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Richard II, 1989
Q:
The Richards, I gather, were your own idea?
DJ: Well, Richard II was.
Duncan Weldon, who runs Triumph, who had put on Cyrano,
and Much Ado in New York, was somewhere included in producing Breaking
the Code, certainly in America, said, “What play do you want to
do? “ Well, when an actor
is asked that sort of question the mind goes a total blank.
We aren’t usually asked those sorts of things.
I always wanted to do Richard II, so I said, “I want to do
Richard II before I get too old to do it.”
He said, “OK. Alright, we’ll do it.”
I couldn’t believe my ears!
This was a West End management saying this, you know.
It’s a big cast; it’s expensive.
You’ve got the National and the RSC as competition, and
here’s a West End management saying they’ll put it on.
Then he said, “Well, we know it’s a big cast, we know it’s
going to cost a lot of money, it would be more economical to do two
plays, because you’ll also get people coming to do two parts, rather
than just walking on in one.” So
- thought, thought, thought! It
was going to be a modern play. It
was going to be a comedy. It
was going to be all sorts of things, and it was Clifford Williams,
“What about Richard III? Do the two Richards."
I, at first, said. “Ooh, no. No! I think I can do Richard
II.
I don’t think I can do Richard III.
It’s not my part.” I kind of canvassed my various friends and said, “If
I said to you that I was going to do Richard III, what would you say?”
and none of them threw up their hands in horror!
They all said, “Oh what a good idea.”
So, not totally believing them, I said, “OK.”
Q:
Why did you think they wouldn’t like the idea of your playing
Richard III? You said it
wasn’t your part.
DJ:
Yes. I think that
whatever part I do this is going to be the one that finds me out.
This is the one I should never have tackled, and have thought
that about nearly every part I play, but I had it really strongly with
Richard III. Particularly
since it was not that long ago that Tony Sher had this huge
success with it, and I thought, “Can I follow that? Do I want to risk those comparisons again?
Do I want to be told I don’t come up to Tony Sher?
Do I want to go through all that?
But, everybody seemed, and Clifford seemed, to think that it
would be a good idea. The
combination would be good if I could pull it off.
I don’t regret it for a moment.
I loved it, and of the two, I suppose towards the end – we did
it for ten and a half months - I
was enjoying Richard III almost more than Richard II.
I did like it, because I hadn’t realized what a funny part it
was. It’s very full of
humour. I think it’s got
to be, because otherwise it would be too monstrous and silly.
Q:
You seem to like keeping busy, and I remember hearing that at one
point in 1989, you were filming Henry V in the morning, rehearsing
Richard III in the afternoon, and playing Richard II in the evening.
DJ: Yes, that did happen a
couple of times. That was
very tiring. It was –
looking back on it- fun, but at the time it was a bit hairy.
Yes, I do like being busy. I
much prefer it. You see,
I’m an old, kind of jobbing company man, really.
Rehearsing one thing and doing another show at night.
That’s what I’ve been doing most of my life.
When we were doing Cyrano at the RSC in 1984 – we’d go to the
run-through stage of Cyrano, at the Barbican.
We’d do a run-through
in the morning of Cyrano, we’d do another run-through in the afternoon
of Cyrano, and then in the evening I’d be in the Pit doing Peer Gynt
till 11:00 PM. I survived
it, and I liked it. You
moaned a bit, “Oh, God, I’m tired”, but if someone said, “OK,
stop doing it," - oh, dreadful!
Q:
Because you’re using your talents, and you love it.
DJ: Yes, and you’re
learning. It’s very easy
to get rusty – particularly in the theatre.
I mean, if you’ve spent a year doing other things, with
microphones shoved down your face, the voice gets rusty!
You do need to keep using it, to keep its strength up.
Doing Richard II and Richard III for ten and half months was
vocally very, very tiring. You’ve
got to be vocally strong to get through eight shows a week.
Q:
Do you get involved in the character at all?
DJ: NO. I think that way madness lies.
I leave my work there. I
don’t particularly bring it here except when I’m learning or
thinking about it. No, it
stays in the dressing room.
Q:
In 1988, you directed for the first time with Hamlet for the
Renaissance Company. You’ve
played Hamlet many times yourself since that first time, aged seventeen,
at the Edinburgh Festival. How
difficult was it to direct someone else in a part when you obviously
have your own strong ideas about the character?
DJ: Yes, it was, up to a
point, but Kenneth Branagh very strongly had his own ideas, too. So while giving him all I could give him I had to get over
the initial shock of actually giving away things that, with my instincts
as an actor, I wanted to do. Any
new thought about Hamlet I’d give to Ken rather than do them myself.
My instinct was, “Oh, no, because the next time I play
it…”, but I’m not going to. But
it was fun to get on with the rest of the play, and the other
characters. I think that,
for me, was the more enjoyable part, directing everyone around Ken,
rather than concentrating on Ken, because he, in a sense, is clever
enough and was strong enough in what he wanted to do to be left alone. I would push, and just do little bits, but there was a
certain resistance there which is inevitable.
Whenever I did Hamlet with a director you tend to just go your
own way. If you're going to
play Hamlet, you’ve usually got some idea of how you wanna do it. So it’s best to let the actor do that, because that’s
endemic to the part, you see, the personality of the actor, and the way
he wants to go. So my best
fun was helping the rest of them.
Q:
You did a radio interview with Ronald Eyre in 1984 in which you
discussed directors. You
said you were a typical Libran, indecisive, and didn’t like making
choices, and need a director to help you make those choices.
So how does an actor like that, who also prefers to do rather
than to talk about a part, switch to being a director, doing the talking
and having to stand back and watch the company “do”?
Breaking the Code, 1986
DJ:
Yes, that’s the most difficult thing for me.
Whereas, as an actor, you, in a sense, are self obsessed – you
are obsessed with your problems in the part – as the director you have
twenty people who are all obsessed with what they want you to do.
You have to come up with answers for all of them.
You have to make choices for them; decisions for them.
They all need a solution to the problems, and they all have
different problems every day. That
kind of skating in such thin ice was perilous for me, because it’s not
my natural bent, and sometimes I just had to make up things, just off
the top of my head, to placate. I
had to play games, in other words.
But that’s when I learnt that lots of directors play games.
You have to play games when you’ve got that many people to cope
with – all those egos! So
in that sense what I was left with at the end of that period of
directing was, “Well, now I know that I enjoy directing, but at heart
I’m basically an actor.” I
prefer getting up and doing it, because the frustration I felt as a
director was when it was done. That
first preview at Birmingham, on a studio with my notebook, there was
nothing I could do, actually. “Oh,
that was wrong! Christ,
what’s she doing! Oh,
God!!” All this was going on, and I was kind of impotent.
Then, of course, they did it - it went well, thank God – but
the next day, “Everyone in for notes”, you know, and one sensed
they’d already left me behind. I’d
had the experience of sitting in the audience, they’d had the
experience of actually going up there and doing it, and all that that
tells them, all that they feel, because there’s a period when
rehearsals become useless in that sense.
You’ve got to put it in front of people, and their directions
will then take you through the next stage.
They had that first hand. I
only had it second hand.
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