of cloche hat, covered in mother-of-pearl beads, and every time she moved…She rehearsed St. Joan in that bloody hat!  As he came down the line, as he came nearer to you, the shirt was sticking to you back, and then he shook hands and absolutely locked eyes with me again.  He was talking to me, and it was just who was going to drop their eyes first, and, of course, it was me, you know.  But it was a real game he used to play- who was going to break the contact first.  He had piercing eyes.  Then he went away and I didn’t see him for a while, because he was directing St. Joan.  The next time I saw him was when we did The Rascal.  But over the years he became a friend.

Q:  Presumably he was the biggest influence on your career.

DJ:  Oh, I think so!  Yes.  Oh, yes.

Q:  In your period at the National, which play did you enjoy the most, and which did you enjoy the least?

DJ:  I can tell you which I liked the least immediately!  It was about 1964-1965.  It was a character called “Mr. Worthy” in a play called The Recruiting Officer by Farquar, directed by William Gaskill.  It’s the one and only time I realised how easy it would be to become, what in our business, is known as a piss-artist, i.e., I hated doing it.  It was the “wet juve”, you know?  Also in the cast were Maggie Smith, Laurence Olivier, Max Adrian, Bob Stephens, Colin Blakely;  and they were all wonderful.  They all had wonderfully funny parts, and I and Sarah Miles were playing the two juves.  Sarah didn’t last very long- she walked out.  She couldn’t bear it.  Mary Miller, who’d been her understudy, took over.  Mary and I played those two wet juves who used to come on, and, plot-plot-plot-plot- nobody was interested!  Then on would come Maggie, and Sir Laurence, and they’d get all the laughs, and it was all wonderful.  Then one day, before the show- something I’d never done before- I had a drink in the pub next to the stage door.  I had a large whiskey.  Not for any reason other than someone offered me one.  I thought, “Oh why not.  It’s only the Recruiting Officer tonight.”  It went straight to my head, and anaesthesia takes over, and I actually enjoyed it!  I got two laughs, and I was so relaxed!  So the next performance I thought “I’m gonna try that again.”  So I went to the pub and had a large whiskey before the show.  Again, it was great!  Got a few more laughs!  Then I suddenly realized, “What are you doing?  You’re relying on this just to get on stage, and you could become a piss-artist.”

Q:  And the one you liked most?

DJ:  Well, there are several of those, you see, all jostling for position.  I loved playing Baron Tusenbach in Three Sisters.  I loved playing Touchstone in the all-male As You Like it that we did.

Q: Was that difficult to do?

DJ:  Difficult to rehearse, yes.  I mean Touchstone is one of those Shakespearian comics with 400 year old gags to put across, and how do you get them across?  You have to take, ultimately, a very positive idea of the character, whom the lines are coming out of, and so the fun is who’s saying them, and how he’s saying them, rather that what he’s saying.  And I was very lucky in that I was surrounded by fellas playing girls.  Not boys playing girls, but men playing girls;  Charlie Kay, Tony Hopkins was my Audrey.  Now if you’ve got Tony Hopkins playing Audrey, with kind of Brunhilde plaits, and you’re playing Touchstone, you’ve got it made.   Also, it was something Edith Evans once said.  Somebody asked her about the basis of her comic technique and she said, “Well, I say everything as if it were dirty.”  It’s that kind of innuendo.  If you’re playing Touchstone with an obvious fella dressed up as your Audrey, a lot of those lines become very much innuendo.  They become very funny because they become dirty.  They become sexy funny.  So I was helped in that way.  Also it was the sixties.  What is the comedy of the sixties?  What do people laugh at?  It was the time of things like Round the Horn and Beyond Our Ken.  It was Ken Williams;  it was Frankie Howerd;  it was Maggie Smith.  That kind of outrageous camp humour.  So I played Touchstone as a kind of camp, East London hairdresser.  Lots of cheap, funny jokes.  No cheaper than Branagh’s though, I have to say!

Q:  Probably no different than Shakespeare intended.

DJ:  No.  Absolutely true.  I also liked doing a production of – it wasn’t a huge success – an adaptation of The Idiot by Dostoyevski, which was my first real, spanking, leading role, and of course, Black Comedy, the Peter Shaffer play, which was the first lead I was given.

Q:  Do you enjoy doing comedy? 

DJ:  Yes, I do.  I haven’t done much of it lately, but yes, I do.

Q:  I suspect most people would associate you with the serious roles, the dramatic, rather than the comic.

DJ:  Yes, but I try to get as much comedy out of tragedy, and the other way round, because I think if you have an evening of total seriousness and lack of humour it’s very hard on both them and us.  I couldn’t do it actually.  I mean things like Breaking the Code, which was about mathematics and computers, there were a lot of laughs in it.  It was lovely to be able to find the humour.

Q:  Do you remember any stage accidents that you were involved in?

DJ:  Oh, there’s lot of them. Corpsing ones, and laughing ones, yes.  I had a very bad one with O’Toole on the end of it.  We were practicing the fight in Hamlet.  He didn’t like the fight that had been arranged.  He wanted to have more swash and more buckle in it, so he said lets go up to the rehearsal rooms and work out our own fight.  So there was a lot of me slashing at his feet, and he’d jump, and I’d slash at his head, and he’d duck.  Jumping onto tables and tables turning over.  Very Errol Flynn.  So we rehearsed it for several days, and then one day the inevitable happened.  I cut at his head, and he jumped instead of ducking, and the sword went straight across his cheek.  It hit with the flat of the sword, fortunately, so it just produced a weal.  It didn’t cut him, just a terrible red mark.  I was more scared than he was.  He took me out and gave me a brandy.  The next day I was called into Sir Laurence’s office.  He said, “I hear you had an accident yesterday.”  I said “Yes”, and I explained what had happened.  He said, “Well, it really doesn’t matter whose fault it was, or how it happened.  You do realize that he’s a film star, and you do realize he’s only doing twenty-eight performances, and he’s going off to make a film of Lord Jim, and if you cut him they can’t photograph him.  So his agent has been on the phone to me, and there is now insurance on him for 60,000 pounds.  So if you touch Peter with a sword you will cost me, and the National Theatre 60,000 pounds.  That was bad enough, but when we opened, the critics hated it!  Hated Peter.  Hated the production.  And Peter, who had been very good up until then and had gone on the wagon, went straight back on the booze.  So it was a full text, and the fight didn’t happen until the end, so four hours into the play Peter is absolutely cross-eyed, and looks at me across the stage, and winks every night, and fights for his life, you know.  And I had to fight for my life.  The trouble was it always ended with Peter getting hurt.  I cut his finger…. It was because I was, kind of, more nippy, because I wasn’t drunk, and Peter had slowed himself down with drink.  I remember he used to slash at the audience, too.  He used to go down to the front row, and slash at the front row….

Q:  To the critics?

DJ:  Hoping they were critics!  Yes.

Q:  What prompted the question was…

DJ:  I know something must have done.  But I did hit Tom Courteney in the face.

Q:  Edward Hardwicke?

DJ:  Oh, Edward!  Yes!  The Governor of Cyprus.  Sir Richard’s Hospital, and all that.   It was in Othello, and I just nicked the top of his head.  It just wouldn’t stop bleeding.  It was pouring down.  You could hear it drip onto the stage.  We were lined up.  After the fight, Othello comes on, and we line up, and he inspects us.  He comes down the line very slowly, and there’s total silence except for the drip of Ted’s blood on the Chichester stage.  He went to the hospital in full drag, and they asked him his occupation.  He said “Governor of Cyprus”, and the nurse wrote that down!