When I was first asked to play Prospero I was in my forties. I thought about it very carefully and then decided it did make sense for me to play it at that age. Prospero is often played as if he were a very old man, a kind of patriarchal Magus, but there is no reason why he should be. Miranda, his daughter, is only fifteen – the text is explicit about that – and he has spent twelve years on the island. She was a child of three, he tells her, when they arrived. Later he speaks of her having been ‘a third of his life’, and one interpretation of the line would only make him a man in his mid-forties.
I am not sure that he is old in body, and I am trying to think not. But I do think he has grown old in his mind. His researches into magic and his working with the elements have made his brain old. His brain has been under the most tremendous pressure to learn all the secrets of magic, and he has achieved that, but it has almost burned him out. When he talks of being near death, then he is speaking the truth, but it is not a bodily illness: he is dying from the inside. He is a man who is now mortally sick in his head.
So when I speak the famous lines, beginning ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’, I emphasise the ‘we’ very strongly. Is Prospero in fact saying that just as the visions he has conjured up, or the characters Shakespeare has created, are figments of the human imagination, so then man himself is a Divine dream?
I think this is so. Prospero has come to believe this himself and he has found it upsetting. He has achieved this awesome power by his working in magic, yet perhaps, after all, it is not as he thought. He is most deeply disturbed.
Michael Grandage was running the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. He heard I had done The Tempest at Stratford, where I had not been altogether happy with it. So with the help of Ken Branagh he got in touch with Duncan Heath, my agent, and invited me to come to Sheffield to do my second Prospero. The production transferred to London where it became the longest-running Tempest in the West End.
Michael claims I am the last living actor to receive the baton from Olivier direct, and the link is direct and very strong. This may be going too far, but what he does think, and I would agree, is that I have what Olivier has, or had, in Henry V, namely a big vocal range, which means that I can do a two-octave jump.
The productions I did for Michael over the next years at the Donmar, subsequent to the West End run of The Tempest, were sure going to put this to the test! Finally, when I came to perform Lear, I lost my voice twice, so maybe this should teach Michael not to make such a claim!
What began to obsess me as I played Prospero a second time was what appeared to be an almost prophetic vision of Shakespeare’s, which is applicable to our own time. In that same speech where he talks of our revels being ended, he continues, saying that all they have seen has now melted into thin air, these cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces, ‘the great globe itself./ Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,/ And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,/ Leave not a rack behind.’
Why should he use such a strange word as ‘dissolve’, that the whole world should dissolve? Did he, in some nightmare, look and see a future before us? For if we do end this world in a nuclear war, then that is exactly what will happen. Our great globe will dissolve, we human beings will just melt. And what is a rack? A rack is a little wisp of cloud. It will all vanish like a dream, and all that will be left of man and his achievements is that tiny wisp of cloud.
For underpinning the magic and beauty of The Tempest is the other side of man: Caliban, the side that is evil, and that cannot be taught good. This is something Prospero recognises when he actually says, ‘this thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine’. A little earlier he has said to Ariel ‘we must prepare to meet with Caliban’. What a strange thing to say. We know he has been meeting Caliban all the time for fifteen years, but this time it is as if he has to force himself to confront formally just what Caliban is, that other side of man.
Caliban is always there, the thing of darkness throbbing away under the surface in man, the evil about which we appear able to do nothing. Even when Caliban says to Prospero ‘you gave me language’, you can feel this has been such a mixed blessing, this ability to communicate.
After Prospero with Michael I did three more great classical roles: Philip II, Malvolio, and finally Lear. When Michael came to cast me in Don Carlos as Philip II of Spain he had a problem in so far as I love to be loved, and tend to fold myself into a love affair with the part, and do all I can to resist attempts to descend to a dark, despotic place.
Michael remembers this well: ‘It is as if Derek has an internal audience, and has to approve, channel that audience which love him being emotional. We had to get him into a kind of default mode or point, so as to get the audience loving him for being nasty. We had built the trust up in The Tempest, so how did it go in Don Carlos? Well, not surprisingly, it was good after we had found the technical way to release the monster by lowering Philip down in voice. Derek never gives his best on opening night, few actors I know do, and when we did Don Carlos we had no props or furniture, which is very demanding for the actors. Derek’s worst enemy is that he likes to get louder and madder sometimes, and he loves showing off, as if to say, “Look what I can do.”’
Playing King Lear, in 2010–11, has undoubtedly been the peak of my theatrical career. When with Michael we had at last fixed up to do Lear at the Donmar and still had plenty of time, I could begin to think seriously how to play this ultimate of Shakespearian roles. Michael and I had talked about doing it two years before, but it was only a year before, when he had to get his programme together, that he said: ‘Come on, we’ve got to make a decision. It’s now or never.’
The first performance of Lear which came into my mind was Scofield’s. I never saw the stage performance, only the film, which was shot almost exclusively in close-up. I had no notion of what it must have been like on stage, which as I knew was quite something. I saw Olivier on television. I saw Donald Wolfit way back on stage. All I can remember of Wolfit was the bigness, the loudness of it. He had it in his repertoire with Tamburlaine and Twelfth Night, in which he played Malvolio. I felt no sympathy with his Lear, and he didn’t stay with me. It was part of something I saw when I was very young, and it impressed me tremendously, but it was never the Damascene conversion.
I had not seen Gielgud perform Lear in his Gruyère cheese costume when he was seventy-six. I saw Ian Holm, and most recently I saw Ian McKellen. They both took their clothes off in the storm scenes. There is absolutely no justification in the text for this at all, as there is for the actor Edgar taking off his kit as ‘naked Tom’, and as he did in Peter Brook’s production with Paul Scofield. I thought the sensational effect of acting knights doing a full frontal was just not for me.
As for the lines ‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks’, which I performed in an intense, inwards whisper with a microphone (the only time I used one), this is much more justified in the text. There is a precedent, too, for this. Charles Laughton wanted to do this speech in a whisper, and he wasn’t allowed to.
We didn’t do a read-through – fortunately. What Michael tends to do is to go through the play and, scene by scene, tell the cast to say it in their own words. Not to read it as Shakespeare wrote it, but to say what the lines mean in our own words. Some were better than others at this. I, because I worked it out before, was prepared, so I cheated! I had worked it out in France, the August before we opened. I went through the part line by line, writing down on the free page opposite the meaning in my own words.
Michael and I had settled on what texts we were going to use: we had both independently cut it, and then we put our cuts together. I had always wanted to be closer to Lear’s age and now I was. We cut the line to suggest his age, fourscore years: ‘Pray do not mock me:/ I’m a very foolish fond old man,/ Fourscore years and upwards.’ I did not waste any time in rehearsals boning up on the words as I already knew them, so I could just think about how to do it.
Michael and I were very much in accord: he gave me my head, and we did not disagree over anything much. His idea was to make it as simple and accessible as possible. My input was to illuminate what I was saying emotionally and verbally, to spotlight what was coming out of my mouth, and out of my head, and from my heart. Michael’s idea was not to get in the way, not to keep making theatrical coups, and to dispense entirely with furniture.
Ultimately, what I felt was so good about it was the fluidity, because there were no set changes; you had lighting changes, but one scene followed another. There were no ‘director’s moments’. What the director did, what the actors did, what the lighting man did, what the sound man did, were all part of the whole, and none of them had their moment: or if they did have their moment, it was shared by the whole performance. The storm was effective, it was simple, arresting, and it looked good, it sounded good. I didn’t worry myself with ideas such as, ‘What am I thinking in the moment? Am I guiding it?’
I find it difficult to analyse when playing Lear, but I am letting or making the audience understand what I am saying, not as a reverently produced text, but as near as I can get it to a spoken thought, the idea or thought or emotion which has suddenly occurred to me. So I say the text as I never heard it before, and hope it comes out of me in a contemporary way. The audience may not exactly understand the particular words I am using, but because of the intonation, of the way I am saying it – ‘It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it’ is the catchphrase – they can understand what I mean, and what I am feeling. It upsets people, of course, who like the end-stopped line, the Shakespearean rhythms, but these rhythms have never meant a great deal to me. I prefer my own rhythms.
I stay in the wings all evening. I cannot go back to the dressing room and hear a bit on the Tannoy. If I have got a big scene coming up I think I should have gone to the loo before, but once I go on I forget about that, I totally forget. In Lear I had a costume change, and then I was not on for about thirty-five to forty minutes into the second half. I had about forty-five minutes off, so I stayed in the dressing room for about half of that, and then I went down and sat in the wings, in order to get myself back into the play.
I treat performances as if I am still rehearsing, when I see round the edge, and everybody is doing their bit, and I get up and do mine and then I go back and sit down. So when I go on stage it is that same kind of mindset I have. It is not back to the dressing room, then back to the play. I have to stay in the play all the time.
Playing Lear I lost my voice twice, once in London, once on tour, and they had to find me a voice masseur, which was helpful: he massaged the throat and the larynx. The loss of voice in Llandudno was the worst occasion. We had done eight weeks in London, eight performances a week, then for two nights I lost my voice: after London this was our first over 1,000-seater theatre, and I was out of practice vocally, although I had done my exercises. I was compensating wildly because of the bigness of the venue, and by Friday morning the voice had gone; so I had to cancel Friday and two performances on Saturday, and then the voice came back.
The next week was Belfast Opera House, a huge stage, a big auditorium where long ago I acted Charles Dyer’s Staircase with Tim West. I had played the character with the playwright’s name, while the other character, Harry C. Leeds, is an anagram of this. Tim and I had got lots of laughs doing this romp in London, but when we took it to the Opera House (and as this was in the days of Ian Paisley) the moment the audience realised it was a play about two homosexual hairdressers you could hear the seats banging up as the good populace of Belfast departed. We followed Belfast with the 1,800-seater in Salford. Then Milton Keynes, and I managed to survive better.
At the end of every performance the stage manager would place a glass of Chardonnay on my dressing table, and that was my reward: I had got through Lear. On the first night in Llandudno there was a reception in the front of house, to which I went, poured down the white wine, and by Friday I discovered the worst thing I could do when I came off the stage as King Lear was to pour white wine down my throat: it was like pouring down pure acid. The nightly glass had to stop. Michael didn’t like me drinking: of course, he wasn’t suggesting I had in any way a drink problem, but maybe he felt with Lear I might be going that way. Anyway, as a friend pointed out, Chardonnay dries out the voice, so it cannot be good for it.
My favourite Lear venues were Richmond and Bath, the beautiful smaller theatres. When one live performance at the Donmar was screened worldwide, the satellite signal failed in the second part. We had to go back a bit, and start again. That was a real test of patience. In New York we performed at the BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the auditorium is Epidaurian.
During a break after London I went to a health farm, quite a harsh juxtaposition to Lear in the storm to recover in a health farm: it was all very gentle. Lear was wrapped in seaweeds and oils, and he came out smelling rather better than when he went in. I don’t think it did any good, but it was a generous gift from the Donmar. I didn’t need to lose weight for I had lost over a stone.
I like Lear as a person and I loved becoming him for each performance. While I am very passive, unconfrontational, Lear is the opposite, with all that rage, all that anger, which I don’t have in myself. When the RSC offered me Cyrano I said, ‘I don’t really have his anger – during the first two acts he unleashes this stream of vitriol.’
Terry Hands said, ‘If I promise to make you angry, then will you do it?’ A few weeks into rehearsal he said, ‘Let’s run the first two acts. With all our sins and mistakes, let’s go for it, run it, and see what we’ve got.’
Well, we finished, sat down for notes, and in front of the entire company Terry said, ‘I’ve got it, Derek. You’re a closet butch!’
With Lear’s Fool the banter can be a game show, a trial of upstaging, but that was never the issue with Ron Cook, for this was a marriage made in heaven. Much of the Fool’s text went, although only the passages which were very obscure. Our two characters adored each other, which really showed in the interplay between Ron and me, and my Lear joined in the jokes and clowning. ‘Where is he, I need the fool.’
There is one very significant line when Lear says, ‘You are a pestilent gall to me.’ I said it laughing, as if Lear didn’t really mean it, but that was what he really needed and he knew it.
Michael was very proud that he revived my classical status with his four productions at the Donmar. He believes Lear shows that the challenge of mankind, or rather the challenge to mankind, is to be big enough to forgive. Lear’s is an amazing life journey, from one who has but slenderly known himself, to someone who has full understanding. I would like to think that this, too, possibly, is what has happened to me in my journey through life, through my seven ages.
Like that earlier character of mine, who is a mixture of wisdom and disability, who claims, ‘I have told the truth and set the record straight for posterity,’ it may be, after all, that I’ve had a good measure of the ‘fool’s luck’ of Claudius.