Читать книгу As Luck Would Have It - Derek Jacobi - Страница 21

Thirty years or so into my acting career I was playing Hamlet on a tour when we visited many Middle Eastern countries, but while in Yugoslavia and before entering Egypt the company manager spotted that I had an Israeli visa stamped in my passport. There was no time to go to the consulate, so in the interval I was stuck up against the wall in the dressing room in Hamlet’s mad ‘antic disposition’ attire, and they snapped a passport photo of me there and then, so I had a new passport issued by the British Consulate. For ten years until the passport expired, border officials had to check me against the lace collar and beard of Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’.

In my final term at school, Bobby Brown – who by now was a good friend, and would often have a meal at home with the three of us – cast me for the first time as Hamlet. Bobby was tall, with receding chin – something of a chinless wonder – very clever, very kind, and with a great sense of humour. He had a terrible time with the troublemakers in my class who would riot and play him up rotten: he was not a born teacher by any means. I used to feel terrible when this happened, and I sensed there was something of the actor manqué about him: when he started rehearsing us he was a different person, he would relax more than when he was teaching.

He cast Hamlet from the school dramatic society, and we held read-throughs in the wood-panelled library, and then moved downstairs to the assembly hall. Sometimes we rehearsed out of school in my best friend Mark Allen’s large house on the edge of Epping Forest – he was Laertes – and there we practised the sword fight.

Bobby was a good director: very gentle, he gave me a sense of what the words meant, who the character was and where it all came from. Mum made me wonderful costumes, and when we moved to the final rehearsals in the school hall there would be this great buzz and hive of activity: costumes and props being fashioned by parents in the auditorium, lighting and rehearsing on stage. We changed in the gym, and once Mark’s brother Tim, aged fifteen, who was a very fetching blonde Ophelia, turned up blind drunk for a run-through. We had to put Ophelia under a cold shower to get her on.

After playing as usual in the school assembly hall we took the production to the Edinburgh Festival. As my Prince Hal with Croft was now being succeeded by the Prince of Denmark, I might be forgiven for thinking I was cast in the same mould – forever to play princes and royals, with the odd pope and cardinal thrown in.

As part of the Fringe we played in the hall of the Edinburgh Academy, where my performance was commended for its attack and ‘sheer professionalism’. It was everything but that, and I didn’t rate all that highly, but what I lacked in craftsmanship and insight I believe I made up for in terms of raw energy. I remember this Hamlet, which was the first of my four performances in the part, with the greatest affection and pride. It wasn’t the Youth Theatre production that was generally touted, but put on by the Players of Leyton – as we called ourselves – and we experienced together, with boys playing the females, just that camaraderie I never found in my one Youth Theatre production.

Mine was a black-and-white Hamlet, very simplistic, in which I tore several passions to several tatters, but for all that it may have had something very accessible, entirely due to Bobby Brown’s careful coaching, because we received a huge amount of publicity. We rather outshone the main Festival offering, The Hidden King, a Scottish play with Robert Edison and Robert Speiaght, at the Assembly Rooms.

Hamlet had astonishing results. Mum and Dad couldn’t believe it, and were so chuffed. They ran a profile of me in the London Observer on the strength of which I was summoned to the Soho office of 20th Century Fox, where they told me I was too young for them. The Fox executive added that my only asset was my red hair, because it would photograph well.

Hamlet was a turning point, because although I had always, from a small child, wanted to be an actor, I was now really at the point where I thought: ‘Yes! I could probably make it work!’ My Hamlet even caused a spat between two leading critics, Alan Dent of the News Chronicle and Kenneth Tynan of the Observer.

Tynan pontificated patronisingly, ‘As Hamlet this boy would make a fine prose actor,’ which Dent took to be a slur on my performance.

Dent in turn wrote, ‘May I remind Mr Tynan that I once saw him [i.e. Tynan] play a dreadful Player Queen as a schoolboy?’

It was quite ridiculous. Here were these two critical giants clawing at each other’s throats over me, an eighteen-year-old!

Twenty years later, in 1977, when I did Hamlet at the official Edinburgh Festival in the Assembly Rooms for Prospect, an American couple in the audience sent word after it ended through the stage manager: ‘Can we come and see you and say hello?’ This was after I, Claudius on television had been such a success that I was known as ‘I, Claudius Hamlet’.

‘Are you here for the Festival?’ I asked this very sweet couple in my dressing room.

‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘and we’re also celebrating our twentieth wedding anniversary. The reason we wanted to see you – apart from being fans – is because we were here in the year we married twenty years ago, and you were playing Hamlet, and were still a schoolboy. We were so impressed that when we had our first child we called him “Derek”: and twenty years later here you are, still playing Hamlet!’

In earlier days, back in Leytonstone, Mark, who played Laertes, asked me over to celebrate with his parents, and his brother Tim who was Ophelia, and his sister. Mark had taken to wearing a large Astrakhan fur coat and trilby in the style of Bud Flanagan and his raccoon coat.

Mark’s father was a chemist who ran the dispensary at Whipps Cross Hospital. They cooked octopus in its own ink, and we drank wine with it. We never had wine at home, so wine with dinner was my introduction to a more sophisticated style of living. It was strange eating this new dish swimming in black juice, and I’m afraid I almost gagged.

‘Did you enjoy it?’ my hosts enquired.

‘Oh, yes, very much,’ I replied politely, so they insisted I had seconds: I had talked myself into a second helping.

Mum and Dad were up when I got back home, waiting excitedly for news of what we had eaten for dinner.

‘Octopus,’ I told them.

‘Octopus!’

They frowned. What kind of friends was I cultivating?

It was entirely due to Bobby Brown that I started my theatrical career. Bobby was a fantastic influence for the good, so he was the first to stamp Hamlet on the passport (metaphorically so, in his case) that gained me entry to the wider world.

Bobby had a passion for drama and later left teaching to join the British Film Institute. We often wondered if there was a lady in his life, but we could never quite work it out. But there was never any suggestion that he was interested in boys. He followed my career later with extraordinary devotion, and he came round after the shows to give me stringent notes and say devastating things when all I wanted to hear was lavish, unstinting praise!

Our withered-arm headmaster, Mr Cummings, didn’t wholly approve of acting and actors: he created fear in our eyes, not a bad thing for the maintenance of order. Now the school is a sixth-form college, stuffed with glass and hi-tech gear, overrun by security guards in luminous coats with clipboards.

‘All a bit cissy’ was what the headmaster thought of us then. Mum cultivated him through the PTA, to which she belonged, to look more kindly on our acting talents, so you could say she was my first agent.

I met Mr Cummings at some function years later and ‘You’ve done all right for yourself, Jacobi!’ was what he said: just like that – ‘Jacobi!’ But he was more than pleased to see me again, and to know me.

Grandpa and Grandma were always a benign presence in my early existence, but it was one that could not go on forever. When they were near the end of their lives they were both (though in different wards) in Whipps Cross Hospital, a walking distance away from Essex Road.

It was here that Grandpa died first. We went down the corridor to see Grandma to tell her. I was there with Mum and Dad, Uncle Henry and Auntie Hilda. We stood looking at Grandma, wondering how she would take it. I remember Grandma just saying, ‘I know, I know. He came to say goodbye.’

I could feel Mum jerk a little and pull herself together as she stifled her tears. Grandma died a few weeks later.

I knew that these wonderful close family relatives my good fortune had brought me would not last forever. I wonder now how they could have lived and died in such proximity to each other. Uncle Henry, with his yen for betting heavily on horses and dogs, had been bailed out more than once by Hilda. He died from a heart attack in the front room in Essex Road, his body blocking the door when Dad found him and tried to get in. Hilda had gone some years before from cancer.

Auntie had been a very strict mother to Raymond. They waited till he was twenty-one before they told him he was adopted. Discovering this had a traumatic effect on him and he began to drink. He was twice married, and had a girl and a boy from each wife. I became godfather to the eldest, Gail, just before I reached fourteen.

Raymond died before his time. I guess life in the end just wasn’t good to him. Gail became a croupier for a time working at the Trocadero, Piccadilly, and we are still in touch.