"Leading light of Royal Shakespeare Company will shine in arts festival"

London--One night last summer Derek Jacobi was accosted outside the Royal Shakespeare Company's Stratford theater by an eager American admirer. One of Britain's most distinguished classical actors was greeted by a kind of breathless enthusiasm uncommon in his native land. "Aw, Mr. Jacobi," gushed his American fan, "you were great tonight, you were great! You were even better than Benny Hill!". "And," recalls the rueful Jacobi, "I had just played Benedick in 'Much Ado About Nothing.'"

The fan's comment may seem inane, even insulting, but it's not necessarily off the mark. The Royal Shakespeare Company, despite its grand and officially sanctioned sounding name, is not the keeper of some stuffy British theatrical tradition. The RSC can be irreverent, and sometimes outrageous, in the way it treats the normally enshrined work of its namesake. Along with the National Theatre of Great Britain, with which it has a long-standing and healthy rivalry, the RSC is considered the premiere theater in the English speaking world. And its leading light of the moment is certainly Derek Jacobi. Jacobi will be starring as both Cyrano and, in the performance in which he had been so blithely compared to Benny Hill, Benedick. In the latter role, it is possible to see the comparison. Jacobi plays the self-absorbed, rapier-witted, but sexually terrified soldier of Shakespeare's comedy with a certain camp sensibility. In addition to Hill, he has been compared (by professional critics this time) to Maggie Smith.

Jacobi, pale, slight, and boyish in a faded blue shirt, gray trousers, and scuffed tennis shoes, defends his interpretation over sandwiches during a rehearsal break at London's Barbican Theatre. "My performance is rooted in the text. It's not something that is there simply because I enjoy camping around and making people laugh," Jacobi insists in his gentle, melodious voice. At one point in the play, he points out, his chief antagonist and future bride Beatrice declares that 'valour is become curtsey.' "I.e.," explains the actor, "men are wimps. At another point, Beatrice's uncle calls Claudio and his friends 'fashionmonging boys'. Men in that society have become dandified---they all come on looking like peacocks. But during the play Benedick drops the campness. He doesn't necessarily become more Steve McQueen, but he becomes a truer person, a more genuine fella, a gentleman."

Jacobi returns again and again to his insistence that his interpretation of Benedick, for all its apparent stylishness, is really nothing more than a close reading of Shakespeare's lines, combined with a close questioning of his own responses to them. Added to this is his insistence that the stage demands its own kind of acting. There's an audience out there, and Jacobi feels it needs a different kind of attention from a live performer, rather than an actor on a screen, large or small. This "attention" has led to criticism from some quarters, and Jacobi has been accused of "working the house" as a nightclub comic might. But he feels that the emotional temperature that rises and falls between an actor and his audience demands its own response, especially if an audience is really going to get to know a character intimately.

On the surface, Jacobi explains, Benedick is merry, facile, and glittering, "the one who always keeps the table on a roar, full of the repartee," but when he is alone we catch glimpses of his more sensitive, melancholy side. During Benedick's soliloquies, Jacobi walks a tightrope between staying in character and acknowledging the spectators, a liberty he defends vigorously. "Some people might say that there is too much up-front audience contact, but I believe that one of the reasons soliloquies are there is not only for the character to talk to himself but so he can share his thoughts directly with an audience. It's much more than eavesdropping---it's real two-way communication. And if that audience responds to what he is saying, then why shouldn't he respond to their response? For instance, when I start singing, badly, the song 'The God of love, that sits above' and an audience laughs at me, then why shouldn't I, as my character, respond with a look that say, 'Come on, give me a break!'? At the same time as they get some fun out of it, I don't think it upsets the balance of the play. It's not me pandering to the audience and saying, 'Now I'm going to do my stand-up comic routine.' It's got to come out of the character, and I try to make it that way."

Jacobi's Benedick is forced to make contact with the audience because they're there, in front of him, and he can't seem to obliterate their presence. "But it's dangerous," notes the actor, "and it doesn't always work, because you're asking an audience to REACT to what you've just said, and if they don't, then what do you do? You've offered them a role to play, and they say, 'No, we're not going to play, you'll have to do better than that.'" In some ways the approach, bringing the audience into the play during his soliloquies, is a practical matter. Soliloquies make him nervous, and especially in this 'Much Ado'. "There is no safety net with a soliloquy; it's just you and them, and the set for this production makes it worse. It's a wonderful set, but it's a sharp, shiny, dangerous one of steeped, raked glass. There's no way you can lean, no way you can rest. You are at a funny angle when you're standing up, so there's no sense of ease. Since that set is a little bit inhospitable, you have to make your creature comforts; you have to make it home, by inviting the audience in."

Jacobi's two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company--where he won all four of London's top theater honors--marked his return to the London theater after a 2 1/2 year absence. Going back on stage after doing films and television was a great shock, and he found himself suffering from severe stage fright. "Anything you do in front of the camera you can do again, but in the theater there's nothing. It's you and them, and it's a terrifying prospect. Before I'd done films it wasn't terrifying; theater was my natural element. But I knew that unless I accepted the RSC's offer, there was a chance I'd never go on stage again. You go rusty very quickly doing films. You don't need to use your memory; physically it's very easy---sitting around on a film set with endless cups of tea and minions waiting on you. Theater is a much harder life, much more work, and a lot less money,..but if you get it right, it's so much more satisfying. But it is frightening, and the more you do it, and the older and the more successful you get, the worse the fear is. It never leaves you, and that's exactly where I am at the moment. I stand in the wings every night and I shake, 'I can't do it, I can't do it.'"