Drama
Magazine
Very occasionally an actor who has, for years, been given finely-wrought,
polished performances in the classics will suddenly, and without apparent
warning, appear to have crossed a threshold and achieved a performance or two
more remarkable than any his earlier work had indicated was likely.
This seems to have happened at Stratford-upon-Avon this season to Derek
Jacobi, where he is playing three parts: Benedick
in Much Ado About Nothing, and
Prospero in The Tempest at the Royal
Shakespeare Theatre, and Peer Gynt at The Other Place.
His voice is as lyrical and romantic as any in the English theatre today,
and his speaking of Shakespeare at least, poetry and prose, unsurpassed.
When Trevor Nunn, the RSC’s joint artistic director, offered him the
three parts, he resisted Prospero the longest.
“I was locked into that vision of the older man.
Yet the text says that Miranda is 15, it says it twice.
There is no need for Prospero to be more than 40, really not, but the
only times I’ve seen the play I’ve beamed at the patriarchal figure.
It’s always a surprise when Antonio comes along that he’s
Prospero’s brother because he always looks younger than Prospero.
So at least now Bob [Robert O’Mahoney] and I look of an age, that we
could be brothers.”
Derek Jacobi’s achievement is not to “star” as Prospero but to
return the character to the play. It’s
one of the finest spoken, wisest, most humane performances I’ve seen an actor
give in years. Ron Daniels’ eloquent production, designed by Maria
Bjornson, is of a haunting beauty and contains impeccable performances from the
entire cast, including seven Ariels. All
is in the service of Shakespeare’s play.
I’d wondered, having seen Mr. Jacobi the previous evening as a
dazzling, “tenor” Benedick, how he’d cope with the lower register and gravitas of the magus: “One
of the things that has come out of playing Prospero is that I’ve found some
more notes in my voice, which I don’t use as Benedick because I don’t need
to. I’ve found some deeper [full
fathom five?] resonances in Prospero that may stand me in good stead.”
Lear, then, might be attempted? “I’d
love eventually to do it but that will be quite some time in the future.”
We met at the stage door of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre on a fresh,
intoxicating mid-October Saturday morning:
Stratford was at its loveliest, and there weren’t too
many tourists. Mr. Jacobi led me
through the labyrinthine entrails backstage where, by some ingenious feat of
organization, the sets of all five of the year’s Shakespeare plays were hung
and stored, accommodated in the interstices of the 1932 building.
We walked along corridors and climbed flights of stairs until we reached
Trevor Nunn’s capacious office, where the interview took place.
(Trevor Nunn was in New York, where Alan Howard in Good
had opened two nights earlier and his production of Cats
shortly before that.) When I
arrived at the theatre, Derek Jacobi had been participating, along with the rest
of the cast, in a word run through of The
Tempest, and when I left him he returned to it. This even though the play had been in the repertoire for more
than two months. However, it
hadn’t had a performance for a couple of weeks because The
Taming of the Shrew, mainly with different actors, had been playing previews
and opening performances. Most
impressive this, the RSC’s constant attention to the quality of the product.
Derek Jacobi was born in London in 1938.
“There was no acting in the home, no books about it, or a tradition.”
But he was stage-struck from an early age.
“The first time I went to the theatre was in the late 1940s.
I was 8 or 9, perhaps a bit younger .
The Palladium, Evelyn Laye as Prince Charming, Noele Gordon as Dandini;
that was my introduction. At Leyton
County High School I had a couple of marvelous masters who really did encourage
me—the school play and all that.”
He acted leading roles with Michael Croft’s National Youth Theatre, then went up to St. John’s College, Cambridge. At university, with the ADC and Marlowe Society, he acted “forever. It was the Cambridge rep. You acted anywhere you could, all the time.” He has had a “nostalgic feeling for Stratford ever since my Cambridge days when we did a production of Marlowe’s Edward II in the Memorial Gardens in the open air.” After University he joined the Birmingham Rep, making his first professional appearance in 1960. “I used to come over here at weekends whenever I was free."
“The RSC, until now, was the company I hadn’t been in before and was
really the one I’d ambitions to be in, because I’d started up the road in
Birmingham. I’d been there for 2½
years, and if you had classical aspirations the natural step seemed to be here.
Albie Finney did it, Ian Richarson did it.
It’s what I’d have liked to have done but for me it didn’t happen,
through various circumstances. But
luck was with me and instead I got to Chichester, which then became the
National.” At Chichester he
played memorably Brother Martin to Joan Plowright’s Saint Joan, and in the
opening production of the National at the Old Vic in October 1963 was Laertes to
Peter O’Toole’s vague Dane. He
remained with the National for nine years, increasingly one of their most
reliable and eloquent actors. His
Touchstone in Clifford Williams’ all male As
You Like It was a particular joy, and he was a sinister Don John in
Jefferelli’s Much Ado About Nothing.
He spoke with relish of the Olivier regime at the National at the Old
Vic. “It was such a marvelous and
creative period, in the mid ‘60s, because one was working with wonderful
people, the directors and other actors, and there was a marvelous company
feeling. It just had everything
going for it. One learned so much. The
new building can’t have the company feeling we had.”
When he was at the National, there was considerable needle between it and
the RSC. Now, perhaps partly at
least, because Peter Hall is a director of the RSC as well as boss of the
National, actors move from one company to the other without apparent anxiety.
As Jacobi pointed out: “A
friend of mine, Brenda Bruce, was I think the first to be in the National and
the RSC at the same time. She was
doing The Shoemaker’s Holiday in the
afternoon performance at the National, and coming to do the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet at the Aldwych in the evening. So it can be done.
And a lot of the National at the moment is ex-RSC.
Judi Dench, Sue Fleetwood, James Laurenson.
A lot of RSC people, they are company actors, you see.
They’re used to that sort of company, the ensemble feel.
That for me is the best. Certainly
my theatre career has consisted wholly of that.”
Jacobi left the National to join Prospect (after, like Olivier before
him, taking in Oedipus Rex and Mr. Puff in The
Critic on the same evening, at Birmingham).
He stayed with Prospect, more or less, until 1979, playing many parts
including Aguecheek, Buckingham, Octavius Caeser and Hamlet, which he later
played at Elsinore, as well as doing work by Turgenev, Chekhov, and Christopher
Fry. I’d thought he’d directed
for Prospect as well. “No, Toby
Robertson was always promising me and I never did.
I was always asking.” He’d
like to direct in the future, and divide his time “between the two, New York
and here, stage and film.” He
starred in Suicide in New York a couple of years ago.
He has made a number of films—including The
Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File
and The Human Factor—but on celluloid is probably still best known to
most people for being Robert Graves’ eponymous I, Claudius on television. On
the box he has also appeared in The
Pallisers, Man of Straw, Philby, Burgess and Maclean, The Hunchback of Notre
Dame and, elegantly, Richard II.
“But most of my professional life has been on a stage, camera work
really for me is a recent growth and I’ve done much more stage than I ever did
television and film. Being away from the stage you do get a bit rusty, the voice
gets rusty and that sort of thing; but it comes back and this place is full of
teachers and classes, which is marvelous.”
Of coming to Stratford this season his “only worry was that I hadn’t
been on a stage in this country for 2½ years when I started last April, and I
hadn’t been on any stage of any sort for 19 months, and my fear was:
have I lost my nerve for it? Have
I lost the knack? Because it’s so
much easier to act if you’re working in front of a camera, as I’d been for 2½
years. The special nerve that you
need, actually to climb on to the stage in front of 1,300 people, night after
night, is a different sort of nerve and I was in danger, I think, of losing it.
My fear coming here was: I’ve
got to face it now, otherwise I’ll never go on stage again.
If I’d left it much longer I’d have got further and further away, and
I’d have taken all the tele jobs and all the film jobs and I’d never have
gone on the stage again. Because
one gets inveigled away, and if you become an actor who is asked to work in
front of the camera, and there are many of them, you do so forget about the
other. You also say, oh yes, the
theatre’s better, dying to go back; but I don’t actually ever do it. And there comes a time when they say; I can’t. I
remember Johnny Hurt saying, ‘I don’t think I could now’. Which is a great pity.”
We talked about his roles at Stratford this season.
“The one I’m still frightened of, still not relaxed in, is The
Tempest. But it’s the one
that really is the most satisfying. Each
performance for me is like a first night. It’s
something I’ve not done before, and is very rewarding.
It’s really broadened me, stretched me.”
Maria Bjornson’s set is luscious and elaborate.
“It’s a difficult set because it has no level area anywhere. It’s
like walking up a mine field. For
the actors it’s like one of those crazy houses in a fun fair, there are so
many different levels.” The day I
met Mr. Jacobi, King Lear was the
matinee, The Tempest was playing in
the evening. “The changeover from
one play to the other should take five hours, because of The Tempest set, but they’ve got only 2½ hours to do it in.
They’ve only done it once before and they had to hold the curtain till
7:45. They didn’t quite get it
done in time.”
Ralph Koltai’s set for Terry Hands’ production of Much
Ado About Nothing glitters. The
floor and stage mirror the actors, as the text does.
It’s all hugely elegant. When
Don Pedro (played by Derek Godfrey, Stratford’s Benedick in 1971) and his
company arrive at Messina they hardly look as if they’ve stepped off a
battlefield. “There’s something
to be said for the theory that we’ve been fighting Don John, that the two
brothers have been having a private battle.
There’s no actual battle mentioned in the text but there’s a
reference to Don John ‘being reconciled to the prince your brother’.
They suddenly come on and do this masque and things, and where have they
got all that together? So we
thought: oh, that’s what we’ve
been doing; we’ve been practicing
that since we’ve been fighting.”
Some actors are said not to enjoy being exiled in Stratford for nine
months. Not so Derek Jacobi.
“I don’t actually live in Stratford.
I live in Alcester, in a cottage I rent which belongs to the theatre.
It’s lovely driving into work every day through the country, that’s
smashing. I like all the visitors.
This place has been bulging all season, which is wonderful.
At the height of the season the audiences roar with laughter, it’s just
extraordinary. The overseas
visitors are so much more giving than
English audiences. They laugh
loudly. It’s an almost childlike
response, without inhibition, and at the end they all stand up, a nice
feeling.”
I asked him if he was looking forward to playing at the Barbican with
these productions in the Spring. There
was a cascade of laughter. “I’m
looking forward to playing at the
Barbican. One has been loaded with criticism about the place, how awful it is
for actors, and we all have to go 6,000 feet below sea level.
I’m looking forward to actually doing the plays because apparently the
theatre itself is lovely—I’ve not seen it yet.
The working conditions are being improved, it’s getting better.
But they have been rough.”
In addition to the 1982 Stratford plays, Derek Jacobi will play Cyrano de
Bergerac, which will open around April or May.
“I love to play.” Not
withstanding that, he’s more keen than anything to do new plays.
“I long to do something that nobody’s seen before.
In the classics you have to live with being compared. I’d love to create something which you can’t compare with
whom you saw do it last time, or memories of previous productions.
But new plays that last more than a minute are hard to come by.”