By Matthew S.
Wolf
Chicago Tribune
May, 1984
The actor, 46, best known to American audiences for his performance in
the title role of the television series “I, Claudius,” will be in Los
Angeles June 7-23 for the festival with the Royal Shakespeare Company, fresh
from a two-year stint with the RSC in England and on tour that has brought him
more awards than most Olympics contenders ever could gather.
For four roles with the RSC—the title role in Rostand’s “Cyrano,”
Benedick in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado,” Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” and
Prospero in “The Tempest”—Jacobi won all the year-end acting awards from a
wide range of British theatrical organizations and publications:
Drama magazine, the Society of West End Theatres, Plays & Players
magazine and the 29th Standard Drama Awards.
Jacobi’s versatility prompted Giles Gordon, editor of the theatrical
quarterly Drama, to comment that “the accomplishment and variety of these
performances recalled years gone by when actors regarded the stage as their
natural habitat and home and the classics to be wrestled with.”
Among the awards hoopla, the Standard’s citation, presented in a
televised ceremony from the Savoy Hotel in London in January, had special
meaning for Jacobi because it was presented by John Gielgud, with whom Jacobi
worked at the National Theater of Great Britain in the mid-1960s.
In his presentation speech, the actor/knight, 80, implied that his young
colleague well might follow in his illustrious path.
This subject and the mention of Gielgud cause Jacobi’s voice to tremble
slightly.
“I got very emotional about Sir John giving me that award,” Jacobi
says. “My reaction to the whole
thing of prizes is ambivalent, but when it happens to be Gielgud giving you the
prize—well, that’s when the knees just go to water.”
Jacobi is suspicious of lofty claims to his prospects as an actor/knight,
in the league of Gielgud, Laurence Olivier or the late Ralph Richardson, and he
speaks with a modesty that befits someone who always has regarded himself as a
“company man.”
“I must say that when the papers start talking about the new Olivier,
it’s just silly. Every generation is different, and every few years someone is
nominated as the new this or the new that.
I’m the flavor of the month at the moment, but it’s more than likely
that in a few months someone else will be.
“It’s only worth anything, I suppose, when someone else is called the
new Derek Jacobi.”
Despite a continuing success with the RSC that began with the summer
season at Stratford-on-Avon in 1982, Jacobi, a native of London, explains that
his journey to the renowned British troupe has been anything but simple.
It began in 1964, in the midst of Jacobi’s first professional
engagement with the Birmingham Repertory Theater, 24 miles north of Stratford,
when the “natural progression” for him was an RSC audition.
“My turn came, and I was invited by Sir Peter (Peter Hall, the founder
of the RSC in 1960 and director of the National Theater since 1973) and given
three parts. A week later I got a
telegram asking me to go and meet everybody; so I went, was met at the stage
door by the company manager who thrust a copy of “The Tempest” into my hand
and was told I had 10 minutes to prepare to read Ariel.
“I walked out on the stage, and there was Peter Brook, Peter Hall, John
Barton, Clifford Williams—all of them: row
upon row of directorial power,” Jacobi recalls.
“And I launched into this reading of Ariel like a sick choirboy.
They said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and I went back to Birmingham none
the wiser. I then got a letter
saying, ‘Sorry. We don’t think
you’re right.’”
Calling this experience “my first huge disappointment,” Jacobi says,
joking, “it took the next 20 years to cover those 24 miles—about a mile a
year.”
Once the offer from the RSC did come, Jacobi jumped at the possibility of
performing the classics in rotation, although he had some doubts about the
choice of parts for which he was wanted.
The self-questioning Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s mammoth 1867 play was “the
least frightening” to Jacobi, who was nursing doubts about the range of Cyrano
and particularly the depth of Prospero, a part closely associated with Gielgud.
“Prospero was the one I was most frightened of, felt most miscast
for,” Jacobi explains. “He’s
always played as a run-up to Lear with him coming on in his late 60s.
It was the part I knew I was chancing my arm by playing because it was so
locked into the ‘old man’ concept.”
Now, as he nears the end of his RSC season in London two years later,
Jacobi believes that he is acting “a deeper Prospero, a more rounded
Prospero,” but admits that he would like to have another try at the part in
five or six years.
The long-nosed, verbally facile Cyrano, who should have American
audiences initially exulting, then weeping into their programs during the
fifth-act cloister scene, is “a wonderful part,” his performer says. And if this role has brought Jacobi more acclaim than
any of the other three in the RSC repertory, it is “the part getting the prize
as well as the actor,” he stresses.
Cyrano and, to some extent, the frolicking Benedick in “Much Ado,”
are both parts that celebrate the actor as actor, since each man spends a great
deal of his respective play putting on a show for someone else’s
benefit—whether it be for the uncomprehending Roxane who understands
Cyrano’s love only too late or for the prickly Beatrice who succumbs to
Benedick’s charms in time for the final curtain.
These roles are well-suited to Jacobi, whose tendency to play an actor
self-consciously has become part of his trademark and whose desire to act goes
“as far back as I can remember.”
“When I was young it was just a matter of showing off,” he says,
realizing that the quality now gets him work.
The recent television adaptation of Albert Speer’s book, “Inside the
Third Reich,” for which Jacobi received an Emmy nomination, required Jacobi to
play Hitler, a part he resisted—until he understood why he had been chosen.
“I knew the producers were not in the business of making mistakes,”
he says, “so I wondered why they wanted me.
Well, the Hitler whom Speer describes is a man who acted every day of his
life; they wanted an actor who could play an actor and be seen acting.
They were talking my language, and I knew I could relate to that totally.
The line they wanted on Adolf was the line I could give them.”
In addition to Claudius and Hitler, Jacobi’s television work includes
the title roles in “Hamlet” and “Richard II” for the BBC Shakespeare
plays. For an actor wed to the
stage, the requirements of filming were not without their oddities.
“Film is basically about photography,” he explains, “because a
camera takes a picture. But when
I’m acting in front of one, I don’t think about that, or about the music
they are putting behind me. I just
carry the feeling that I’m used to of finding the truth of what I’m
doing.”
With the Shakespeare dramas, Jacobi momentarily was thrown by the fact
that the plays were filmed out of sequence, with the result that the great last
soliloquies were being spoken before the character had been introduced.
“Hamlet was easier because I had done it on stage and had an emotional
graph in my head of where I should be,” he explains.
Whatever the eccentricities of film, Jacobi admits that he suffers from a
“grass is always greener” mentality.
“When I was doing television, I wanted to get back to the theater.
I was afraid of losing my voice, of everything getting rusty; so I was
desperate to get back. Now I’m
back, and I’m eager to be in front of a camera.”
Jacobi admires actors such as Alan Bates, who balance film and theater,
but expresses pleasure with the British system in which “one is constantly
recharging batteries by coming back into the theater.
Jacobi remains tantalized by certain stage roles:
both Richards, II and III, Coriolanus and anything by Checkhov, whose
plays Jacobi could perform “forever—forever.”
For the time being, though, Jacobi’s energies are devoted to putting
over “Cyrano” and “Much Ado” on foreign soil, a challenge he says he
looks forward to “hugely.”
Jacobi feels more confident about Broadway this time around, when he is
backed by a prestigious British company, than he did on his maiden Broadway
outing—the Nicolai Erdman’s Russian drama, “The Suicide,” which had a
brief run at the Virginia (then the ANTA) Theater late in 1980.
“I am still a bit of an innocent abroad on Broadway,” Jacobi says,
fretting slightly and pointing to the disappointing run last spring of the
RSC’s critically acclaimed “All’s Well That Ends Well” as proof that
“the idea of Shakespeare on Broadway is still a bit wearing, no matter how
well it’s done.”
About American audiences Jacobi has less reserve.
“The Americans who have come to Stratford and the Barbican have loved
“Cyrano” and “Much Ado,” he says, “and the up frontness of their
reactions is wonderful. They come
prepared to enjoy, and you have to be fairly bad to gain their disapproval.
“I just hope they like us in America.”