Energy In Action
Interview by Anne Nothof
Acting is hard work, not a mystical process. You clear the undergrowth, you get rid of the stuff that isn't useful, you discard the ideas that aren't right. You do everything you can, both physically and mentally, to be ready for something else to happen. And that's what a performance is.
Actress Glenda Jackson was born in 1936 in Birkenhead, England. As a child, one of four daughters, she loved to go to the movies and admired most those actresses who “seemed to be very capable of conducting their own lives, regardless of the dramas they had to live with,” Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, writes David Nathan, in his biography Glenda Jackson.
She worked in Boots Chemists (drugstore) for two years after completing school and turned to amateur acting at the Y.M.C.A. out of sheer boredom, having no particular ambition for the theatre. But at eighteen she was accepted by the most prestigious acting school in London, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. This did not, however, provide a ticket to instant theatrical fame. She served eight, hard, impecunious years in repertory theatres around England and in numerous low-paying jobs.
In 1962, she was spotted by Charles Morowitz while playing one of Alfie's victims at the Mermaid Theatre, London. Morowitz was exploring the possibilities of Antonin Artaud's “Theatre of Cruelty”. Morowitz and Peter Brook, backed by Peter Hall and the Royal Shakespeare Company, set up an experimental “Theatre Cruelty” to explore problems of acting and stagecraft in laboratory conditions. Glenda Jackson worked for three months with Brook and Morowitz, participating in “interminable improvisations and games in which the actor's personal imagination was being constantly nudged, wooed, or flagellated into action” (Nathan, p. 24). She starred in Artuad's Spurt of Blood, and Peter Weiss's infamous, The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade. Her role as Charlotte Corday, the murderess, which she came to detest, resulted in a place in the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she played an aggressive, strong-willed Ophelia, one of many “classical” roles which se would act according to her own interpretation of the playwright's intentions. Of Ophelia, she remarked, “Weak people don't break, they bend.” Ophelia broke.
Glenda Jackson won her first Oscar for Women in Love, in which she played the man-destroyer, Gudrum. Drama critic Penelope Mortimer commented that “every movement expresses the passionate longing of a frigid woman for freedom and domination”. Jackson contends that she is not particularly a D.H. Lawrence fan, but was attracted to the part of Gudrum because she was mysterious: she had the capacity to inquire and be surprised. For B.B.C. television Jackson undertook the part of Elizabeth I, and during the six episodes of Elizabeth I she aged from 16 to 69. She recalls the makeup sessions with a shudder. Her successful foray into romantic comedy came in 1972 in A Touch of Class with George Segal, and again in 1978 in House Calls with Walter Matthau. But she finds the “great plays” the biggest challenge. In Nathan's biography, she says, “great plays make demands on your energy levels. It's just there, waiting, like a bloody great mountain and you have to climb it.” She took on that most formidable of female roles—the actress's Hamlet, Hedda Gabler, in 1975. And again she insisted on reinterpreting Ibsen on the grounds that “we're all indoctrinated about the classic roles.” She had read Ibsen only in what she called these dreadful Michael Meyer translations. Her director, Trevor Nunn, got a literal translation by a Norwegian friend in which the individual voices could be heard. Jackson sees Hedda Gabler as a funny play, “a mordantly black comedy about Norwegian society”. Hedda is not calculating or ruthless but stupid. She has no courage and is none of the things she is told she is.
Jackson admires Hedda only because she actually acknowledges that there is no way out for her, and she chooses not to conform. It's the only element of choice she has. In the end, she does what people least expect. Jackson took her version of Hedda Gabler on tour to Australia, the United States, and Canada. The play was panned by critics as a travesty. Her version of Racine's tragic heroine, Phaedra, faired little better at their hands. But she did upset critical stereotypes with her film portrayals of a frumpy housewife in Return of the Soldier, a reclusive poet in Stevie, and more recently of a reclusive author of children's stories who learns how to affirm life in Turtle Diary.
She has worked with great energy for theatre and film on other fronts too: in 1982 she helped to form the Women's Playhouse Project and United British Artists, and to produce plays, films, and videos of artistic and social merit. She has lectured on drama at Balliol College, Oxford, and taught courses in acting in the United States.
But although she has brought stories for women to the stage and to film, she admits that there is still a derth of good parts and recognizes that she has now entered the limelight between the young, desirable roles and the old undesirable roles - the “characters”.
In 1936, Federico Garcia Lorca, Spanish poet and playwright, completed his best-known play, The House of Bernarda Alba, and was shot by the Fascists at Fuente Grande, nine kilometres from Granada. To commemorate Lorca's life and works on the fiftieth year of his death, the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, located several underground stops west of London's West End invited the Spanish actress, director, and ardent advocate of Lorca's plays, Nuria Espert, to direct The House of Bernarda Alba in the fall of 1986. Glenda Jackson agreed to undertake the part of the tyrannical old woman, Bernarda, adding one more ruthless, power-hungry female role to her repertoire. She has gained a certain notoriety for such roles and still defies current assumptions that there are some parts which an actress should not undertake without injury to her public image. “We still accept a narrower range of behaviour from women, part of a double standard that goes far beyond the sexual licence issued men, to moral and aesthetic considerations as well. A man can get away with murder... while a woman must have second thoughts so as not to lose the audience” (Psychology Today).
The House of Bernarda Alba is based on the lives of a group of women whom Lorca observed clandestinely, intrigued by their rigorous adherence to the forms of social morality and religion. “It was like this. Not far from Granada, there is a tiny village where my parents owned a small estate, Valderrubio. In the neighbouring house lived an old widow, Dona Bernarda, who practiced a tyrannical and relentless control over her unmarried daughters. They were like prisoners, deprived of any free will; I never spoke to them at all but I used to see them going by like shadows, always silent and always dressed in black... at the end of the courtyard there was an interconnecting well, which didn't have any water in it. I used to go down into it to spy on this strange family whose curious behaviour intrigued me. From there I could observe them. It was a cold and silent hell in the middle of the African sun, like a tomb of living people under the iron rod of their warden. And this is how The House of Bernarda Alba was born. The women locked in there are Andalusian but they are coloured by the ochre lands more in keeping with the women of Castille. (Federico Garcia Lorca in conversation with Morla Lynch in 1936, from the program for the Lyric Hammersmith production of The House of Bernarda Alba.)
The stage, then, is populated solely by women—Bernarda, age 60; her mother, age 80; her five daughters, ranging in age from 20 to 39, all unmarried; two maids; and a group of women in mourning, who function as a kind of Greek chorus at the beginning of the play. It opens with the funeral of Bernarda's husband and ends with the suicide of her youngest daughter, who believes that Bernarda has shot her lover. Grim stuff this-powerful, stark, human tragedy and very difficult to enact, as Glenda Jackson is the first to acknowledge. She discussed her views of the play and her approach to the role during a press conference held in the lobby of the Lyric Hammersmith shortly after the opening of the play.
It was obvious that for the Lyric Hammersmith the production of The House of Bernarda Alba was a political event as much as a theatrical one. A testimonial to the participation of the young workers of Hammersmith in the Spanish Civil War was mounted in the form of photographs, newspaper clippings, and drawings. The play was set in the context of remembrance and admonition against political inertia—the kind of convenient forgetfulness which the veterans of the MacPats are protesting in Canada.
Although Glenda Jackson's commitment is primarily to the theatre, and the role which she has undertaken—in the case of Bernarda Alba that of an authoritarian whose tactics in respect to her family could be described as fascist—she is aware of the social and political repercussions of the theatrical event. And although she confessed during the interview to a certain ignorance of modern Spain, her sensitivity to Lorca's portrait of the consequences of repression is acute. As the interviewers from the Spanish Press and from Athabasca University (Aurora) strategically arranged their chairs and planted their mikes at a circumspect distance, Glenda hummed in a quiet monotone.
Spanish Press: Can you tell us what The House of Bernarda Alba is about?
Jackson: Over and above the actual plot it is about repression. I don't think it's necessarily about repression for its own sake, I mean simply for the enjoyment of power. It would be easy to say that it was an allegory for what was to happen in Spain. As it was written before the civil war broke out, it may well be that Lorca saw the signs indicating the way things would go, but I believe it unlikely that he would have opted for believing that fascism would be victorious in that particular incidence, but you could make it an allegory of how fascism works. As far as my character is concerned and in the context of the family, she has very good reasons for being as repressive as she is, and they are not necessarily bad reasons. That is what I think is very interesting in the play—that it is not sheer naked villainy. Her reasons for guarding her daughters in this way have to do more with love than with hate, and I suppose you could say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Spanish Press: Is The House of Bernarda Alba a universal play from a modern point of view?
Jackson: Yes, repression, fear, desire, and sex have not been removed from the face of the earth, and that's what the play is about. We do live in an infinitely more liberal society in England than the society that Lorca is writing about, but, nonetheless, people are still victims of their emotional lives. Families are still repressive. If Bernarda were Bernard, for instance, the question wouldn't be asked. It would be simple to understand.
Aurora: Do Lorca's plays touch current interests or concerns, particularly in respect to women in society?
Jackson: That's having the privilege of the benefit of hindsight. I don't think that when he wrote this play he was necessarily fortelling the arrival of the women's movement and the whole idea of women's liberation. He was a great dramatist, and certainly as far as this country is concerned, he was an unknown dramatist in the sense of being played very much, which is partly British insularity and partly the lack of really good actable translations. The fact that 1986 is the fiftieth anniversary of his death is as good a reason as any, if you need an additional reason, for staging his work.
Spanish Press: Did you know much about Nuria Espert's work as the director of her own company before this production?
Jackson: Well, she's simply amazing. She learned English. It shamed us all that none of us learned Spanish. She's marvellous to work with in that she's not only a great actress herself but she has that continental tradition of acting which we hardly ever see in this country. The enormous energy and commitment which she brought to every day's work was very salutary for all of us.
Spanish Press: She says the same of you.
Jackson: I'm flattered to think that she thinks the same of me. One of the other great plusses was she's Spanish so we had our own technical advisor in the guise of the director as well. Her approach to the play by virtue of being Spanish opened up many areas for us which would have been totally closed if we had an English or non-Spanish director. There's a line in our translation about “putting on these airs and graces”. Now “airs and graces” in English is a minor derogatory statement, and Nuria said that in Spanish the actual phrase is about the worst insult that one person can say to another, which is why the scene afterwards is as intense as it is. Now, if we hadn't had her, we would never have known that, so Joan [Plowright] and I would have laboured for months wondering why the scene didn't work because we couldn't understand why these two women were getting into such a state about such simple words.
Spanish Press: Was it very difficult for you to get used to the Spanish way of directing or acting?
Jackson: The first day it can be alarming to the English when suddenly somebody stands there and acts just out of the blue. I mean she would take a line and act it, and you think, “Hang on a minute, this is too soon for me. I need more time to get up to that level of energy.” She was infinitely more intuitive than we were about how the English worked. She was very patient with us and gave us time and space to find things for ourselves.
Spanish Press: Had you read Lorca before doing the play?
Jackson: Yes, and I have to say that generally the translations that we receive are pretty appalling. They tend either to be so poetic that you could not believe that any peasant would have those kinds of words at their disposal, or they are so nonpoetic that you wait to see where the play is. One of the things that I asked for when I agreed to do it was that there be a new translation because the existing ones don't work. Some of them are extremely American— they're full of Americanisms. David Macdonald's translation is simple and direct; it loses none of the poetic imagery or the force of the play, and it is understandable. You can believe that these people would say these words.
Spanish Press: Did you feel that you were speaking a foreign idiom?
Jackson: It's not so much the choice of words, it's not so much a foreign idiom of language as a foreign idiom of energy. The whole of my part is exclamation marks. Because she never apologizes and she never explains, the part is very simple, but it is obvious from the exclamation marks that what's happening inside her is really quite huge. That's the foreign nature of it, as far as I'm concerned.
Aurora: You have stated in an interview that you enjoy playing women whom the audience is not invited to weep for. Do you feel that there is any degree of sympathy for Bernarda? I noticed that you mutely appealed to the stars to witness your suffering at one point in the play.
Jackson: Well, I think she has her reasons for doing what she does. It's not simply absolute power corrupting absolutely. She's not horrible to these girls because she enjoys being horrible to them. It is an extreme end of protective maternal instinct. Whether she arouses any sympathy in the audience, I honestly don't know yet. We've only been playing it for a week and a half and I personally haven't got to the stage yet where I can really judge what an audience is feeling, beyond the fact that they're either quiet or they're not quiet, or they're shuffling or they're not shuffling. It may well be that with this play one may never get to that point where you really know what an audience is feeling because it is a very extraordinary piece of theatre. But I think that if not sympathy then at least interest. Otherwise why watch it? The play could not exert the hold that it so patently does upon people if the characters did not impose some kind of hold over the audience, some kind of interest. It may not necessarily be sympathy.
I've said that I haven't been able to read an audience clearly, but at the matinees we get a preponderantly elderly audience. We get lots of old ladies, and they see the world very much through Bernarda's eyes. They absolutely understand, and I think there is a fair amount of sympathy for her and less sympathy for the girls, and that shifts again in the evening when you tend to get a younger audience.
Aurora: The whole cast of the play is female, as is the director. How is it to work with a group of women?
Jackson: It's lovely. Usually you don't get a chance to work with actresses because most plays have one, possibly two parts for women, and if you've got one, then that's it.
Aurora: Do you feel it brought out strengths in the women in respect to their roles?
Jackson: I think that in the beginning, certainly among the younger ones, there was a reluctance on their part to accept the responsibility for the whole play, and that's not merely because they're women, but because women are not given much responsibility in plays. It took some of the younger ones a couple of weeks to realize they actually had to make their own decisions and commit to them, and they were either right or wrong for the play. Once they were over that particular hump, it was a very good working experience and I don't think that was necessarily because it was all women; I think it was because we were all concerned with doing the play as well as we could, and because it's a play that is structured for and about women.
Aurora: Would you like to direct a play?
Jackson: No. You're sort of useless when the play actually happens. There's nothing for a director to do. The play only really happens when it meets an audience. That's why you do it. It's to present that play to that other group of people, the audience, and at that moment of real truth, when everything you've worked for either happens or doesn't happen, there's nothing for the director to do except pace the corridors or go to the pictures or get drunk; and that seems to me to be a pointless exercise.
Spanish Press: So you prefer to meet the audience?
Jackson: I like that moment of danger, yes.
Spanish Press: Do you still fear the audience?
Jackson: Oh yes. They're very dangerous, audiences - very dangerous indeed.
Aurora: Why did you decide to do this play? You have said that you are very disappointed with the theatre scene in Great Britain at the moment.
Jackson: Well, I think it's in a very shakey state. It seems to be getting more and more nervous and rather unclear about what it should be doing, which is why I think that Peter James and the Lyric Hammersmith are to be admired and applauded because they do take a chance. I can't think of any other place that would do this play.
Aurora: What do you think the theatre should be doing?
Jackson: Well, something that's theatrical. The unfortunate trend in British theatre over the last ten years is to put on the stage work that I think would be better served by television. The theatre should do theatre. This play, although it could be approached by other mediums, works at its best, was written specifically for the stage. The canvas has been too small for too long, and I think we're in dire need of a major shift. I just hope there are some dramatists out there who are prepared to shift it, and there are some producers and managers and directors who'll help in that shift.
Aurora: Is that why you've been doing a lot of the classics in the last few years - Hedda Gabler, Phaedra?
Jackson: Well, it's not so much doing classics. I don't see any point in doing a play which is not a piece of theatre and quite a lot of modern drama is simply not theatrical in my sense of the word, and a lot of older theatre and neglected theatre certainly is.
Spanish Press: Would you like to do any more Lorca?
Jackson: I only hesitate because I'm too old for Blood Wedding; I'm probably too old for Yerma, actually, and they're the only two other plays of his that I know quite well.
Spanish Press: What did you learn from the experience of playing Bernarda?
Jackson: I don't know yet. To know if you've learned anything at all is only something that you can be aware of in retrospect or when you face a problem and you can solve it quite easily and think, “Oh, I can do that because of what I learned in that.” But at the moment I'm still working through the difficulties of actually playing the play. It's not something that one has solved or cracked or achieved yet.
Aurora: What attracts you to a role; what do you look for when you're reading a script?
Jackson: It's not a part I look for; it's a play, or an idea, or a story that is worth expending all that energy on.
Aurora: Who are your favourite contemporary playwrights?
Jackson: Of the new plays that I've done recently I like Charles Wood very much. I did a play on B.B.C. radio by Howard Barker, and I think he's a marvellous playwright, because he seems to me to be one of the dramatists who is expanding the canvas both horizontally and in depth, and he uses language marvellously. [Glenda Jackson was named “Best Actress” for her part in Scenes from an Execution and Barker's script “Best Drama Script” in the 1985 Sony Awards.]
Aurora: You've also said that this is not an age for comedy.
Jackson: It doesn't seem to be, no. Well, comedy in the sense of wit. I don't think that this is a witty age. Comedies written today tend to be either just plain jokes or physical humour, neither of which appeals to me very much. I think it's' because we all feel it's not quite right—the world is too serious a place to laugh in—which is not the case.
Spanish Press: What is your next film or play?
Jackson: A film called Business as Usual, directed by Leslie Ann Barrett who also wrote the script.
Aurora: You have said that you don't like to do television very much.
Jackson: No, I don't. It's the least interesting medium for me to act in. I just don't see the point of acting for that small a screen. The actual working conditions combine the worst aspects of both film and theatre with none of the advantages. You shoot out of sequence in television. I don't find it an interesting medium to act in at all.
On the occasion of another interview, Glenda Jackson also expressed her preference for the theatre over television. A play feeds the actors as much as the audience: “you get nourishment from its construction and from its incident, and from where things are placed in relation to one another” (Nathan, p. 47). She has described acting as “a distillation of experience”, and repeatedly stresses the importance of energy to maintain a balance of absolute freedom and absolute control. What is most important is the way you work. The message is not enough on its own; it must be transmitted.
On Nov. 26 at 7:30 p.m., Theater of the Air will feature Glenda Jackson in two modern British plays.
Dr. Nothof is a professor of English literature at Athabasca University.
Glenda Jackson gave up her acting career and turned to politics. She was elected MP for Hampstead and Highgate in the general election. She then became Parliamentary Secretary of State for Transportation. In 1999 she resigned this post to run for Mayor of London (unsuccessfully). She was elected to MP of the new constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn in May 2010.
Glenda Jackson MP Website:
http://www.glenda-jackson.co.uk/
Screenonline: Glenda Jackson - Biography
Barnes and Noble (Glenda Jackson films)
Updated March 2014
Aurora Online
Citation Format
Nothoff, Ann (1990). Glenda Jackson: Energy In Action. Aurora Online: