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5. DEREK JACOBI: The Courtier, Soldier, Scholar
- University of Iowa Press
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5 DEREK JACOBI The Courtier, Soldier, Scholar For Derek Jacobi, acting goes beyond an occupation to that rare sphere of vocation or calling: "If you've got a crush on the theatre or a great desire, be wary. You have to need to be an actor. If it's just a desire, a want, a love-that's not enough. You have to need."1 Jacobi's experience with Hamlet has encompassed the middle decades of his life in the theatre. He first acted the role just before he entered Cambridge as a student in a production in 1957 which was highly praised at the Edinburgh festiva}.2 Of this early experience Jacobi mostly remembers its zeal: I was lucky enough to do Hamlet at seventeen. Actually, it was a week before my eighteenth birthday. As a schoolboy, I think I tore a passion to tatters. What I lacked in experience and technique and skill and craft, I made up for in enthusiasm, passion, and just plain noise. I don't remember how I did the soliloquies.... I really think you have to be in your thirties or forties to do the role well. That young Hamlet had great energy and was very loud.3 Jacobi spent the next twenty years developing his acting career. He had periodic associations with Hamlet, because his formative years were spent in the leading classical repertory companies of England, the Birmingham Repertory and Olivier's Chichester Theatre, which became the core group of the National Theatre's4 first company. Jacobi debuted in London by playing Laertes to Peter O'Toole's Old Vic Hamlet in 1963. He also saw a great many Hamlets: 92 Derek Jacobi in Hamlet, 1977. Photograph by Chris Davies. [54.210.126.232] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:13 GMT) I'd seen Olivier's film and onstage Paul Scofield, John Neville, Michael Redgrave, Alan Badel, Richard Burton, and David Warner. I've always been a great fan of Scofield's, but I think the one that made the most impact on me was the Olivier film. It was my era, it was from my age, it was film, and I was very young. Henry V and Richard III also made a great impact. I'd not consciously patterned anything after these other actors. . . . I was kind of far too young to appreciate any technique they were using or even to know if they were using any. And they were far too good to let it show. The glory of them was that they had this wonderful technique that never looked like technique, that always looked spontaneous. So in watching them, I wasn't aware of a particular thread or attitude to the part-or even a convention they were following. In 1977, after the very successful television series of Robert Graves' I, Claudius, Jacobi began an association with Hamlet that was to saturate his life for the next three years. He opened in the role at the Old Vic with the Prospect Theatre Company on May 30, 1977. This production ran through August 1977, then it toured the Near East, going to Egypt, Amman , Teheran, Greece, Cyprus, and Athens. It was also seen in Dubrovnik , and at the Edinburgh festival, toured parts of England, and returned to London, so that it was still playing in 1978. A year later, the performance was revived at the Old Vic, and Elsinore was the first stop on a second world tour which included Sweden, Finland, Australia, Japan, and the People's Republic of China, where Jacobi was the first Englishspeaking actor ever to give Hamlet. He stated that these were separate productions "only in the sense that there was time in between the two. But it was really the same director, virtually the same set, not totally the same cast, but all but."5 He has performed the role 379 times, a total that rivals only John Gielgud's. Jacobi's interpretation of the role received unanimous critical approval. London critics perceived that something noble had been restored to the stage. Tired of controversial productions and experimentation with basic character conception, they felt that Jacobi had found an essential core: "Recent performances of the play ... have mangled or upstaged its protagonist . This time Hamlet is back in control. Derek Jacobi restores the figure of the Renaissance prince ... equipped with all the courtesy, irony, 94 Derek Jacobi and masterful variations of tempo and weight that traditionally belong to the part."6 The...