By Sheridan
Morley
The Times
5/77
For the next few days it is going to be hard to avoid Derek Jacobi; on
Monday he opens for Prospect at the Old Vic as Hamlet, and the next evening he
can be seen on ITV as Burgess in Granada’s play about the
Philby-Burgess-Maclean affair. Add
to that a winter of award-collecting for his title role in BBC 2’s I
Claudius (soon to start a summer repeat) and it is not hard to see why Mr.
Jacobi should be feeling reasonably cheerful.
“I was terrified that after I
Claudius I would not get any other work at all because they would think all
I could play was ancient Roman emperors. Luckily
this Hamlet came along and it seemed
too good to miss. Anyone claiming
to be a classical actor has to go through this hoop sooner or later.
It is the one you can fail with or succeed with on a large scale, and
first of all you think of all the other people who have played it and then you
try to forget them and start again. I
told Albert Finney I was going to try it at the Vic, even though it was so soon
after his own at the National, and he said I would get about 50 percent
enthusiasm and 50 percent hatred, which is the most any Hamlet can hope for.
I just hope this will not be my last; I think an actor should perhaps do
three or four Hamlets in a life time.”
This in fact will be Jacobi’s second, his first was exactly 20 years
ago this summer, when he was 18 and in his last year at the Leyton County High
School. “We had a wonderful
English master who took our school production up to the Edinburgh Festival
fringe and there it was seen by George Devine and Bill Gaskill and John Dexter
and that was how I really started.”
The only son of a department store manager, Jacobi went up to Cambridge
immediately after that Edinburgh Hamlet
and there found himself in the generation of Trevor Nunn, Ian McKellen and Corin
Redgrave, all of whom were reasserting Cambridge’s straight theatre supremacy
after a generation in which the stars had been the Frost/Bron/Bird revue people.
“Cambridge was just like being in rep; everyone acted all the time,
some directed, the blind led the blind and by the end of my last term all my
friends already had agents. I did
not, and I very soon learned that to be an actor I would need luck first, then
health, and talent only third. My
luck was in getting an audition at the Birmingham Rep because Bernard Hepton who
was then running it had seen me in a Cambridge Edward
II” (directed incidentally by Toby Robertson who is in charge of the new
Prospect Hamlet).
Jacobi survived four consecutive plays at Birmingham, only learning on
the last night of each one whether he was to be re-engaged for the next; then
John Harrison took over the direction of the company from Hepton and decided to
replace all the actors save the oldest and the youngest.
Jacobi was the youngest. Luck
again?
“Yes, entirely, but then it began to go a bit wrong.
The natural progression in these days was that you worked your way up to
be a leading man at Birmingham and then got an offer from Stratford.
Finney had just done that, and when my time came sure enough there was a
call from Stratford, and Peter Brook was on the stage and said would I like to
read for A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
So I did it in my best light, fairy voice, sounding like a sick choir
boy, and there was a terrible pause and quite soon after that a letter came to
Birmingham saying the RSC would not after all be in need of my services.
That was suicide time; I really thought I was finished, as I had already
resigned from Birmingham in anticipation of something better.
Anyway, luck again, they were having their fiftieth anniversary
celebrations and needed a Troilus so I played that through the summer, and one
afternoon Laurier Lister was in the audience, up on a scouting trip for Laurence
Olivier who was forming his first Chichester company.”
On Lister’s recommendation Jacobi got Brother Martin in the Joan
Plowright Saint Joan, a production
which Olivier transferred to the Old Vic in the National’s opening season
there and one which started for Jacobi a National association which was to last
unbroken from 1963 to 1971.
“Apart from playing Brother Martin in that Saint
Joan I was supposed to be understudying all the Jeremy Brett parts in the
season when, luck again, he was wanted by Warners for the film of My
Fair Lady so they bought him out of his National contract and I got the
parts. I also understudied Redgrave
in Uncle Vanya and one matinee they
said he was ill and I would have to go on and play the part with Olivier as
Astrov.
Olivier came and looked at me in the makeup that was supposed to be aging
me and just laughed like a drain; then at the half-hour Redgrave himself turned
up and said that much as he liked me as a young actor I would not be playing
Vanya so long as there as breath in his body, and he just about got through the
afternoon.”
Stirring times, but the trouble was that all Jacobi’s National work
took the form of reliable second leads (fifteen in eight years) until The
Idiot, which was his first title role and one of the company’s greatest
disasters.
“I thought soon after that I had better be moving on, and I went to see
Olivier who agreed with me, alarmingly readily, I thought.
He too had realized it was time for me to make a break, though I had sort
of hoped he would put up more of a fight. Anyway
I left at the end of 1971, and found myself for the first time in my career
totally out of work. I had never
seen an insurance card for 10 years, because Birmingham and the National had
been a totally sheltered existence; I had even bought a house in Stockwell to be
near the Old Vic.”
Prospect rapidly found him work, however, as did a BBC2 director called
Herbert Wise, who put him into the serialization of Man
of Straw.
“Out of that, indirectly, came I
Claudius. Herbert took me out to lunch with a man from London Films who
partly owned the rights, and although he clearly did not know me from a hole in
the ground, I was supposed to be so charming, that he would see me as the
obvious choice for Claudius. Then
came a nasty week while they muttered about trying to get Charlton Heston, and
after that they came back to me and we had eight happy months taping the series.
But whoever had played Claudius would have made a success in it—it is
that kind of role.”
After Hamlet, Jacobi goes on to play Octavius in the Alec McCowen and
Dorothy Tutin Antony and Cleopatra, also for Prospect at the Old Vic.
What then?
“Who knows? I keep trying to tell myself that I ought to be a commercial
actor and get a really good film or something, but in the end I always find
myself back at the Old Vic in the classics.
At long last I am beginning to get the message—that is what I am
supposed to be doing, I think.”