Q:  You mentioned the effect the critics had on Peter O’Toole.  Do you read what the critics say, and do you take any notice? 

DJ:  I don’t read them for things that I’m in, no.  I used to, but not for the past twenty years, I suppose.  I don’t read them because I think acting is difficult enough.  What actor’s put themselves through – emotionally, physically, mentally, psychologically- doing the role on stage is wearing enough.  To actually have to add to that the spiritual upheavals that critics can cause in an actor’s breast when it can be avoided by not reading them.  You get to know what the critics have said very quickly.  Well, you get to know the drift.  You read it in people’s faces, and you can tell by the tone of their voice if they don’t tell you themselves, that the critics were good or the critics were bad.  Even friends will ring up and say, “Oh, marvelous.  Congratulations on the reviews.  Whatever you do don’t read the Times!”  You don’t have to read the words of how bad you were in their description.  My distrust of critics, in so far as being able to learn from them, stems from the fact that, - we’re lucky in that, unlike in America, we have more than one critic so they can’t really destroy you- they write for newspapers, they write for a certain public.  The critic from the Express sees the same show as the critic from the Times, but will write a slightly different slanted review, because his readers are different.  They are also furthering their own image as reviewers.  Nowadays most of the columns either have a cartoon or a photograph of the critic attached to it, so they are becoming big stars themselves.  I read them about other people, but I don’t find what they say usually helpful, because they nearly always get it wrong.  They praise for the wrong reason.  They throw brick-bats for the wrong reasons.  Sometimes when they say someone is marvelous they’ll give an instance of how marvelous they were that’s wrong.  I, as an actor, instinctively know they’ve picked the wrong thing.  The actor, or the actress, might be wonderful in that role, but not for that reason.  It’s a strange area in which, if I dabble too much, I tend to get emotional about it, and uptight about it, so I ignore it really.  The actor knows when it’s working, or when it’s not working, or when it needs work on a particular area, or should.  The good actors do.  No, not “good”, that’s a bad word.  The proper actors do:  the real actors know whether it’s working or not.  The critics come to a very special, highly charged un –if there is such a word- indicative performance.

There are, on a first night, in London, something like four hundred people out there.  Perhaps a third to a half of the audience are doing their job of work.  They are observing and they are commenting at the same time.  They cannot participate, because they've got to have one eye on what they’re doing, and what they’re going to write about.  So they are spectating, they are not participating.  The people on stage know that tonight is the one night they are going to write about.  So for them, the nerves are worse.  It’s the most uptight, nervous, unrepresentative performance that they’ll ever give.  When they’ve worked into the play and they know more about it the critics never see those performances.  It’s so unfair, and that’s when judgments are made.

Q:  The feeling now is that people who go to the theatre do so because of word of mouth.

DJ:  Oh yes.  I do think word of mouth is wonderful.  It does help enormously, so the critics can be ignored by the public as well.  When they say something is good too the reverse happens, and the people circle us.

The Tempest, 1982

Q:  I often wonder if the critic was at the same play when I read a review the following day.

DJ:  Exactly.  They are only observers and have you ever seen a critic clap?  They never stay to clap.  Don’t let's talk about critics.

Q:  Let’s switch to a pleasant topic -  I, Claudius.  Up to that point you were probably very well known by a minority, but Claudius shot you into the public eye.  How did that come about?

 DJ:  Well, when I left the National in ’71 I did a BBC2 Classic Serial called Man of Straw, which was an adaptation of a Heinrich Mann novel.  It was a six episode series, which has since been wiped by the BBC.  But it was directed by Herbert Wise and produced by Martin Lisemore.  It was an interesting story about a boy who modeled his image – seventeen to about 50 years of age – on the Kaiser, about the time of the First World War.  It was a marvelous part, and I enjoyed doing that, but then five years later the same team, Herbert Wise and Martin Lisemore, were going to do Claudius and they couldn’t find a Claudius.  Originally, they wanted two people; one to play the young Claudius and one to play the old one.  Then they decided to try to find an actor who could tackle both.  I wasn’t their first thought.  The rights to do I, Claudius were owned by an American film company, ironically called London Films, which was the old Alexander Korba stable, so their permission had to be obtained for whoever played Claudius.  Of course, being American, they’d never heard of me.  So when Herbie and Martin thought of me,  - “What about Derek? He aged from seventeen to fifty.  Let’s ask him.”-  I was thrilled, but they had to sell me to the Americans, and that involved various lunches with executives of the American film to try to convince them that I could do it.  I don’t know how I was doing that.  Eventually, they said OK, we’ll go along with that.  So really, that’s how it all came about.  It was adapted by Jack Pulman, and Jack had done many things on television;  You Can’t Have Everything,  Crime and Punishment,  War and Peace.  Jack was a wonderful writer.  He died untimely of a heart attack.

Much Ado About Nothing, 1982

Q:  I suppose the thing most people remember of Derek Jacobi as Claudius is the stammer.  A critic recently wrote, in his review of the play, “The unhinged Nero starts with a Derek Jacobi stutter and ends by going berserk in a blood-boltered toga.”  He wrote “Derek Jacobi” rather than “Claudius”, how do you feel about that?

DJ:   He’s also got it wrong, because it’s not a stutter, it’s a stammer.  Yes,  I mean in a sense it’s nice.  Every actor, I think, in the course of his career longs for one part that becomes his.  Some actors get more than one in the course of their career, some actors don’t get any of those kind of parts. For me, I suppose, Claudius was that part.  Before I did Claudius, when you thought of Claudius, you thought of Charles Laughton, because although the film was never made, it had begun to be made, and he was always associated with it.  There are many actors and actresses who you do associate with a particular part.  I see nothing bad in that, and I would never knock it, because it opened so many doors for me, not only here, but abroad,