Oliver Ford Davies interview transcript
What attracted him to Shakespeare
My father was a schoolteacher in London. He was very keen on the theatre. He directed a lot in amateur theatre. So he took me to Shakespeare from quite an early age. I remember I was taken to see Richard II which seems a very odd choice for an eight year old. I became hooked on it. Unlike my elder brother who didn’t become hooked at all, and I shouldn’t think has seen a Shakespeare play for fifty years. And I remember, when I was about 12, thinking “Do I really like Shakespeare or am I just trying to please my father?” And I can remember sitting in my room and doing Antony’s speech over Caesar’s dead body from Julius Caesar, and reading it out load and thinking “Yes, I really do like Shakespeare, I’m not just trying to please my father.”
Advice to a young actor performing Shakespeare
Shakespeare is a kind of Rolls Royce. He is a kind of ultimate test. And it seems, like a Rolls Royce, very big and difficult to operate at first. And then, when you get the hang of it, it purrs along in the most extraordinary way and supports you. But I think Shakespeare, like all acting in great plays, needs a lot of imagination and a lot of craft. You have to have both. You have to have the imagination to come up to Shakespeare’s imagination in language, but also his imagination in the predicaments that he puts you in: whether it’s becoming a mass murderer like Macbeth, or whether it’s having to put on male clothing in the Forest of Arden like Rosalind. He also asks a lot of you in craft, I think. He requires a great deal of energy, a great deal of speed of thought. It’s often said that in plays and films, you think twice as fast as you do in real life. In Shakespeare you think three times as fast. So he requires a lot of you in clarity, in thought, in energy, in speed of thought.
Public appetite for Shakespeare
In London, when Shakespeare is done at the National Theatre it does very good business. The Globe on the South Bank has been an extraordinary success and is packed most of the time. And not just by tourists thinking they’re going to have an authentic experience. The RSC continues to do well. Their season of histories at the Roundhouse a couple of years ago was sold out before they opened. So there does still seem to be an appetite for Shakespeare. I think because of the extraordinary degree of imagination, of fantasy, of great storytelling, and of all the universal conflicts that he deals with. It seems to be there. I don’t think it’s just heritage.
Shakespeare on stage rather than on screen
I spent a lot of time, from 1975 to 1986, I was mostly with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so I wasn’t available for when the BBC were doing all their television Shakespeares. And then after about 1990, I moved in to doing a lot of modern television: I did Kavanagh QC for five years, and I did an awful lot of Midsomer Murders and that kind of thing. And I was quite glad to get away from Shakespeare in fact. I had about 12 years when I wasn’t doing any Shakespeare at all. But I’ve come back to him recently with, I think, renewed vigour.
Differences between performing for stage and film
Obviously, on stage, you the actor are more in control. Finally, when you get out there in front of an audience, there’s nothing producers, directors, editors can do about it. You are communicating directly with the audience, you are in control, you are in power. Working in television, and particularly in film, the editor has got the final say. So the moment where you think “Oh I handled that moment extraordinarily well” and you find either it has been cut or that they’ve decided to have a shot of the person who is listening to you. And you think with exasperation “You really missed me”, I think. But there is a satisfaction in film and television of only doing it once, as it were. Of doing maybe you might do five takes of a particularly demanding scene, but you might feel at the end “That is, I think, at this moment in time, the best I can do it, and I’m delighted that that is now printed and I don’t have to visit that again.” So film has its own attractions in that way, that the repetition of stage doesn’t necessarily have.
I think acting is a great deal about how you control your energy. Because we all have similar impulses, thoughts, emotions, intentions, whatever. It’s how you energise those in communicating in the theatre to an audience, and on film, communicating both to the camera and to an unseen audience, as it were. And the main difference there I think, between them, is control of energy. And in the theatre quite obviously it’s a more outward outgoing energy, and in film it’s more contained energy. But if there isn’t energy behind what you’re doing in film, often nothing comes across. It’s no good thinking “I’m thinking the right thoughts and the camera will pick that up” – they won’t necessarily.
Favourite Shakespearean role
I did Polonius recently in Hamlet, and I greatly enjoyed that. I think it’s a wonderful character study of a man who is both tough and an old baby, so there’s a lot of humour in it. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed playing the Duke in Measure for Measure very much, which I think is a very, very interesting part. And years back I enjoyed Falstaff, I thought was a great part, a great opportunity.
Shakespeare’s use of comedy
One of Shakespeare’s great breakthroughs was the introduction of comedy. Tragedies, up to Hamlet, didn’t really have much comedy in them. And one of Shakespeare’s great breakthroughs was to think “Now I’ll produce you a great tragic hero, who is also quite funny, who’s got a sense of humour.” He was an extraordinary experimenter. We’re so used now to Shakespeare that we forget just how much he experimented, how much of an innovator he was in his time.
Playing Lear
I’ve played Lear, and Lear is a kind of ultimate test. Before I played it, the writer David Hare, who directed Anthony Hopkins’s Lear at the National, said to me “Listen, there are 11 scenes, you’re bound to be able to do some of them.” [Laughs] And I was able to do some of them. Like all Lears, I was talking to David Warner recently who played Lear at Chichester recently, and we were comparing notes on the scenes we didn’t think we could do, that we never got on top of. It’s an enormously challenging part, but a very, very finally very enjoyable part to play, but so difficult. And the first half of the play, the first two acts, I found extraordinarily difficult. Acts Four and Five of Lear are wonderful – some of Shakespeare’s very, very best writing. But all his anger in the first two acts are hugely draining. And I was doing it seven times a week for twelve weeks – very, very exhausting. An opera singer would say “Goodness, I would do that twice a week. That’s absolutely tops.” It is mentally exhausting, vocally exhausting. We had a lot of rain in our production – this was at the Almeida – so I spent most of Act Three, the storm scene, being drenched with water. [Laughs] How I didn’t get pneumonia, I don’t know. Whichwas a great help, but was also physically very demanding. But rain, actually rain is a very interesting obstacle to have to play through, so it added yet another problem.
Writing or acting?
I think I prefer acting. I started off life – my father was a teacher, I thought I was going to be a teacher – and in fact I very briefly became a lecturer in History at Edinburgh University. So I started off as an academic, and I miss teaching and writing a lot, which is probably what I’m doing at the University of York. So I enjoy the moments of being alone in a study researching, I enjoy going to the British Library, I enjoy the research. One of the things I enjoy most about acting actually is the research. I’m fascinated by what you can dig up and how much it informs your performance. But finally, there must be part of me that, for some reason – which I don’t wish to go in to too closely – I enjoy playing somebody else. Finding bits of myself that will add up to a different character, and communicating that to an audience. That’s what I really enjoy, and I’m not altogether sure why.
Looking to the future
I’m at Stratford with the RSC doing a play Written on the Heart about the translators of the King James Bible. So we’re doing that till March. That might go on somewhere, it might not. And last year I did a play at Chichester and toured it, of Goodnight Mister Tom, and there’s hope that we will do that again in London. So it’s possible next Autumn I might do Goodnight Mister Tom which will be a huge change from playing a Jacobean erudite bishop in Written on the Heart, but it’s the changes I like.
Performing in York
Thirty years ago – in 1981 I think it must have been – I did one of the six great plays I most like: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, by O’Neill, which I did at the Theatre Royal. And I was much too young for the part but I played the father which is a great,great part. And I was fascinated that in the play, the character in the play talks about a great American Shakespearean actor called Edwin Booth and he said “The greatest moment of my life, when Edwin Booth said ‘that young man is playing Othello better than I ever played it’.” And I thought, when I was in the theatre, “I wonder if Edwin Booth ever played at the Theatre Royal York.” And the archivist looked it up, and yes he did! So it is possible that Edwin Booth played Othello – he used to alternate it with Iago – played Othello or Iago at the Theatre Royal York in about 1870. And I used to think about that, I thought “I’m standing centre-stage talking about the greatest moment of my life was when Edwin Booth said that, and Edwin Booth might actually have stood here.” A very, very exciting moment.