A masterclass with Dame Janet Suzman
● The view from Lady Anne Barnard’s former home in Cape Town, now the Vineyard Hotel, is incomparable — the mountain is arranged like a theatrical backdrop for maximum visual effect.
The hotel’s particular charm is that the courtyard, where I am being schooled in a one-on-one masterclass with Dame Janet Suzman, is deferential to the spectacle of nature and does not try to compete with the scenery.
Between the sparkling conversation and the overwhelming beauty of the setting I am feeling particularly lucky.
Suzman is visiting South Africa for the first time since Covid and battling with the bank to unlock her account.
Despite living in London since 1959, where she moved after graduating from Wits to train for the stage at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art — which quickly led to her induction into the Royal Shakespeare Company and her much lauded career — her roots are still decidedly South African.
“I always compare the land of your birth to your parents. Somehow, even though you didn’t choose them, they just happened, it’s in your blood. It’s part of your makeup. Your molecular memories and everything are to do with you in the place you were born in. And the memories are the most vivid of all of them, however long you spend away,” she says.
Many of those formative memories are Joburg-based. Her aunt was the other famous Suzman — Helen — and Janet was raised in that liberal, anti-apartheid milieu.
She speaks in long, beautiful sentences with a cadence that is almost poetic, a sideeffect of a lifetime spent treading the boards, I suspect. We continue to discuss how memory works. I wonder how all those long texts embed in the mind? Her experience is that the writing is key.
“A great writer sets up images in your mind, and your memory clings on to extraordinariness that I think is emotional.”
To explain the enduring relevance of Shakespeare, which is what has brought us together — her trip to South Africa was in part to celebrate Lara Foot’s moving production of Othello at the Baxter Theatre — she tells me an anecdote about one of her most celebrated roles, Cleopatra.
Harold Bloom, the famous literary critic, wanted to use her image as Cleopatra on the cover of his book. She told him: “I’m just amazed every time I was acting that part, to think that a man could have written this woman with such nuance and richness of observation and feeling. It’s a role unlike any of the other women characters.” Bloom replied: “Only Shakespeare can rise above the limitations of being a male.”
“Watching this production of Othello was such a squaring of the circle. I am sitting there having directed Atandwa’s father [John Kani] in Othello in 1987 at the Market Theatre, which broke the Equity boycott and caused a sensation because it was all black and white sex — because it’s a sexy play. Jealousy and just the ordinary stuff of life — there are only 12 stories in the world really. And here is his son. Playing the same thing.”
How does the directing process differ from acting?
“Directing — you’re in charge of everything. Everybody’s fate is in your hands. Whereas in acting, you are in charge of yourself. You see the world through the eyes of the character just as we see the world through our eyes. That’s your version of the world.”
However, she is not a card-carrying member of the “method acting” club.
“You have got to separate the imagination and reality — when people start acting like their characters offstage, then they’re bonkers. They have slid into madness, because you’ve got to be in control. I mean, there are certain ways of behaving which are a bit sort of like ‘the method’ I suppose, like some people don’t like to come out of character in the coffee break. So they’ll have their coffee served to them in their caravan or away from other people. So you can just stay focused. You see it with musicians. You see it with tennis players.”
She is 85 and makes an excellent case for induction into the “blue zone” hall of fame. She is active on multiple boards and is still acting, most recently in The Crown. A life spent in pursuit of excellence clearly does wonders for the spirit. She is vibrant and acute, but what is her experience of time?
“It feels an invention, really. I am terribly old when I actually think about it — ancient — but I don’t feel it. Yes, just a strange mystery, you live with the mystery. Because I think until you start getting something terrible which is going to kill you, you don’t feel age. But we all have to end things and it will come when it will. I’m a bit like Hamlet.
“I do think about death. I’m doing lots of clearing out at the moment. I’ve got a house full of guff. You know how one collects stuff. An unbelievable amount of rubbish. Just bits of your life, which are on shelves, in books, or in a suitcase, in boxes, photographs. Proper photographs, not digital.
“I suppose the editing process is like writing a very short novel. When you’re chucking things out, you just think, ‘I wonder what’s really important? What do I need to keep?’”