by
Sheridan Morley
In a reactionary time, the theatre is inclined to start looking for
matinee idols as well as tap shoes and there can be no doubt that in Derek
Jacobi the Royal Shakespeare company have found themselves Britain’s most
romantic leading classical actor since the long-lost 1950’s when Richard
Burton and John Neville used to swap roles at the Old Vic to teenage cheers from
the gallery. But with the
productions of Cyrano de Bergerac and Much
Ado About Nothing, which open on Broadway this month after a triumphant
European tour and a season at the L.A. Olympic Arts Festival, Jacobi and his
Gaelic co-star Sinead Cusack are reaching the end of a punishing two-year stint.
At Stratford-on-Avon, the Barbican in London and his recent travels,
Jacobi has been playing not only Benedick and Cyrano but also Prospero in The
Tempest and Peer Gynt, sometimes achieving all four in a single week
Miss Cusack (though she has only recently joined the Cyrano
company as the ravishing Roxane) has been working no less hard. Theirs is a purely professional partnership, Miss Cusack
being privately, if sometimes stormily, married to another recent Broadway star
from the other side of the Atlantic, Jeremy Irons, and although romantic-star
duos have not been exactly Stratford’s house style since the great days of the
Oliviers, there can be no doubt that public enthusiasm for the Jacobi-Cusack
team has been stronger in both Europe and America than for any other
Shakespeareans of recent times.
It helps, of course, that both Much
Ado and Rostand’s Cyrano are
hugely romantic plays (now in superb new productions by the RSC’s joint
artistic director Terry Hands), and they both seem to have caught a moment in
theatregoing taste when there is a distinct move away from the chillier and more
academic classics and back towards a more lyrical and picturesque kind of stage
romance. Certainly Cyrano, the more recent of the two productions, is for all who love
a parade. The
adaptation/translation is by the novelist Anthony Burgess who first worked on
the play as a sort-lived Broadway musical for Christopher Plummer more than a
decade ago, and though this is now a somewhat revised text, certain of the
longer speeches still sound as if they could have done with a musical
accompaniment by Stephen Sondheim or at the very least Andrew Lloyd Webber.
In the title role, Jacobi himself, who has been obsessed with Cyrano
for very nearly as long as Burgess, goes all out for the voice beautiful and
the gorgeous profile (even the famously long nose is here trimmed to manageable
proportions), while Terry Hand’s marvelously agile and active production is
forever allowing its star to leap into the kind of poses that must have been
used to advertise the play on its original turn-of-the-century posters.
What we have in Cyrano is a curiously sexless pageant dedicated to chivalry and
mindless heroism: Early critics
found it a useful antidote to the new-fangled neuroses of Ibsen and Stringberg,
and indeed it still works much after the fashion of a Douglas Fairbanks silent
movie with wonderful set-piece highlights like the arrival of Roxane on the
battlefield or the great death in the orchard where both Cyrano and his virginal
beloved seem to be slowly drowning in a sea of falling leaves.
The same director’s equally glamorous Much
Ado, set in the period of King Charles I, is a strong companion piece not
only because of the cross-casting but more importantly because it too is about
the importance of distinguishing between fashionable surface sentiment and
genuine emotion. In both plays
Jacobi grows from court jester to tragic hero through the power of love, and in
both plays Cusack is the object of that love.
Both productions also star the designer Ralph Koltai, whose sets are
little short of magical, and if overall Cyrano
seems to win by a nose, at least for English audiences, that may well have been
because the play was the less familiar of the two—Much
Ado has been much revived in both London and Stratford of late.
Not surprisingly, Jacobi now feels like a marathon runner at the end of a
long Olympic Arts sprint, “hanging on by an eyelash” as he says after a
two-year theatrical glory trip which has won him a handful of British stage
awards and may well line him up for a Tony if Broadway’s love affair with the
London stage is not yet quite over:
“I know,” he said recently, “that there will probably never be
times like this for me again. There is a small voice inside me saying, ‘Gather ye rosebuds
while ye may,’ but I try not to listen to it.”
Now 46 and resolutely unmarried, Jacobi has dedicated his life
wholeheartedly to the business of being an actor, though his arrival at the
Royal Shakespeare company has in a sense been 20 years overdue.
A golden boy of Britain’s National Youth Theatre and then of Cambridge
undergraduate acting circles, he progressed straight from college to the
Birmingham Repertory Company at a time when it was traditional that the leading
man there was invited at the end of the season to audition for Stratford:
“Lined up on the stage there were all the 1963 directors—Peter Hall,
Peter Brook, John Barton, Michel St. Denis—they asked me if I’d like to give
them something so I gave them ‘To Be or Not To Be’ and a few days later
there came an embarrassed note from Peter Hall saying that it was Not to Be.”
Instead Jacobi went to the founding season at Chichester where Laurence
Olivier was building up the first British National Theatre company, and with
that company he stayed for the next eight years, working his way through the
ranks from spears to leading classical roles at the Old Vic in everything from
Noël Coward’s Hay Fever to Laertes
in O’Toole’s Hamlet.
Then followed a period in films and television (most notably, of course,
the stammering title role in I, Claudius)
and a return to the classical stage when the RSC at last rang with a sizeable
offer and “the telephone went red hot in my hand.”
Though he still has hopes of one day making “the really big film, just
to see what it feels like,” there’s not doubt that Jacobi is most at home on
the classical stage, whether barnstorming the world with the RSC or working in
the more intimate surroundings of one of their London or Stratford studio
stages. Not that this will be his
Broadway debut: he was last here
with the short-lived Suicide in 1980.
This time things are looking a good deal more promising for him, as
indeed they are for Sinead Cusack: The
current Roxane-Beatrice double rounds off a memorable seven year stint with the
RSC during which time she has managed to shake off all the labels she first
acquired as “Cyril Cusack’s daughter” and “Jeremy Iron’s wife” and
establish herself as one of the best classical actresses of her mid-30’s
generation. Though she could
probably have stayed forever in work at the Abbey Theatre Dublin as a member of
Ireland’s leading theatrical family, she came to England at 21 and achieved
early if soon-abandoned stardom in a forgetable Peter Sellers movie called Hoffman.
She also achieved considerable gossip-column fame as a girlfriend of the
footballer George Best, none of which made it exactly easy for her to persuade
the RSC that they should be taking her seriously as a classical actress.
But by the mid-1970’s she was starring with Irons (they now have a son
called Sam) in the second cast of Wild
Oats at the RSC’s London base, and since then, while he was off to Brideshead
and The French Lieutenant’s Woman,
she stayed with the company, working her way up to a fiery Kate in Taming
of the Shrew and the current Broadway double as well as a Portia in Merchant
of Venice and Lady Anne in Richard III.
“For years I was dreadfully typecast in films and television because I
have this round face, blue eyes and blonde hair:
it was the RSC who taught me that there was a lot more to being an
actress. Imagine: they give you eight weeks rehearsal in Stratford, then
another eight weeks in London and another eight before you go off on tour.
If you can’t get it right by then, there must be something very wrong
with you.”
But despite her recent arrival at classical status, Miss Cusack remains a
fiery and very funny lady. When she
was first living with Irons during the run of Wild
Oats and discovered that she was pregnant, she waited until he was about to
go on for his big scene at the matinee. Then,
backstage, she whispered the news to him: “wickedly
unprofessional,” as she says, “but very enjoyable.”