Q:  Theatre must be your great love, rather than television? 

DJ:  Oh, yes.  I’m doing a film at the moment, and I’m constantly feeling that the job satisfaction is very, very little.  All other things equal, I prefer the theatre. 

Q:  Is that because of the audience presence, or because of your own control?

                                             Cyrano, 1982
DJ:  Yes.  It’s because you are making the creative artistic decisions while you are in front of the audience, and there are no safety nets if anything goes wrong.  You have to put it right immediately.  You have to compensate, do things -  it’s you they’re looking at all the time.  Film is about framing.  What the director wants the public to see.  Theatre is about what you want the public to see, hear, feel and respond to.  It’s all emanating from you, plus the other actors, and the director of the play, but you're much more in control.  You’re much more making the choices.  So the upshot is, you’re having more fun and more job satisfaction.  Also, the fact that the audience is there, the electricity that that creates, the adrenalin runs round your body, knowing you can’t rely on microphones, or you can’t go back and do it again.  All those things make it much more exciting. 

Q:  Yet in the early ‘80’s, before the huge roles you undertook for the RSC, you actually were away from the theatre for some time. 

 DJ:  In 1980 I went to New York with a play called The Suicide – a Russian Comedy called The Suicide - so ’80 was really that.  I came back in ’81 and was kind of mucking about.  I remember one thing I did was Inside the Third Reich, because it was while I was playing Hitler that the call from the RSC came.  I was kind of mucking about and doing telly for those two years, although The Suicide was fun. 

Q:  Did you worry about returning to the stage after such a long break?

DJ:  Yes, also I’d been through a terrible time of stage fright, of loosing my nerve on stage.  So when the call came from the RSC it was now or never.  It came at the worst time in a sense, because I was so frightened.  Having this terrible disease which actors get, and it is a disease, stage fright.  The only way to cure it, I was told, would be to actually face it head on.  To say, “Yes, I’ll do Peer Gynt.  Yes, I’ll do Benedick.  Yes, I’ll do Prospero and one other.”, and at the same time  just dreading the thought of having to do it, of having to go on stage.  I remember the first night of Much Ado, which was the first one in Stratford, I’ve never been so frightened in all my life.  Oh, gut-rotting terror.  Just terrified.  I thought I’d fall over.  We were on a glass stage, a glass, raked stage, with my high-heeled shoes.  I remember I was wearing shot-silk. And I’d been on stage for less than a minute, and it was black with sweat.  Every pore of my body had opened up.  Terror!  Awful.  But it got better during the course of the season.  It had to.   

                                                                                                                  Peer Gynt, 1982
Q:  Did it take the full season to get over? 

DJ:  Yes.  I’m still not over it totally.  I mean you get sudden waves of it.  It came back a bit in Breaking the Code when I had to do long speeches straight to the audience. 

Q:  Had you suffered before?

DJ:  No, it just started, and many actors suffer from it.

Q:  Olivier described it very graphically in his books.

DJ:  Yes, Olivier got it.  He had it for many years, and disguised it fantastically well.  When he was doing Othello he had it.  When he was doing Merchant he had it.  It’s awful, it really is.  If you let it get a hold of you, you’ll never go on stage again.  Never again.

  Q:  After your period with the RSC, playing Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, Prospero in The Tempest, and the title role in Peer Gynt and Cyrano de Bergerac, you played Alan Turing in Breaking the Code which was a departure for you in many ways -  there was no large company; it wasn’t repertory, i.e., you were playing the same role in a long run; and it got you out of doublet and hose and into relatively modern dress.  Was that a deliberate choice on your part?

DJ:  Oh yes.  I wanted to play more modern things.  You get dubbed as a “posh” actor.  A posh, classical actor.  Because classical means posh, somehow.  I don’t see why it should.  I wanted to do plays in which you weren’t compared with the six hundred people who had done that before you.  You know, you were one of six hundred Hamlets, or one of five thousand Prosperos.  Most of the critics had seen some of those and compared you.  All that comparative criticism that goes on, you know, “better than”, “bigger than”, “smaller than”, “larger than”, “best of” – the century, the decade, the last five years!  This desperate need for definitives in classical drama which can never be.  You can’t be the definitive anything.   But to have a play where the author was alive, I could actually talk to, and discuss things with, was wonderful.  And a play that kind of grew and grew on me the more we did it.  I thought I would get bored, maybe, because I was told that I would part way through, but I never did.  I kept finding more and more things, and I loved it.  I adored it.  I learnt a lot from it too.  Also, as you say, it was the first time I was kind of out there on my own.  It was me in the play, it wasn’t me as part of a company.  In a sense I was the company, for the first time.  The responsibilities and the pressures that that brought I had wanted to experience, to see if I could tackle them, and found that I could.  And enjoyed it.  In a sense I did it again with the Richards, and hopefully it was alright.