Derek Jacobi and Norman Rodway talk to Margaret Tierney
Plays and Players, 8/70
The time when actors automatically went into rep because there was virtually nothing else to do is long gone. Films and television have changed the picture to such an extent, that the actor who joins a good permanent company and spends several years experi-menting and enlarging his range, is an object of remark and often envy. When he gets the lead in a major production, there is usually a band of afficianados to say ‘About time too’, and crowd the theatre to see where the experiments have led.
Both the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company have picked
this season to promote a major supporting player into a leading role.
At Stratford, Norman Rodway has trodden the minefield of Richard III.
In London, Derek Jacobi tackled Myshkin in The
Idiot.
Their situations are not identical.
Derek Jacobi, twenty-nine, has been with what he realistically calls
‘posh rep’ since he was twenty-three. Sir
Laurence Olivier’s talent scouts spotted him at Birmingham, playing (of all
unlikely parts) Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.
This led to a season at Chichester, and then to the National Theatre.
Norman Rodway, ten years older, worked extensively in Ireland before
coming over here six years ago. He
appeared in films, television and the West End before joining the RSC.
Of the two, he is less the product of a company.
Derek Jacobi talked to me between rehearsals of The
Idiot. When this appears we
shall know the verdict, but at the time both the play and his performance were
still in the shaping-up stage.
‘We’re still making alterations as we go along,’ he said.
‘Norman was fortunate in that he had a great classic play already
written. Of course, he’s got the comparisons problem to a greater
extent, but I have it too. We’re
doing a new version—Simon Gray’s vision of The
Idiot rather than simply an adaptation of Dostoievsky, but the character of
Myshkin is very well known, almost as famous as Hamlet. People who’ve managed to get through the 700 pages of the
book have strong views about Myshkin. Some
people think he could never possibly have existed, because he’s just too
saintly to be true. But I think
he’s a very, very complex psychological character.’
Ninety miles away, playing another complex psychological character whom
some have considered too sinful to be true, Norman Rodway refused to be bothered
by comparisons.
‘I didn’t feel I had the film breathing down my neck.
I’d seen it often—six times when it first came out, and I admire Sir
Laurence’s performance enormously. He’s
been my hero all my life. But I
also admired Ian Holm the last time this company did the play.
‘We try to start with each play as though it were new, and nobody’d
ever seen it before. At first, I
tended to think, “I can’t do that, because Sir Laurence or Ian did it that
way.” But as rehearsals went on that wore off, and I just forgot about them.
Terry Hands and I started with a fair degree of agreement about what we
wanted to do, and it developed in his way and mine.
‘I had a lot of freedom over my interpretation, because Terry’s a
persuasive rather than a dictatorial director.
He dangles carrots in front of you, and you go after them.
I started from three basic ideas. One,
that Richard was a child. Two, that
he was an actor who loved dressing up and putting on different wigs and
costumes. Three, the relationship
with Buckingham. Physically and
mentally Buckingham is everything Richard would like to be. He’s beautiful, he’s a brilliantly smooth politician with
lots of flair and finesse. Richard
has none, and he admires him hugely. He’s
astonished when he finds that this man is on his side.
Buckingham’s his favorite playmate, and he has great fun with him until
he actually gets on the throne. Then
he loses Buckingham and everything goes wrong, because he can’t cope.
He’s over-parted, better in Opposition than in Government.
‘If you read the play carefully, you’ll see that never once does he
actually say he wants to be king. He
says it in the last part of Henry VI,
but he never says it in Richard III. Once he’s actually got to run things he isn’t interested.
And when he loses Buckingham he also loses heart.
At the end of the play I try to emphasis very much his great sense of
loss over Buckingham, and the fact that eventually he just doesn’t care.’
How does a company decide someone is ready for promotion?
One way is for the actor to help matters along with a discreet hint.
‘I didn’t suggest Richard, but I did mention that I thought it was
time I had a lead. Fortunately, the management thought so too.
Then it was a question of waiting for something suitable.’
For Derek Jacobi it’s been a two-year wait and he retained to within a
week of the opening night a faint disbelief that it would actually happen.
‘Sir Laurence did say it was time I had a lead, but that was two years
ago, and it’s been a question of when and what.
It’s been a slow process. This
play’s had plenty of birth pangs.’
Tackling the preliminary work on the role, he adopted a method that might
have appealed to his studious Ferdinand in Love’s
Labour’s Lost. Never having
managed to finish the book (‘I always gave up after a hundred pages’), he
has now read it through three times.
‘It was useful at first, but after a while it doesn’t help to keep
saying, “Look Simon, you’ve written that, but in the book—“
So now we’ve declared a moratorium on the book.
‘Some of the cast had never read it, and didn’t miss it.
I would have missed it. I
wanted to discover what Myshkin was all about, and I found the passages about
epilepsy invaluable. Dostoievsky
himself was an epileptic, and his descriptions of Myshkin’s two fits are often
quoted by doctors. I’ve got
several pamphlets about Dostoievsky from the British Epilepsy Association, and
I’ve seen some films which were fairly harrowing.
‘I’ve done all this because I think the epilepsy is central to his
character. This is something Simon
has picked on. There’s a moment
when Myshkin protests that what people think of as his “goodness” may simply
be that his illness makes him different. He
says, “I might do things that you wouldn’t think of doing, but that isn’t
goodness.” I think this is vitally important to understanding him.
‘When I mentioned Hamlet, I meant that you have to approach Myshkin in
the same way. You can’t hope to
accommodate everybody’s ideas, you just have to be true to the Hamlet that is
in you. I can’t “act” Myshkin,
I’ve got to try to find him in myself, and “be” him.
‘Except for the epilepsy, of course.
That’s all acted. But the psychology has to come from inside and be my own.
If I were to impose anything that wasn’t real for me, and “act it
out,” it would be totally unbelievable.’
To have waited so long for the big chance might be frustrating, but he
didn’t seem to think so.
‘The marvelous thing about a company like this is that you broaden your
range. I love the variety.
There were times I thought “I’d love to be a big star.
I’ve come to a halt on a plateau and I’m not getting that big jump
up.” But in fact, I was being
like a little goat on a mountain, getting a bit higher each time—higher in the
sense that I knew more about my job and could bring more to each role.’
To a certain extent this variety is the result of the National
Theatre’s casting system.
‘I’ve been on two three-year contracts, and there you play as cast.
Sometimes you find out by looking at the notice-board, other times
you’re called into the office and told. You
can be nabbed coming off from one play and told you’re starting something next
week. There’s a certain amount of
consultation, but we don’t have lengthy discussions.
It’s all very democratic. After
Myshkin, I might be saying “the carriage awaits”.’
In contrast, the RSC has discussions at the end of each season.
This can give an actor more chance to get his word in, depending on how
much he knows in advance.
‘Generally not much,’ said Norman Rodway.
‘Sometimes you can work it out by a process of elimination, or you
might get a leak from the workshops who tend to hear before anybody else.
We have great games deciding what’s likely to be done. Someone generally makes a book on it, and starts taking bets.
‘If you’re interested in a part you can negotiate a bit.
You might be told you can have the part if you’ll also take on
something much smaller. This season
I’m playing Snout in The Dream, and
understudying Alan Howard as Oberon, and he’s understudying me as Trinculo in The Tempest.’
Each seems happy with the casting system in his own company.
Each has discovered roles he might not otherwise have wanted to play. With Norman Rodway it happened with his first part with the
company, Hotspur.
‘From choice I’d have played Hal before Hotspur.
Hal is much closer to me personally.
And I’ve played a lot of loud, swaggering parts which I’d never done
before. The one time I thought I was totally miscast was as Don Pedro
in Much Ado. In the end, I found a way to do it, but it never felt
right.’
Derek Jacobi started with similar misgivings about Touchstone in the
all-male As You Like It.
‘I’d never played a Shakespearean clown before, and I couldn’t
conceive what to do with it, particularly since he’s usually played
middle-aged and fat. No, I didn’t
say anything to anybody in authority, just moaned incessantly to all my mates in
the dressing room. And I ended up
enjoying it enormously.’
Isn’t the danger of a permanent company that actors grow over-familiar
with one another’s methods?
‘Yes,’ said Norman Rodway. ‘You can lose your capacity to surprise
each other. We try to make it less
of a danger by being constantly aware of it, and jolting each other.’
‘No,’ said Derek Jacobi. ‘With
actors you know, you can relax, and that gives you more freedom.
So you are, in fact, constantly being surprised, because the more you
relax with each other, the more you give out.’
One thing they have in common is a dislike of their looks.
‘I’m much more at home playing people who don’t look like me,’
said Derek Jacobi. ‘I’ve got a
hang-up about my looks. They’re
not very good for the stage. I’ve
got a pudding of a face, and my hair is too fair.’
Norman Rodway spoke disparagingly of his ‘little short hairy legs’,
but didn’t feel that character roles were the answer.
‘I’m unlucky physically, because my lack of height limits me.
I don’t much care for wigs, moustaches, funny noses or accents.
Your Alec Guinness type acting. I’m
not good at that.’
When it came to plans for the future, Derek Jacobi thought a change might
be nice, but not permanently, and not yet.
‘Just because they’ve given me a big part, I’m not going to say
“Right, that’s my spring-board, now I’m off.”
I’d like a leave of absence eventually, to try television or films, and
to recharge my batteries.
‘But I’d want to come back. I
adore Shakespeare. I love words. I love making them mean different things.
And in Shakespeare you can re-interpret all the time.
I’m going to be terribly boring and say I want to play Hamlet.
And Richard II. In fact, a
year in the RSC would be nice. I
nearly got there once, but it all fell through.’
Norman Rodway suffers less from the restlessness of wondering what’s
going on in the commercial world outside, and puts it down to his pre-RSC years.
‘Most of my work in Ireland had been with one company, which is the way
I like to work. But we couldn’t
afford to do much Shakespeare, and I’d always wanted to work in the classical
theatre, because I love the spoken word. I
believe in it as the strongest means of communication in the theatre.
Something like the Living Theatre doesn’t appeal to me at all, whereas
the classical theatre, and above all Shakespeare, does.
When I came over here I freelanced for a couple of years, did some
television and films, and found I didn’t much like them.
So I got the commercial bug out of my system before I came to Stratford.
I much prefer being a stage actor.
‘There are a lot of stage parts I want a crack at, Iago and Macbeth,
Halmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck, and
I’ve always wanted to play Peer Gynt.”
My attempts to raise the specre of commercial stardom were treated with
healthy disrespect, twice over.
‘I think that’s awful,’ said Norman Rodway flatly.
‘I wouldn’t like it at all. No,
not even for the money.”
‘I want to be successful of course,’ said Derek Jacobi, ‘but I
don’t want the big star bit that goes with it, I don’t think I could
cope.’
‘Besides,’ he added,’ what exactly do you mean by the word
“star”?’
What indeed!