By
Ruth Hamilton
New York Yimes
The British actor who played the stammering, lame yet quick-witted Roman
emperor Claudius will soon be seen as Shakespeare’s melancholic Danish prince.
Derek Jacobi, who won high praise for his television portrayal of the
title character in last season’s “I, Claudius” has been selected to play
Hamlet in the BBC’s continuing Shakespeare series.
“Hamlet” will go before the cameras next January and is scheduled to
be shown on public television in the United States next spring as the final
offering in the 1979-80 phase of the six-year project.
Meanwhile, viewers who missed the first telecast of “I, Claudius”
will have another opportunity to watch it.
The 13-part dramatization of Robert Grave’s novels about corruption and
intrigue among the dissolute ruling families of ancient Rome begins an “encore
presentation” on Channel 13 this evening at 9:00.
The announcement of the selection of Mr. Jacobi to play Hamlet was made a
week ago by Cedric Messina, the executive producer of the Shakespeare project.
The 40-year-old actor will have considerable opportunity to shape his
interpretation of the role. At the
end of this month, he begins rehearsals of “Hamlet,” opening at the Old Vic
at the end of July; in mid-August, at the invitation of the Danish government,
the production will be performed at Elsinore, prior to a tour of Scandinavia;
then back to Britain for a two-week tour of the northern provinces.
The company will next embark on a tour of the Orient, with performances
scheduled for Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, and then will make a historic visit to
China, playing in either Shanghai or Canton (the exact itinerary has yet to be
pinned down) and Peking. After
that, the troupe will go to Australia, before returning to London in December in
time to begin rehearsals for the January television shooting.
“The exciting thing is that this will be the first Western theater
company ever to have played in China,” Mr. Jacobi said in a recent interview.
“When we get there, they are going to have those automatic translation
machines plugged into their ears. And
while I’m saying “To be or not to be’ in English, a Chinese gentleman will
be saying it in Chinese. We on
stage won’t be able to hear that. One
just hopes that whoever is doing their script has the same cuts as we’ve got,
that they’re hearing the same scene that we are playing.”
Performing Shakespeare on television is not a new experience for Mr.
Jacobi. He starred in the BBC’s
production of “Richard II,” which was shown on American public TV in March.
Commenting on Mr. Jacobi’s performance, New York Times television
critic John J. O’Connor wrote: “His
command of the poetry is subtle and sure.”
When asked how he felt about doing Shakespeare on television, Mr. Jacobi
replied: “The main difficulty is
the lack of an audience. The plays
were intended for the theatre. They
were written in such a way—certainly, with great tragedies—that the actor
reaches peaks and valleys and charts his way through the play in a series of
rhythms. It’s like a piece of
music. In television, this,
naturally, is cut up. You don’t
start at point A and reach point B two-and-a-half hours later.
It takes several days to shoot scenes out of order, almost out of
context, and it’s not the same feeling for an actor to play a great
Shakespearean role in front of a camera. It
can’t be, because on stage the audience sees all the actor all the time, from
the top of his head to his feet. The
actor lives through the play in the course of an evening.
And I think that is how the play really should be done.”
Does he expect that the soliloquies in “Hamlet” will be done using
the same voice-over technique that was employed in the TV production of
“Richard II”?
“I don’t think so. Of course, it will probably be a different
director [the director and other cast members have yet to be announced], but I
think, because there are so many soliloquies in “Hamlet,” it would be sort
of copping out to do them with a voice-over.
I think one must see the actor doing them.”
What other actors has Mr. Jacobi seen perform “Hamlet”?
“Paul
Scofield, Richard Burton, Nocol Williamson, David Warner, Alan Badell, Alan
Howard, Michael Redgrave, Ian Bannon and a Yugoslav actor, whose name I’ve
forgotten. So, I’ve seen quite a
few. I’ve seen Olivier’s Hamlet
only on film, and I didn’t see the great Gielgud Hamlet because I wasn’t
around then and he didn’t put it on film, which is a shame.”
How does he rank Olivier’s film Hamlet, which many people consider to
be the definitive interpretation of the role?
“I think Olivier is one of our greatest living actors, and I’ve
learned an enormous amount from him. I
worked with him for eight-and-a-half years—from 1963 to 1971—both under his
direction and as a fellow actor. I
think that with ‘Hamlet’ it is such a peculiar play that there are as many
Hamlets as there are actors who play him. And
nobody can be the definitive Hamlet, because the definitive Hamlet doesn’t
exist. It’s a contradiction in terms.”
Although Mr. Jacobi had a formidable list of theatrical credits behind
him (recent roles in repertory at the Old Vic have included “Hamlet,”
Chekhov’s “Ivanov” and Thomas Mendip in Christopher Fry’s “The
Lady’s Not for Burning”), it was his performance in television’s “I,
Claudius” that brought him international attention.
“The marvelous thing for me was not the pseudo fame: he said, “but
the fact that afterward, people who were not habitual theatergoers would pay
hard-earned money for theater tickets to see the actor who had done ‘I,
Claudius’—seeing me in the kind of theater I most enjoy. Of course, ‘I,
Claudius’ was a marvelous experience: such
a large canvas for an actor to attempt to paint on.”
“What was difficult about the role,” he continued, “was to present
the old Claudius without having been
through the young Claudius and middle-aged Claudius.
We did it in sequence, as it was shown, and, as you may remember, he was
old first. Then he had to be the same old at the end, after the middle section.”
The aging process involved some masterful makeup work, not to mention
considerable patience on the actor’s part.
“It took six hours,” Mr. Jacobi explained.
“We got it down from seven, at the beginning.
The nose was Latex, which is not such a problem in films, but in
television there are long takes, and the mouth and nose would start to crack and
come off. ‘The scene was fine,’
they’d say, ‘but your nose is starting to come off.’
So we’d have to do it again.
“And you could never do a young man scene right after an old-man scene,
because after a day in that makeup, your skin is not fit to photograph.
It took six months to do the series, during which time I led a monastic
life—social life was at a premium.”
Mr. Jacobi’s speech pattern—both on stage and off—has a distinctive
quality about it; he has a way of prolonging the vowel sounds in certain words.
He said he does not consciously set out to do this, but he is aware that
it happens:
“In fact, I was doing a voice-over for a Fiat car commercial—of
course, these have to be timed exactly—and they told me it must be delivered
just a little quicker. Well, I
found I literally could not say the words any faster.
I could not shorten the vowels and have them come out clear.
“I believe that if you’re a classical actor and if you have any
eccentricity—your voice, your movement—for God’s sake, use it, exploit it.
Especially when you do Shakespeare, or verse, you’re constantly using,
exercising, your vocal equipment. One
thing that pleased me was having an opera singer once say, when we were
introduced, ‘Ah! The man who
speaks arias!’”
There was no tradition of theater in the Jacobi family, “but as far
back as a toddler dressing up in my parents’ clothes, I just always wanted to
act,” he said. “Trite as it sounds, I must have been born with it—the
urge to act—because there was no outside influence in that direction.
My parents have been absolutely marvelous, and it—the urge—was
nurtured at school by very enterprising teachers.
I remember particularly a history teacher and an English teacher who
encouraged me enormously.”
Mr. Jacobi is one of a sizable number of British actors who say, when
asked where they trained for the stage, “Well, I didn’t, actually.
I went to Cambridge.”
Can he account for the Cambridge magic?
“Yes. We acted all the time,” he said.
“It was like being in rep. You fitted in your academic work between
engagements. What mistakes you made, you made in public—not the classroom.
That’s why I picked Cambridge, though I supposedly read history.
“Cambridge also had a veneer of professionalism in that occasionally
you’d get a professional director. That’s
how I first met Tony Robertson [director of the Old Vic], when I did ‘Edward
II’ at Cambridge.
“There are so many of us, they call it the Cambridge Mafia.
It started way back when Peter Hall, Peter Wood, Tony Robertson and Peter
Brook were all there at the same time. That
was a year of directors, followed by a year of actors.”
As an actor, Mr. Jacobi concerns himself with the internal aspects of a
part before worrying about the externals: “You
do need certain props, but I think it’s much better to get inside the
character first. There are certain
actors who become other characters.
They disguise themselves. There are others who are always themselves: the
character, Hamlet or whoever, becomes them.
Which am I? I’m not sure,
yet. For a while, my career is
still going to be based on a search for an answer to that question.”
But how does he feel about the fact that this television Hamlet will
undoubtedly be considered definitive by several generations of students?
“I think in that way lies madness.
If I go into it that this is forever and ever, the last will and
testament of an actor called Derek Jacobi—no, I can’t think of it like
that.”
How does he feel about the fact that his televised Hamlet will be seen by
more persons at one time than other actor’s interpretation?
“I’m rendered speechless by the thought.
Absolutely speechless. I
mean, I haven’t thought of that. It
doesn’t make playing it any easier.”