Jacobi in Napa for Bard
Sir Derek Jacobi has performed the part of Angelo, the lecherous, duplicitous deputy in Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” only once before. In 1958. He was 19 at the time; this was for a youth theater production in Edinburgh. “I think I was pretty terrible,” Jacobi remembers, speaking over the phone from a chateau in southwest France that he shares with his partner and artistic collaborator, Richard Clifford.
This week, in Napa County, Jacobi has a chance to redeem himself, Clifford jokes.
Napa Valley Shakespeare, a 2-year-old company, partnered with the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., to produce the world premiere of “Measure + Dido,” which Clifford adapted from “Measure for Measure” and Henry Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas.” The
piece combines actors’ narration and music from the early-music ensemble Folger Consort. Clifford both directs and reads as the Duke, alongside Jacobi’s Angelo.
Jacobi, of course, has no need for redemption of any kind. Since his breakout role in BBC’s “I, Claudius” in 1976, he has gone on to become one of the greatest living actors in the English-speaking world. In “Hamlet,” he’s given an unhinged Danish prince and, years later, a spent, sympathetic Claudius. He’s been a menacing chorus in “Henry V” and an insistent yet withdrawn and erratic Alan Turing in “Breaking the Code,” among many other acclaimed performances.
More recently, he’s starred with Sir Ian McKellen in ITV’s “Vicious,” as the more effeminate and doddering member of an elderly gay couple who butter each other up by tearing each other down. Not anymore, though.
“We’ve done an hour-long special for Christmas,” says Jacobi, “but that’s it. The two old gays have stopped bitching at each other.”
But at age 77, he’s still working steadily, at times outlasting younger performers. In his recent three-month performance as Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet” in the West End, he says he “fell over once and bruised a rib, but got up and kept going.” The male lead fared less well — and so did his first replacement.
“The first Romeo (Richard Madden) hurt himself very badly jogging,” Jacobi says. “The second Romeo (Tom Hanson) hurt himself practicing the sword fight. And the third Romeo (Freddie Fox) was lovely.”
For Jacobi and Clifford, performing any work of Shakespeare is freighted with academic baggage. As Anti-Stratfordians, they question the authorship of of Shakespeare’s plays, doubting that the Stratford man — as they call the man most think of as Shakespeare — had the “knowledge of power, power from the point of view of courtiers, courts,” Jacobi says, to write so many plays that are “steeped in aristocracy.”
The pair caution that they’re not scholars and that they’re very grateful to have been immersed in Shakespeare’s plays throughout their careers. Yet, Jacobi continues, using “Measure for Measure” as an example, “it of course is all about the duke and the wielding of power and how all that is connected with a particular way of life and a particular society. Entwined in that there are extremely fascinating and dramatic characters,” as well as “interplay between the sexes and the overhanging, constant threat of death. The subtlety of it and the sophistication of the writing don’t fit with what we know from the man from Stratford.”
When Jacobi performs Shakespeare, whether that’s the man from Stratford or someone else, and whether he’s doing a reading, as with “Measure + Dido,” or a full production, his approach is similar. Shakespeare, he says, “is complicated for the actors; it’s complicated for the audience. The actor’s job is to make it as accessible as possible, to make it sound as if this is how you speak, this is how you think.
“It must come across as spoken thought, not as something that has been written down 400 years ago and so must be offered reverently, as if you’re reading a biblical text,” he adds. “It’s got to be alive, and to make it alive, you have to have a great deal of attitude towards it, because the audience might not necessarily understand each particular word.”
As much as Jacobi relishes his career performing in Shakespeare’s courts, a coming project he’s especially looking forward to is the fourth season of PBS’ “The Last Tango in Halifax,” about a heterosexual couple who find love in their 70s.
“I love playing, and rarely get the chance to play, an ordinary bloke,” Jacobi says. “I’m usually Shakespeare, I’m usually posh, I’m usually classic. Suddenly, somebody — bless them — decided to offer me just an ordinary fellow, which is the character I play, and I love it because I’m ordinary.”
If that self-characterization sounds dubious, Clifford is also skeptical. Jacobi, he says, “is never ordinary. Even his ordinary is extra-.”