In my third year, foreshadowing Claudius in I, Claudius, I played my first stammerer in John Whiting’s Saint’s Day, roundly criticised by Ann Dowson in Broadsheet. While Jill Daltry and Ian McKellen, ran her review, ‘managed to conceal the stiltedness of the writing by the conviction of their acting’, I came in for the most stick.
‘In the uncharacteristic part of a cringing clergyman, exaggerating Aldus’s affliction of speech,’ she wrote, ‘until it became a comic turn ... [Jacobi] provided too many laughs of an inappropriate kind.’
That was me, all right, true to form! More afflictions of speech, already there early on, and more to follow, and even cringing or indignant gay men of the cloth.
Much more notably I played a second Hamlet at the Arts Theatre Cambridge, which we took on a tour of France and Switzerland. During this I came face-to-face with an acting legend. He was a colossus with magnificent looks, voice, stature. My very first inspiration had been of ‘Rich’ – Richard Burton – in those glorious seasons of his youth at the Old Vic. By chance, a member of the cast of Hamlet was an old friend of his from childhood. This was my dear friend David Rowe-Beddoe, playing Claudius to my second Hamlet.
Now in December 1959 once again, nearly for the last time, the Cambridge rep assembled both for the Arts Theatre and a foreign tour. The company was the Experimental Theatre Club, which had earlier taken Richard Kay’s Romeo to Paris, the producer being Michael Deakin, and the director Garry O’Connor.
After the Arts, off we went, playing Hamlet in the Municipal Theatre at Grenoble, the Studio Créqui in the Lyons Faculty of Letters and the Opera House in Lausanne – where you could hear the pages being flipped over as our devoted audiences followed the text of 1598. We had ‘un rhythme rapide, mais avec une diction impeccable’ – what greater praise could there be than that from the Feuille d’Avis de Lausanne? David Rowe-Beddoe was singled out for his ‘remarquable’ Claudius, while I apparently had ‘une vérité saisissante’. Every actor should be named for excellence, said the review.
Waris Hussein, who doubled the roles of Osric and the Player Queen, didn’t think so, and had no illusions about his performances, saying, ‘Every time I came on I could see Derek anticipating, “Oh, my God, here he is again!”’ – though of course I had no such thoughts in my head.
In Switzerland, Lausanne’s Opera House, where we performed, was the size of Covent Garden. Richard Burton lived in the countryside nearby and came in to watch the play, and every night he drove David back to stay with him. His house, in Selignac, was called ‘Villa du Pays de Galles’ (Welsh villa!) and here he lived with his then wife Sybil, whom he had recently married and whom he later divorced.
One night he asked the company back to his villa for a drink and it was here that he gave me very important advice. He complimented me on my voice, and on how well I spoke the verse, but then said, ‘You have a beautiful voice, Derek, but if you don’t roughen it up you will end like J.G. [John Gielgud] and risk sending the audience to sleep!’ I took this advice very much to heart, although not altogether agreeing with him about J.G.
I received a letter from Rich when I was back at Cambridge, which said that if there was anything he could do for me to help me in my career he would: a letter I straight away lost. Some time later, in 1977 or thereabouts, I worked two days on a film with him called The Medusa Touch, and I cherish that experience of playing a scene with him. He remembered he had seen me play Hamlet nearly twenty years earlier in Switzerland.
‘What are you doing next?’ he asked, as we sat around on the set in our canvas chairs.
‘I am playing Hamlet again for the Prospect Company at the Old Vic.’
‘I’ll come and see you,’ he said.
He was as true as his word when it opened. In my dressing room after the performance we chatted and he said, ‘Let’s go out to dinner.’ He waited while I changed, and as we were leaving he said, ‘Do you mind if we go up on stage? I haven’t stood on a stage for twenty-odd years – not for that long!’
We went up on stage. It was a very moving experience for him, and tears filled his eyes. He’d lived the life he wanted, but all that huge acting talent and power in him had never been given the chance to come out fully.
‘I was a schoolboy sitting in the gods watching you play Hamlet,’ I told him as I stood there with him on the Old Vic stage – it was a cathartic moment for me, too.
‘You know one night when I was here playing Hamlet,’ Rich went on, ‘and I was starting the speech “To be or not to be”, I saw Winston Churchill, who was sitting in the front row. He started saying it, mouthing it out loud with me. I didn’t know whether to stop and let him go on – to finish it, or not to finish it!’
We proceeded on to dinner. He reached into his pocket as we left the theatre, pulled out a wad of fifty pound notes, peeled off I do not remember how many, and gave them to the stage-door keeper. It was such a movie-star gesture!
After eating we went to a nightclub to see and hear his stepson with Elizabeth Taylor play the saxophone (it was during the time he was married to his third wife, Susie). All he wanted to talk about was the theatre – and particularly Shakespeare. Although he no longer had British residency, and could only be in Britain a limited amount of time each year, he asked in all seriousness if I would arrange a Prospect Old Vic production for him to be in, and even suggested he’d fly me and the cast at his own expense to rehearse in Hollywood.
Rich stayed friends with Rowe-Beddoe till the end, and Villa du Pays de Galles, where we’d visited him in Switzerland, was the home in which he died, and from where his coffin was brought to the church. David arranged the music and played the organ at his funeral. In New York, David would ‘cover’ for Rich during his early escapades with Liz Taylor, taking Sybil out to dinner and acting as ‘beard’, her gentleman escort. She knew only too well what was going on, and used to lambast David for his complicity, with uncomplimentary reference to the ethnic background he shared with Rich! David and I had this bet at Cambridge as to which of us would have the first pink Cadillac. He bought his very soon after leaving, and easily beat me.
I’d found Cambridge horrifyingly competitive when I first went up. Academically I had ended up with a 2.2 – the Actor’s Degree – but over three years I’d learned a lot, done so much, and was anxious to get started and skip drama school. Drama school can teach you what your good points and bad points are, what you need to forget, and what you need to bone up on, but I’m not convinced it can teach you how to act: you can either act or not.
Not only had there been a continuity of roles during my time at Cambridge, but I had played all the time before a paying public, and although most of the audiences were students, and on my side, they were far from uncritical. There was a healthy sprinkling of parents, and often professionals, visiting directors, agents, impresarios from London and elsewhere.
Cambridge expanded our minds, our emotions and our skills, and the grounding in drama at Cambridge was much broader than just the practical side of acting. Dadie and Barton have remained with me all my life. Theatre at Cambridge brought me the chance to grasp the essence of theatrical performance, and its roots in traditional classical drama.