It'll be all right on the knight

BY BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE

After a lifetime in the theatre Sir Derek Jacobi is still crippled by stage fright Derek Jacobi is 62, a knight of the realm, successful on both stage and screen, and, as I rediscovered when we met for a drink, the sort of chap strangers address rather reverently, like a statue of some benign-looking saint. Yet he says that when he stands in the wings at the Vaudeville tomorrow, preparing to make his first entrance in Hugh Whitemore’s God Only Knows, he’ll probably just have thrown up and will certainly be shaking with nerves. Not many actors openly acknowledge their insecurity and fear, as Jacobi does; but then not many actors take the same risks as they struggle onstage to achieve the art that conceals artifice. Concidences, coincidences.

When we last spoke seriously, Whitemore was also the reason. It was 1987, and Jacobi was en route to Broadway as the pioneering scientist Alan Turing in the dramatist’s best play, Breaking the Code. Since then, Whitemore has become the actor’s good friend. Indeed, he wrote the leading role in God Only Knows — an Englishman on the run in Italy with secrets deeply embarrassing to the Vatican — for Jacobi. The hair has whitened since 1987 and the face has got a bit more lined, which is fine, since one of Jacobi’s insecurities concerns his features, which he has variously described as roly-poly, cherubic, well-fed, effete, teacher’s pet and boring. He’s always envied actors who look gaunt and lived-in, such as Jack Shepherd or Jonathan Pryce, and feels that one reason his Macbeth failed in 1993 was that he didn’t then look the part. “Saturnine, sculpted faces are automatically associated with emotion, but if you’ve got a round face and fair hair, you don’t look as if you’ve suffered. You may change an audience’s mind during a performance, but it makes these judgments when you enter. For the Scottish play, I cropped my hair, I tried to use the thick neck I’ve got, but physically I didn’t convince. I just didn’t give off the evil Macbeth is supposed to give off.” He could probably summon up more grimness now, which is why he’d like another go — but could he summon up the confidence?

For an actor as self-critical as Jacobi, that’s always a pertinent question. In the past he’s suffered seriously from stage fright, a condition he regards as the actor’s industrial illness. Twenty-odd years ago he had temporarily to give up the theatre for the screen after sudden episodes in which he felt his pores were in meltdown, his costume evaporating, and he himself likely to fall backwards into hell. Indeed, it wasn’t until the RSC rang asking him to play Cyrano, Peer Gynt, Benedick and Prospero in the 1982 season that he decided he must force himself back on to the stage. How could he refuse so many ace roles? But after playing Uncle Vanya in London in 1996, those self-doubts began to resurface, and the longer he remained away from the theatre, the worse they got. He had to nerve himself for the premiere of God Only Knows, and he did so by going to Broadway last year and regaining his confidence with a role he knew well: Chekhov’s Vanya again. “It’s horrible, terrible, and it’s much more common than people realise. When Laurence Olivier was doing Shylock for the National Theatre, and I was Gratiano, he called me into his dressing-room. And he said, ‘Don’t look at my eyes when you do that big speech in the trial scene, look at my forehead or my chin.’ I didn’t understand then that eyeballing him would have defocused and frightened him — but I do now.”

For Jacobi stage fright is particularly destructive, because he won’t perform on automatic pilot. Spontaneity, openness, risk are key words in his lexicon. His ideal is to be so caught up in the character and situation that he doesn’t consciously know what will happen when he ventures on stage. If the mind and emotions react fast enough, the words will begin to sound as if they’ve never been written down or rehearsed; each performance will become subtly different; and a long run, such as that of Breaking the Code, will never get boring. But concentration is essential. Let an irrelevant thought intrude, and freshness disappears. At worst, a performance becomes false and even showy. “The audience gives you an electricity you can play with, and, when it goes right, the joy and exhilaration are wonderful,” says Jacobi. “But when it doesn’t, the horror and terror can be devastating.” First nights, with critics preparing to make judgments set in verbal stone, are particularly difficult for him. “It might be the best performance you’ve ever given, but the odds are that it won’t be, because you’re telling yourself, ‘I have got to get it right tonight. Oh God, let me not go wrong.’ But you mustn’t let the worm of doubt, fear of failure or anything extraneous enter your head. The moment those thoughts start coming, you’re fed.”

Another possible obstacle to good performance is, paradoxically, Jacobi’s eminence: which is why he thought long and hard about accepting a knighthood in 1994. For one thing, it would mean “the pressures are greater, the expectations are greater, the risk of disappointing people greater”. For another, he’s a strong believer in ensemble acting and has seen actors let their status cut them off from their fellow performers, on and off the stage. When he joined Olivier’s embryonic National Theatre in the early 1960s — the move that made his name — he never felt able to call the great man Larry. “I could no more do that than fly to the moon. He was Sir Laurence, he was Sir. But I didn’t want younger actors to change their attitude to me because I had a title. I didn’t want a barrier between us. I’d loathe it, it would be awful. But then I thought, well, it depends on how I handle myself. And what it means is, the boy’s done good, that’s all.” Even before the knighthood, Jacobi felt he got too easily categorised as “posh”. When he heard that Carlton was looking for someone to play the monkish gumshoe Cadfael in a television series, he asked his agent to communicate his interest, and got the initial reaction: ‘Oh no, he’s a BBC actor, he does Shakespeare, he’s classical.’ “But he’s not,” wails Jacobi. “He’s a jobbing actor! I’ve worked for major companies and the BBC and done a lot of classical work. But that hasn’t been a career choice. It’s the way the cookie has crumbled. What Carlton said made me realise that an actor may acquire a spurious image that has nothing to do with who and what he is.”

For Jacobi, a major contemporary role, such as the tramp in The Caretaker, is as challenging as a classical one. And the roles that have given him most satisfaction include Turing as well as Hamlet, Cadfael as well as the lead in I, Claudius for the BBC. Currently, he’s on screen as a rebellious senator in Gladiator, will soon be seen as a ham Shakespearean actor (“it came very easily”) in an episode of Frasier, and is about to play Michael Gambon’s manservant in Robert Altman’s new Gosford Park. He’s especially proud of his performance as Francis Bacon in the 1998 film Love is the Devil. Indeed, that movie did much to change his attitude to the screen, which he had always regarded as an inferior art form, mainly because it seldom lets an actor do more than offer isolated bits and pieces to an all-powerful director. But even in 1987, when we last spoke, he conceded that it demanded different and not necessarily lesser skills. And then he was given a measure of control over the way his performance in Love is the Devil was cut and selected. “I didn’t feel someone else was having all the fun and making all the decisions. I felt, no, this is mine, this is me.” And future stage roles? Well, he’ll follow his normal, rather passive practice, which is to wait to see what he’s offered. He’d like another go at Prospero, but feels that Lear should wait until he’s 69 or 70, when he hopes he’ll be emotionally and professionally ready for what he regards as the most taxing part of all.

Meanwhile, he’s been busy touring and re-rehearsing God Only Knows, a play he likes because it touches on metaphysical subjects seldom aired in the theatre, and does so in a way that accords with his own rationalist beliefs. Would you believe that Jacobi was once a Billy Graham convert? He barely believes it himself. But the local vicar in Leytonstone, where he was brought up, lured the 13-year-old Jacobi and his none-too-religious parents to a huge evangelical rally — “and there was Billy Graham preaching, and this wonderful choir singing angelically. He asked people to come forward and give themselves to Jesus, and I found myself walking down the centre of Haringay Arena followed by several hundred others and, to my great surprise, even my parents.” His conversion didn’t last more than a day or so; but maybe it will pass through his mind as he prepares to play the frightened runaway in God Only Knows. As he says himself, “I particularly identify with a joke at the end of the play, about not being a religious man but in times of great distress thinking, look, if there is anybody there, please help me.” For someone who feels the way Jacobi does about first nights, a prayer in the wings might make the prospect of performing on a wing and a prayer a bit less daunting.