Glenda Jackson Hopes to Scale Mount Lear in Her Stage Return

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/arts/glenda-jackson-lear.html

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LONDON — It’s one of the most demanding roles in theater, but Glenda Jackson, the two-time Oscar-winning actress, will open a new production of “King Lear” on Friday having not stepped onstage for 25 years. In the interim, she worked to keep a realm together as a member of the British Parliament; her first act in her return to the theater will be to play a monarch who breaks one up.

Many major actors take a run at the role in Shakespeare’s tragedy, a part so daunting that it’s nicknamed Mount Lear. It would seem especially so for Ms. Jackson, whose last performance came in 1991, in Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra” at the Glasgow Citizens Theater. Her return, after such a long hiatus, is highly unusual and, at 80, she is older than all but one of Britain’s last 10 Lears in major productions.

What’s more, she’s playing him at the Old Vic — a 198-year-old, 1,000-seat theater with an imposing history. Laurence Olivier was Othello there; Judi Dench was Juliet. “She’s part of that tradition now,” its artistic director, Matthew Warchus, said.

Before starting his job, Mr. Warchus invited Ms. Jackson for a meeting. He had tried to tempt her back into acting while she was still in Parliament, to no avail, and he arrived with “very, very low expectations.”

Her reply took him by surprise, as did her suggestion that she play King Lear.

“She was very modest and self-effacing, really,” he said. “She said she’d been looking at the play and thought she’d rather like to have a go.” (Ms. Jackson declined all interview requests before the opening.)

She had recently seen the Catalan actress Núria Espert, an old friend, play Lear in Barcelona. “If she was going to come back, she wasn’t going to tiptoe back into the business,” Mr. Warchus said.

Unable to align their schedules, Mr. Warchus asked the veteran stage director Deborah Warner (“The Testament of Mary”) to direct. Ms. Warner came early to the trend of casting women in Shakespeare’s richest male roles. Having directed Fiona Shaw as Richard II in 1995, she didn’t need to ask why Ms. Jackson wanted to be Lear.

“It seemed obvious: because it’s so bloody difficult,” Ms. Warner said. “That’s what great artists do: They challenge themselves.”

Ms. Jackson’s career testifies to that. She quit acting for politics, winning selection as the Labour Party’s candidate for the Parliament seat of Hampstead and Highgate, in North London. First elected in 1992, she served five terms.

She is a product of the welfare state herself. Born in 1936, the daughter of a bricklayer from Birkenhead, a town near Liverpool, Ms. Jackson left school at 16 to pursue acting. After training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, a meeting with the director Peter Brook helped her career take off.

Speaking to the BBC recently, he remembered her as “fearless and ready” to take on anything “without a moment’s hesitation.”

Ms. Jackson spent four years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where Mr. Brook was a prominent director, before winning her first Oscar for Ken Russell’s 1969 film adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love.” The second came three years later in Melvin Frank’s romantic comedy “A Touch of Class.”

Ms. Jackson was plotting her return to acting before leaving Parliament. In a BBC radio adaptation of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart family saga, she narrated as the 104-year-old matriarch Aunt Dide.

The playwright Dan Rebellato, one of the series’s writers, attended the read-through — Ms. Jackson’s first performance in public. “Usually actors hold back on Day 1, but she absolutely attacked it,” he recalled. “It was a bit like she wanted to see if she could still do it.”

Publicly, Ms Jackson was still brushing off the notion of a return to theater. “I’d have to get myself fit,” she told the BBC’s Artsnight television series in February. “If somebody said to me, ‘Come next Friday, you’ll be on Monday,’ I don’t think I could do eight performances.”

But Celia Imrie, who plays Lear’s eldest daughter, Goneril, in the new production, said she had done just that.

“Her stamina is extraordinary,” she said, chalking it up to Ms. Jackson’s habit of long walks. Ms. Warner’s “Lear” has been minimally cut and runs almost three and a half hours, but her star had memorized her lines before rehearsals began. “She just has a terrific command, which both the part and the theater need,” Ms. Imrie said. “Does it show that she’s not been onstage for 25 years? Absolutely not.”

Mr. Warchus contends that, in a way, politics kept Ms. Jackson in good shape for a return to the theater: “You can tell she’s been using her voice and speaking in public. That muscle — putting her thoughts and ideas across clearly – hasn’t lain dormant.” Ms. Warner agreed: “She speaks from the depths of herself, and her voice is like no other. People know it. This is what makes her truly great.”

Ms. Jackson used her casting as Lear to speak out on an issue that has long been important to her: the limited opportunities available to actresses, particularly older ones. She holds living writers to blame for failing to create complex characters. “I see no one who writes anything in which the driving force is a woman,” she told the BBC last year.

Ms. Jackson is the first British woman to play the part this century in a major production, and she does so at a moment when gender is a battlefront for Shakespeareans in Britain. Harriet Walter is leading an all-female trilogy for the Donmar Warehouse. (“The Tempest,” the third production, arrives at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in January.) Emma Rice committed Shakespeare’s Globe to gender parity in casting but quickly left her role as director of the theater in the face of criticism about her use of technology in productions.

Ms. Jackson’s wish to return to the stage, at her age, “says something enormous about the potency of theater,”’ Ms. Warner, the director, said.

“It’s not someone coming back to a place where they felt good for the sentimental feeling of a return,” she added. “She’s coming back because she knows it matters. It matters very much. It probably matters a great deal more than politics.”