The New York Critic: Interviews

Steve Capra's Interview with Glenda Jackson
July 11^th, 2008  

Once one of the English-language theatre's leading actresses, Glenda Jackson studied at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and worked for four years with The Royal Shakespeare Company. She went on win two Academy Awards for her  work in film. She is today a Member of Parliament for the Labor Party. Steve Capra met her at Parliament House in London.
 
SC: Should we expect theatre to have a political effect?
 
GJ: Well, you have to define what constitutes political effect – to define the difference between political effect, as you say, and party political effect.
 
Most political activity is usually based on being against a prevailing political system. What was interesting about the Democratic and Republican primaries for presidential candidate was that  Obama’s campaign seemed to be about being for something. It was for change.
 
It tends to come down to preaching to the converted. It has an effect on people who agree with its polemic. Whether it causes people to change their opinion is I think a very moot point – very moot indeed.
 
SC: Because we’re preaching to the converted, we can’t expect a change of opinion.
 
GJ: It’s more complicated than that. The essential thing about theatre is that it has to be good theatre. Now, I’ve never read a good fascist play. If I read a good fascist play, or if it was extremely well performed, I think it’s unlikely that I would suddenly decide that a fascistic political point of view is one that I could endorse – but you don’t know. Very often, political drama – that which explicitly states itself as being political drama – is party political drama. It’s usually targeted at a particular political structure it is opposed to.
 
Political ideas staged in theatrical terms are extremely hard to define. There can be a lack of objectivity.
 
I remember talking to Geraldine Page once. I can’t remember what the film was we were discussing. I said I thought it was it was a film that had a political message. Rip Torn had to play some kind of Texan zealot, extreme right wing. But the baddies were so bad! It denied the possibility that someone who held a political point of view opposed to your own could have any basic principles. That simply isn’t true. She said yes, these guys passionately believe in what they’re saying. It may be appalling to us, but their passions are engaged in a way that we of the left would like to think we are permanently engaged.
 
SC: Well, you’ve done Mother Courage. Certainly, that was written to change votes, wasn’t it?
 
GJ: Well, was it? Was it done to change votes? Brecht is on the record as saying that he wanted to change theatre. He wanted people to know that theatre is false – it’s not realistic. He wanted a kind of distancing of the audience. He wanted everyone to hate Mother Courage. He wanted her to be regarded as not a heroine but as the antithesis of a heroine. But, of course, from an audiences’ point of view, that isn’t how it works.
 
SC: But isn’t it propagandistic? That play and Good Woman of Setzuan…
 
GJ: Oh, yes, because his political base was very clear and very strong.  But we’re talking about the utilization of political ideologies in the theatrical context, and it seems to me that he never managed to achieve that. I don’t think the alienation of the audience from what they are seeing on the stage ever happens.
 
SC: To leave the point just for a moment, because I have to ask you – did you approach that role in a different way than you approached, say, Lady Macbeth?
 
GJ: No.
 
SC: And your movie roles – would you approach them the same way?
 
GJ: Yeah… absolutely.
 
SC: …and the script takes you in a different direction?
 
GJ: Hopefully. That’s what you have to make work.
 
SC: I see! I’m concerned with freedom of expression. Are we loosing freedom of expression as government gets more control over our lives? Do you think we’re loosing that battle?
 
GJ: Not really, no. My main concern is that the expression is so tacky. It’s not the incursions into freedom of expression that bother me, it’s that what is being expressed is so often so uninteresting.
 
SC: Has theatre responded to its responsibility to create relevant theatre?
 
GJ: Well, I don’t regard that as primary responsibility. If you’re talking about the people for whom that is their motivating force, obviously all changes in theatre come from writers. They don’t come from anywhere else. However much you may talk about directorial brilliance and all that kind of thing, theatre only changes when a dramatist comes along who says something that causes it to change. It doesn’t seem to me that we have dramatists in this country that are doing that.
 
SC: One of the problems in the States is censorship by the funding authority. Does the UK have the same problem?
 
GJ: No, because we have a subsidized theatre. We have The Royal Shakespeare Company, we have The National Theatre, we have regional theatre, where the great bulk of their funding comes from the state. We’re recently had a terrible row here because the Arts Council wanted to close theatres – small theatres, in the main. There was a great outcry in opposition to that from within the theatre itself – not just the theatres who were earmarked, but the broader creative society. And so they reduced the list of companies that are going to lose their funding.  So we don’t have that over-riding problem.
 
But the need to put bums on seats is still there and there will be productions that will receive bad notices and that the audience won’t go to see. There can be a sort of in-built censorship that comes about where the theatres, the companies themselves, are unwilling to take risks. But that’s not an overt political censorship.
 
SC: In the States, we do have a problem with the NEA, and that’s stifling. If you don’t have that problem in the UK, it’s very lucky.
 
GJ: Yeah, but that’s a completely invalid argument. That argument that external repression dries up the fount of creative expression is ludicrous. Look at what came out of Russia, or what came out of the Iron Curtain countries under what was real repression. I don’t buy that argument.
 
Another argument that I never buy that you can’t do anything interesting in the theatre unless you’ve got a lot of money to do it with. It’s always been my experience that the tighter the boundaries are, the more people really have to work, be creative and be imaginative. If it’s given you on a plate, then people can become extremely sloppy.
 
SC: You say it’s necessary to put bums on seats. That means you can’t offer material that’s going to offend people. Aside from being -
 
GJ: Well, that’s not true either. Very often some of the most successful productions will be those that the reading public is told are offensive. I mean, we had – what was it? I’m going back several years now – The Romans in Britain, which was done at The National Theatre. The outrage there was because naked men were seen performing acts of buggery. Well you couldn’t get a ticket to the theatre once that came out! There is an element can provoke and promote – and make people want to see the production.
 
It can also be a terrible burden. I’m thinking of Edward Bond’s Saved. He constantly writes, you know, but I don’t think he’s ever got out from under that. In the same way, Albee is never going to get out from under Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
 
SC: Do you think that we in the theatre have met our responsibility- in the UK or in the US – to hold the mirror up to nature, or to discuss social ideas?
 
GJ: Well, again, you’re defining the responsibilities of theatre which I’m not sure that I necessarily agree with. Theatre is a much broader world than that. Theatre can be comprised of things which are not word-based, for example, and be marvelous! It’s why you want to do it in the first place. If you do want to hold the mirror up to nature, or if you do want to actually say to society “Look, this is what we’re about,” theatre isn’t the best way, these days, to do it.
 
SC: Really?
 
GJ: Well, how is it? You’ve got television! You’ve got the whole… One of the major changes that I’ve seen during my life is that the image has taken the place of the word. We absorb so much with our eyes. It’s image, image, image – however you want to define that image.
 
Ut theatre, when it really works, can do that without overtly saying it. The obvious example is Shakespeare. If you get a really good Shakespearian production, what those people are saying and being and doing, we are saying and being and doing now. There’s no difference, because what he’s looking at is human nature, which doesn’t change. The human condition can change – hopefully, it can be improved – but human nature never does. That’s what great dramatists are always essentially interested in. Who are we? Why are we? What are we? How that expresses itself from the individuals is for them.
 
SC: Will our theatre have staying power for the next, say, two hundred years? Mr. Stoppard’s plays, Mr. Albee’s plays?
 
GJ: Oh, well, I don’t know. Does that matter? Does it matter whether the plays of now last for hundreds of years? What is important is that there should still be theatre still in hundreds of years.
 
SC: What would you like to see in theatre – in terms of funding, or in terms of production, or in terms of its subject matter?

GJ: I’d like to see more new dramatists. I’d like someone to come along like Osborne did. He transformed British theatre with one play, and on the back of that, you’ve got people like Pinter and Barker and all the rest of them. We haven’t had a dramatist changing the theatre in that way. I don’t think it’s impossible. It can happen, but where they are and what they’re doing, I don’t know.
 
SC: Well, let’s hope we’re up to it.
 
GJ: Oh, listen, I’ve never believed in definitive performances. And I’ve never believed in a definitive age of creativity. You know, in Western Europe, we’re raised on the issue of The Renaissance and all that…  I don’t buy any of that.
 
SC: In the United States, it’s difficult to get people to go to the theatre, and there are so many things that theatre can do that film and television can’t do.
 
GJ: Oh! It is an incredible – Well, it’s absurd to talk about a unique experience being incredible. The word unique is sufficient. There is no other medium that can take a group of strangers sitting own in the dark watching a group of strangers working in the light, and out of those two disparate groups create a whole that is specific to that moment in time. Only live theatre can do that. Only live theatre.
 
An audience is a crowd sitting down. Crowds are very dangerous. That, for me, has always been the kind of lodestar of theatre. It is for me a model of a perfect society. There’s an energy that goes from the light into the dark and, if it’s working, that energy is reinforced and recharged, and it goes back up there and this perfect circle is created. And it lasts no longer than the moment that it’s there! That’s its unique quality.
 
SC: When can we expect to see you on stage again?
 
GJ: Oh, never. It’s gone for me, now. I haven’t done it for… I’ve been a Member of Parliament now for 16 years. There weren’t many parts for women my age then – when I came into this bizarre theatre. There aren’t many now.
 
That’s something else that never changes! Women are never seen by dramatists to be the driving engine. We’re always, always adjuncts. And I find that bizarre, because the state of women in the world – in the developed world – has changed dramatically, but that doesn’t seem to have hit home to creative dramatists.
 
SC: I can’t entirely agree. In a lot of American drama, male characters don’t express emotion. They don’t channel the human experience the way the women do.
 
GJ: They’re always central! Their inability to express emotion will be the central dramatic charge of the play. Everything else is peripheral. Women are always adjuncts. If you look at the classical canon – and Shakespeare is the lodestar here – an actor who is halfway talented, and lucky, and works hard, can go from Hamlet to Lear. There is a character from youth to old age in the Shakespearean canon that matches the development of a man all the way through. There is no equivalent for women! None whatever!
 
SC: Not even in A Doll’s House or Hedda Gabler or Ghosts?
 
GJ: No! No! I mean, they’re great plays, but, it’s just not the same.
 
SC: There are women playwrights… Caryl Churchill… Paula Vogel…
 
GJ: There are some who write plays, but they don’t write consistently. It’s harder for a woman to be a playwright than to be a novelist, for example.
 
SC: You mean to be acknowledged?
 
GJ: No – just to do the work! You write a novel on your own. You don’t stage a play on your own. You don’t even write a play on your own. Unless you have done so much that nobody dare change a word, if you’re staging a new play, the dramatist is expected to be there. They’re expected to take it when actor says “Can I say this in a different way?” or “Could this be…” or “Does that mean…” And that means you have to be there in that room with that group of people. If a woman is married and has children, that’s hard for her to do. But she can write a novel when the kids have gone to bed!