As Luck Would Have It. Derek Jacobi
names were Helen Mirren and Diana Quick.
‘With your permission I’ve found two girls to play Helena and Hermia,’ Hill told Croft.
‘Then on your head be it!’ grumbled Croft, who wasn’t exactly enamoured of young ladies in his company, and was the robust, bachelor type. Later Helen played Cleopatra which the Youth Theatre put on at the Old Vic, but she would decline to speak of Croft beyond saying ‘that silly old fart’ – I don’t think she liked him much!
To rehearse Prince Hal I had to come all the way from Leytonstone to Dulwich. It was a marathon bus journey from one side of London to the other, involving six buses and twenty-seven stops. Those Sunday rehearsals in Lordship Lane didn’t exactly inspire me, and I don’t remember them with any fondness. Everybody was very jokey, very camp, giggling all over the place, and I was very much an outsider. The others all knew each other, had worked together before, communicated in that kind of shorthand camaraderie that long-time friends acquire. I never felt comfortable.
At first, when I saw Paul Hill cuddling up to Croft on the sofa, I very much had the feeling that Michael was a bit like a suspect scoutmaster. After read-throughs and when we moved on to rehearse properly – strangely enough, in a scout hut near Herne Hill – he could also be quite a martinet.
Yet Michael helped me greatly with my acting and made me aware of how much I had to learn, especially with my voice, which, although it had just broken, had come very easily to me so I took a lot for granted. Everything in the rehearsals seemed so professional, while activity had been much gentler at Leytonstone with Bobby Brown. I felt as if I had two left feet and was very young, extremely untalented, rather unworldly and quite out of my depth.
On the other hand I enjoyed it and learned a lot, and was glad I was doing it, although I never really felt part of the clique, the main core. And I felt confused at the rehearsals because I didn’t quite know what or who the other boys were. The Alleyn’s boys were such a close, well-knit lot. They all had a past with Michael, while I had no former life with him; I was a bit frightened of them all, and was made very much aware that I had taken over Richard Hampton’s part.
While there was nothing ostensibly of a sexual nature going on in the all-male set-up, they would lark about and joke quite crudely, sit on one another’s laps, and embrace and hug each other familiarly. Meanwhile I was feeling disorientated and unresolved in my own identity. It was strange because all, probably without exception, liked girls, yet I thought they must be homosexuals; while I, who knew I was gay, was a complete innocent, unable to join in and unhappily feeling a complete outsider. This was yet another example, I confess, of my overriding desire to be loved and accepted.
Richard’s mother came in during our run to help with the hairstyling and she would curl my hair every night with hot irons into a Henry V-cum-Shirley Temple fringe. Again, I wasn’t easy with this. I’m sure she twisted my hair harder than she did Richard’s out of some kind of annoyance that Richard wasn’t there, probably thinking: ‘Why should I be doing this for Derek?’
I only really became friendly with Barry Boys, who played Henry IV, and he was an outsider like me because he came from Dulwich College. We had that great scene together when Prince Hal tries to convince his father that he is responsible and is growing up to carry his royal responsibilities. No one can ever play that scene over and over again and not be seriously affected by it as a lesson in responsibility (and I was only seventeen).
Henry IV played four times in Toynbee Hall and won a glowing accolade in Plays and Players, where, in my first-ever professional notice, the critic wrote that I, like all the nobles, conveyed a real impression of aristocracy ‘subject to the same weaknesses as other mortal men, yet endowed with a mettle to subdue them’. The same critic adversely pointed out that I did, in some of my emotional scenes, indulge my emotions instead of communicating them, which wasn’t a bad comment to receive and work on.
‘You see, what I want is not “the actor type”,’ Michael said. He had amazing fortune with his casts, and drew leading critics to the performances. He would have been a bigger influence on me if I had done more for him, but after I began to make a name for myself in the business in work like I, Claudius, I became a little surprised to see how my name rather oddly appeared in a lot of National Youth Theatre publicity, while other actors, who had done far more for the Youth Theatre, were ignored.
I had only ever acted four times for them at Toynbee Hall, and the Hamlet I did as a schoolboy was not theirs but a Leyton School production. I don’t know whether that came from Michael or the journalists, but I didn’t like it.
Michael and I eventually became friends and saw each other, but not that often. We were never close, for I was always the outsider with Michael. I had no idea who or what I was then. I was on the cusp of being timid, but at the same time quite other-worldly, and not at all bothered about whether I was gay or heterosexual. There were much more important things to worry about.
But I never managed to become one of Michael’s ‘lads of life’!
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