By
John Simon
New York Magazine, September,
Derek Jacobi sits in his press agent’s office, and his coloring—his face and his clothes—is not just natural, but better than that: It’s British natural. Earth tones, but understated earth tones, like those of nature in England. This understatement sets off all the more the ironic lines around the mouth and the darting glitter of the eyes. An alert, amused, accessory-before-the-fact kind of glitter, to help life along its astonishing, provocative, merry way.
Surprisingly, this cheerfully self-possessed actor is a Hamlet
specialist. Five times in his
relatively short life (Jacobi is 41), he has played that not altogether
melancholy Dane, and even his first appearance on Broadway, this season, as the
protagonist of Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide—a kind of anti-heroic Hamlet—is a consequence of
Jacobi’s Shakespearean work.
But what may prove to be the pivot in Jacobi’s career has nothing to do
with the Elizabethan stage. It was
the tube. His New York debut is greatly anticipated because of the
enormous acclaim he received for his performance in the title role of PBS’s I,
Claudius. His transformation from a stuttering blunderer to the emperor
of Rome, played out in thirteen episodes on national television, held his
American audience in thrall, and his face, if not his name, is now known
everywhere. Jacobi became an
instant star; two decades of distinguished acting are no match for a single
televised success.
“It’s a state of affairs one doesn’t wholly approve,” says
Jacobi, who claims he’s never before played Broadway because no one had asked
him to until now. “But it sort of
has to be that way, doesn’t it? You
can become a highly applauded stage actor, but if you haven’t had mass
exposure, most people won’t know who you are.”
It is doubtful, once The Suicide opens October 9 at the ANTA, that the Jacobi name will
ever again be less familiar than the countenance to which it belongs.
The play, written in Russia 50 years ago and immediately banned there,
features Jacobi as an unemployed citizen who considers killing himself only to
discover that all his friends, for a variety of reasons, want
him to do just that. It is a rich,
largely comic role, one which Jacobi describes as “part classical, part
modern,” a mixture he finds quite “appealing.”
“In the last four or five years, I’ve done more classical roles than
ever,” he says. “But I see
myself as an actor who acts, and it doesn’t really matter what type of role it
is.”
Jacobi wanted to act ever since he was taken as a tot to see his first
pantomime. The bug that had merely
nibbled before bit hard when the seventeen-year-old played his primal prince in
Edinburgh. Jacobi was merely a
secondary-school student then, but his performance earned many left-handed
compliments. Nevertheless, he went off to Cambridge and, as the British say,
“read” history. But he also did
a lot of acting around the university and never seriously thought he would
become a historian. As a historian,
though, he still likes to read history books (and light novels) while waiting
interminably on a movie set for shooting to begin.
This background serves him well, providing the period sense he brings to
many historical roles, from Claudius to Hamlet and beyond.
Jacobi was one of the few Cantabs who made it directly upon graduation
into the theater—in his case into the Birmingham Rep, where he made his
professional debut in 1960. It was Laurence Olivier who discovered the young Jacobi in
Birmingham and hired him for the first Chichester Festival, to play, among
others, the good Brother Martin in Saint
Joan. Out of the Chichester
Festival the National Theatre was to evolve, and it included Derek Jacobi.
For nine years he played a variety of challenging roles at the Old Vic
and at Chichester, where he first caught my admiring attention as Felipillo in The
Royal Hunt of the Sun. But, at
the end of that ennead, he decided to strike out on his own.
Among the first of his independent performances were Oedipus and Mr. Puff
in the double bill Oedipus Rex and The Critic.
This bravura combination had been originated by Olivier for the Old Vic
some quarter century earlier and not seen since.
On opening night Jacobi got a congratulatory telegram signed “Larry”
that read: “You cheeky bastard!” Jacobi
had considered rejoining the National at the end of this Wanderjahr
but by that time Olivier had quit, so he went on to other things, including
movies and television. He finds
film acting less enjoyable than the stage because it does not allow you to
create fully your own performance. On
the stage it’s all up to you: From
top to toe, you stand, act, and, sometimes, fall before an audience, and what it
sees is what you get back in recognition or remonstrance.
“I’ve heard that New York audiences are hard to please,” Jacobi
says. “But what I like about the
theater is that it is two-way traffic.” As
for television, it is a half-way house between the independence of the stage and
the dependence of film, but it can be great fun, as Claudius
and the recent Richard II for the
BBC-PBS Shakespeare series certainly were.
Jacobi will be back on PBS this season, starring, once again, in Hamlet.
Because of television’s very nature, one might well expect this to be
the most widely viewed Hamlet ever performed. But
Jacobi has already reached what must be Shakespeare’s largest audience.
Last year, he toured China. We
did a live Hamlet on TV that was seen by 100 million people,” Jacobi recalls.
“One of the most remarkable things was that the Chinese couldn’t get over
the fact that we had different costumes from the Olivier movie, which they had
seen. It was difficult for them to
accept that there was more than one way of doing it.”
And so it’s Broadway now for our five-time Hamlet, with his fifth Dane
to air more or less simultaneously on Channel 13.
Has his interpretation of Hamlet changed over the years?
Not radically, but Jacobi says he has made the fine line between feigned
and real madness even finer. When
asked what parts he most looks forward to, Jacobi mentions Macbeth, Coriolanus,
Lear, Peer Gynt, and Cyrano de Bergerac—if not now, to come; the readiness is
all. Who was it who said that?