by Peter Lewis

The Sunday (London) Times: May 24, 1992

Peter Lewis meets Derek Jacobi, one of our most popular classical actors, as he prepares to play one of our wildest poets.

The mystery of Derek Jacobi is that he seems in person too agreeable, too equable, too good-tempered to evoke so many obsessive, tortured souls. When he greets you, his voice has the ring of confidence that all is right with the world; he has the cheerful, rosy look of a cherub whose life is spent sporting in arcadian fields.

On Tuesday at the Ambassadors theatre in London he adds to his portrait gallery of historical enigmas---Claudius, the crippled emperor; Becket, the martyred saint; Kean, the half-crazed actor---the ever-fascinating Romantic, Byron. "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know" (Lady Caroline Lamb's description of Byron) is a "dramatic entertainment with music" compiled by Jane McCullough from his letters, prose and poems, many of them set to music and sung (Jacobi has a light baritone voice). Isla Blair, the only other performer, narrates and takes the parts of all the women in Byron's life, including his half-sister Augusta. It was the scandal of his incestuous passion for her which drove him abroad into lifelong exile.

Jacobi scorns attempting impersonation. "Everybody know what Byron looked like. I can't look like that, so I don't try. The aim is to get the essence and feeling of the man through what he wrote and to find the Byronic spirit that made him a hero for his own and subsequent generations." So there will be no dark curly wig and only the hint of a limp. By purely verbal means he builds the character of the insatiable and arrogant milord who declared: "What I have earned by my pen, I have spent on my ballocks." The show makes no bones about Byron's equally ardent homosexual side, from his affair with John Edlestone at Harrow to the Greek manservant Loukas with whom he ended his life at Missolonghi, at 36.

Jacobi is not one of his own fans. Despite the sunny manner, a hard taskmaster lurks beneath. Around the mirrors in his dressing-room, he lines up make-up sticks and personal baubles with almost military precision, a hint of the inner discipline he imposes. So you believe him when he says, "I continually disappoint myself." This is not the gesture of obligatory humility actors feel bound to make. "I've been acting for 33 years. I've proved I can do it. So any performance now has got to be deeper and better than that, nothing to do with ego, bravura, look-at-me acting. That is an invitation to the audience to assess your ability, and it gets in the way. The object is to get past that and lose yourself in your belief in the person you are trying to create. To find something absolutely real. But I constantly hope to go further than I manage to do."

Immediately after his six-week run as Byron, he begins a four-month tour of "Breaking the Code" (opening in Sheffield on July 6). He is reviving, after four years, the only contemporary character he has created on stage, the mathematician, Alan Turing. Jacobi turned in a disturbing performance that is still vivid in the memory. Turing aside, the parts Jacobi takes, if not actually classical, seem inevitably to be historical. This is true even of his forays into 20th century plays, such as Anouilh's "Becket" (for which he won a best actor award in the title role jointly with Robert Lindsay this year) and the pyrotechnical display of his portrayal of Sartre's "Kean" in 1990. Even in television and films the rule seems to hold. His unforgettable break-through was, of course, as the Emperor Claudius in 1976. It was a virtuoso creation of such singularity that, for all the awards it won, it did not lead to other film offers. "There's a dearth of parts for ageing, limping, stuttering dictators," says Jacobi dryly, "and that's how movie minds think."

He is by nature an actor who is unhappy to be away from the stage for long, and one naturally gifted with a physical charge of excitement and a feline certainty of movement. Above all there is the rich, unmistakable, wide-ranging voice. As Bottom put it, he can "roar you as gently as any sucking dove, as 'twere any nightingale"---but he can also call up trumpet tones, as well as flute and cello. In person, the voice is mild, equable, boyish (he seems a good deal younger than 53). But in performance there are moments when the voice curdles, thickens, even chokes, as harsh emotions, sarcasm, fear and rage flood into it. In the recent radio "Hamlet" by the Renaissance company, his Claudius grew steadily more desperate and dangerous through sheer vocal virtuosity. He looked askance when I used the word melodious. "I once got a letter from Richard Burton about that. He had seen me in a student Hamlet, and he wrote that I suffered from the same thing he did: a voice too melodious, easy to listen to and liable to send people to sleep. He advised me to roughen it up."

There was no acting in his family--he grew up in an East End terraced house with both parents working in the retail trade. "But it was there from the beginning---I'm totally untalented in any other respect." He sprang on to the stage at Leytonstone County High School, where he took on Hamlet at 18. He was lucky in his English master, Bobby Brown, who enterprisingly took his school play to the Edinburgh Festival fringe in 1957. It was the year when the official drama flopped. Critics in search of something to write about went to see him, and two of them, Alan Dent and Kenneth Tynan, pursued their argument about his merits in the letters columns afterwards. (The only critic Jacobi cares about is Mr. Brown---"He spares me nothing"---who still writes to him after every new role). "So I arrived at Cambridge with a reputation I promptly failed to live up to."

He went to Cambridge mainly to act, and in 1960 was taken straight on at the leading training ground, Birmingham Rep, where after three years he got the traditional call from nearby Stratford-on-Avon. Thinking the interview was a formality, he was surprised to be asked to read Ariel before the combined weight of the RSC's then directorate of Hall, Brook, Barton, St. Denis. He muffed it. "When I got the 'Sorry, no', it was suicide time---the biggest disappointment I've had in a profession renowned for its rejections." The Rep took him back and gave him three leads in its 50th anniversary season, one of which--Henry VIII--was seen by Laurence Olivier, who was scouting for young actors for his first National Theatre company season at the Old Vic.

Jacobi's luck had not deserted him. October 22, 1963 was his 25th birthday and he celebrated it in the National's opening production at the Old Vic as Laertes, fighting in real earnest against the unpredictable swordplay of Peter O'Toole's Hamlet. Soon he was playing Cassio in the Olivier "Othello", with a close-up view of the heights to be scaled in the great parts. When he left, after nine years as an Olivier "baby" ("He did invite me to call him Larry, but I couldn't--he was always Sir"), he applied his skills to Hamlet, for which he was now ready. The Prospect Theatre Company valiantly toured it around Britain and the world twice, in 1977 and 1979, with a spell at the Old Vic. Jacobi has now played the exhausting role nearly 400 times, a record for his generation--"I long to play it again, because you never get it right." His was a performance rich in humour, fine arias, introspective intensity and bursts of savage fire. Among the crowds of young people who flocked to see it on tour was Kenneth Branagh, then undecided whether to be an actor or a journalist. "Later he came to see me play it at the Vic and told me I had made up his mind for him. He was then intending to play it at Rada and wanted my advice." Later Jacobi directed Branagh in Hamlet for Renaissance in 1988.

But on the last lap of the Hamlet tour in Australia in 1979, Jacobi was struck dumb by stage fright, the dreaded condition that is no respecter of reputations. "It's as though you have crossed Niagara on a tightrope 250 times and, on the 251st crossing---vertigo. You are convinced you can't move across the stage without falling over. You go rigid from the knees down. You suddenly wonder, why am I doing this?" It drove him from the stage for two years and when, in 1982, the RSC invited him to Stratford again, it was he who was ravaged by doubts about whether he would be able to perform. "I knew I'd got to get through a whole season, three spanking parts, and that if I ran away, I would never act on stage again. It was that knowledge that shocked me out of my illness. But I had a very bad time in the first weeks." He learned the Alexander technique, which enables him to de-tense himself in mid-performance. His years as Benedick, Prospero and Cyrano became a high-water mark. When 'Much Ado' transferred to New York in 1984, he was the toast of Manhattan and his Benedick won a Tony.

He was one of three actors considered for the role of Hannibal Lecter in 'Silence of the Lambs'---surprisingly, for one would put the projection of sheer evil down as one of his limitations, which showed when he played Richard III. The more complex personality of a character such as the naive genius Alan Turing is more his forte, and it was Jacobi whom the author of 'Breaking the Code', Hugh Whitemore, envisaged as Turing when writing the play. They spent many hours collaborating---a process which is still going on, for Whitemore is a compulsive rewriter.

Jacobi is eager to have another shot at the part. "By the end of the last run, I felt I had made a leap forward in making someone appear real on stage. Acting is painting, not photography, but painting is just as 'real' as photography. As an actor conscious that you are in a theatre, you still have to make it look as spontaneous as if you did not know that you are being watched by 1,000 pairs of eyes."