FIVE QUESTIONS FOR .... BEN DANIELS
STARRING IN "MEDEA" ON THE WEST END, THE ACTOR IS ABOUT TO HEAD TO PRAGUE AND PARIS TO BECOME THE NEWEST VAMPIRIC CAST MEMBER IN SEASON THREE OF AMC'S "INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE"
In 1947, Judith Anderson had a great triumph on Broadway in Medea. It was directed by John Gielgud who portrayed Jason - she once played Gertrude to his Hamlet - and was translated from Euripides by poet Robinson Jeffers in a version that is now being used in the smash hit production of the play at the Soho Place Theatre on London’s West End starring Sophie Okonedo and Ben Daniels. It is scheduled to run until April 22nd. From The New York Times review by Brooks Atkinson of that earlier 1947 iteration: “As a modern-minded writer, Euripides would be the first to agree that after 2,378 years, Medea needs a little play-doctoring. Robinson Jeffers has performed that service with the alacrity of a surgeon. Although he has retained the legend and the characters, he has freely adapted Medea into a modern play by dispensing with the formalities editing most of the woe-woe out of the chorus speeches; and in the interest of melodramatic suspense he has not announced every five minutes exactly what Medea is going to do. Since the Greek gods had a monopoly on free-will action at least in the art, the writers of Greek tragedy were great fellows for telegraphing their punches. Mr. Jeffers has kept most of the speeches short, which is a blessing in or out of the theatre; and his literary style is terse, idiomatic, and sparing. The imagery is austere and brilliant. His version is less sheeplike than Coleridge’s which is strewn with literary corpses. With all proper respect for the love and talent Gilbert Murray devoted to his metrical translation, Mr. Jeffers’ is more pulsing in the theatre. And it does not waste time invoking the Greek gods, who were more numerous than influential in the dispensation of justice.”
Atkinson prefaced his appreciation for Jeffers with paragraphs of praise for Anderson, but when she took the production to Paris almost a decade later with Christopher Plummer as her Jason, the critic Jean-Jacaques Gautie in Le Figaro claimed that Anderson, only a couple of years after the great French actress Marguerite Jamois had had her own triumph in the role on the Parisian stage, was dreadfully dramatic and “ground her teeth, clenched her fist, foamed, stamped, roared, choked, and we participated in this prefabricated spasm just as we would a horse show.”
Hmm. Sheeplike. Horse shows. Although both Euripides and Jeffers make the point that human characteristics can be culled from our animalistic impulses - mammals inured to morality but ever curious about combat and the fleshy, fleeting brutal (b)ray of mo(u)rning - they focus more on Medea’s animistic nature. She is a sorceress whose goddess dynamic is in response to another opposing goddamn set of gonads that yet again are determinative of female behavior. My Mississippi grandmother would always advise me “to rise above it.” Medea certainly does in ways Mom, as I called her, could have never imagined. Or maybe she secretly did from time to time. And maybe that is the genius of this mythic narrative - the belief in maybe-ness more than the horror of revenge that transcends the human Mom mindset by ripping the soul from it and thus proving the reality of humans having one that a power greater than ourselves can toss aside, tear asunder. But in no aspect of this concept is there room for that of surrender. The Greeks were too enlightened and complicated for so spartan a concept until they were forced to see it as a Spartan one.
After experiencing this stunning West End production of the play, I went home and looked up a poem by Robinson Jeffers it had prodded me - profoundly - to remember. Jeffers lived for most of his life in Big Sur in acknowledgment of the sacredness to him of the animistic natural world, a belief that I share with him. It is a poem about another creature from the animal world and concerns the godlike darkness within humans that emerges as goodness reshaped into a shadowed, troublingly surer kindness that can be used to kill.
HURT HAWKS
I
The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.
II
I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bones too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him for six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.
(Above: Ben Daniels in Medea with Marion Bailey as the Nurse. Photo by Johann Persson)
(Above: Sophie Okonedo in the title of Medea at Soho Theatre directed by Dominc Cooke. Photo by Johan Persson)
Sophie Okonedo is a sorceress as an actress, summoning a Medea that is ferocious and regal but it is a ferocious regality that resides feral-like within her, encased in a human body but not defined by it. The embodiment of incongruity, her Medea - intemperate and savage and beautiful and wild - soars both on broken wings and the brute force of brokenness itself until she breaks even that and, doing so, the fierce rush of her, unsheathed from reality, brakes the future in its tracks. All is present. Nothing is past but nothingness, no acreage, the geography only of justification. The tension of her spreading flight into another realm, which casts the shadow of its sureness entirely over this one, is tense with human tenses; they form the wind current that caught her in their uplift only to be left behind. There is even glamour glomming onto the encasement as if attempting to domesticate the otherworldly gleam of a star, this Venus in furies. Ben Daniels plays all the male roles, his own sorcery matching hers and then tripling it as Jason, Creon, and Aegeus. Medea is a strategist as well as a sorceress but Daniels overlays the strategic strata in the drama with his own strategies as an actor at the artful top of his craft as he glides between roles - yet also strides, also struts, also creeps, even shockingly also inserts a few Aegean flounces - while deigning delineation a godlike attribute of actors of his stature and brilliance. The grief that grips his Jason at the play’s climax seers our souls as he places them back into our bodies after they had been ripped out by the splenetic splendor of Medea’s rare, raw awfulness. But that is what all great stage actors do: make our souls visceral to us and doing so revive our belief in our humanity by making us aware of an ephemeral aspect of our very being, another incongruity that this narrative unearths for our human condition seen through the gods cornered in our corneas. The greatest incongruity presented - preening, brawny, female, majestic, brilliant, bloody, incorporeal, curative, tragic, mythic, true - that causes our brown study is that one has first to be human to be so supremely inhumane. Yet finally we are left with this: revenge can never be refigured as righteous, not even when inflicted from above instead of wielded from a lowlier realm. Revenge never rights what’s wrong or whose wronged. It fleeces. It is no fleece.
Okonedo and Daniels are best friends and I told them at the opening night party that I would love to see them star in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. They loved the idea. After this stunning artistic and commercial success they are having on the West End in this production of Medea that rivals Anderson’s experience on Broadway not her curdled Parisian echo of it, I hope some producers have the same idea. I was so deeply moved earlier by Daniels, whom many will recall for his portrayal of Princess Margarets’s husband Tony Snowdon in Season 3 of The Crown, in his portrayal of Ned Weeks in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart at The National Theatre, for which he was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Actor. Dominic Cooke directed that production as he has this Medea with a grace that both appalls and yet transcends the tragedies in each with a disturbing beauty. I asked Daniels what other roles he’d still like to tackle. The lead in “The Scottish Play and also Iago and more Sam Shepard” were some of the roles and plays that he longed to wrap his arms around. Here are some other questions I asked him.
QUESTION ONE
How did this production of Media come about? It is a play that one wouldn’t think of necessarily as a commercial one and yet you’ve been a big hit.
I was in rehearsals for The Normal Heart and Sophie called and told me that I was about to get an offer to do the workshop for it but I was not to feel any pressure about doing it. Dom [Dominic Cooke, the director] had been reading that the plays had originally been done with two or three people so he thought, “Hmm, I wonder what it would be like for one actor to play the patriarchy. Let’s see if that will work.” My head was full of Larry Kramer at that point and I was like “Argggh! I haven’t got fucking time!”
So you reacted like Larry.
(Laughing) Yeah! But I went along and did this workshop. And it was kind of fun. I was filming in Prague over the summer and it came through as an offer and I went, “Oh, God.” So I said, “Okay. This is my fear: running on and off in different wigs and costumes. I do not want to do that. But if you can incorporate somehow that you are using one actor, that would be interesting to me.” Years ago I had been in Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis at The National as Agamemnon directed by Katie Mitchell. And in part of my research for that I had come across the character called Proteus who is hardly in any of the writings, but he is a shapeshifter. So I had a whole conversation with Dom about it being a shapeshifting presence that is there all the time. I’d be interested in attempting that. So that’s how it started really. But it was Dom’s idea for one actor to play all the male parts.
QUESTION TWO
You grew up in Nuneaton in northern Warwickshire which had as its foundations as an industrial town coal mining and ribbon weaving. In your shapeshifting art as an actor do you see yourself more as a coal miner or ribbon weaver?
Oh my Good Heavens. I don’t know much about ribbon weaving but one of my granddads was a coal miner - not in the Midlands but in Kent. There is a role I have worked on that for his backstory I have him from a coal mining background. I love creating backstories for my roles. The more vibrant a backstory I can come up with the happier I am. Coal mining is a lot like acting. When you start you’re what is known as a tapper as a kid. You open and close the doors to let the oxygen in and out. So there is a kind of progression. You go next into hauling carts and then you start mining. I don’t know much about ribbon making but as an actor you can often feel as if you’re in the coal mines.
Acting is creating something from nothing. There is an alchemy to it. You have nothing. All you have is yourself. You have to create something from yourself.
You are the ore.
Yeah.
The either/or.
(Laughing) Exactly.
QUESTION THREE
I do love language. Speaking of language, George Eliot is from Nuneaton as well. One of her seven novels is Scenes from a Clerical Life which she set there. Here’s a quote from that novel: “The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.” What do you love and what do you reverence, or cherish?
Oh Good Heavens. Apart from one’s partners and such … hmm … I do love Ian [Gelder], my partner. I love him deeply. (A long pause.). I love life. I love being alive. I love getting up and getting out into the day. I love working. All those things really, really do make me happy. I love the arts. I love creativity. I love being inspired. I guess those are the same things that I cherish as well.
I’m sitting her in Paris talking to you over Zoom. When I was interviewing Bette Midler for cover story for Vanity Fair over 30 years ago now, she told me that one of her favorite memories of visiting Paris was going to the Musée Picasso. "It's an odd place, I find,” she told me. “On one hand it's full of Picassos, and on the other hand it's kind of a mess. It's haphazard and dirty. I'll never forget it. You would think that his shrine would be totally pristine, because he was one of the greats. He was legendary. But the one thing I took away from my visit to that museum was that this guy jumped out of bed in the morning and had to make things. He was obliged to; he was compelled to. In a way, I have a little bit of that, though not to the degree that he had it. But I feel I have to create. I have to dig in the earth, I have to make something grow, I have to bake something, I have to write something, I have to sing something, I have to put something out. It's not a need to prove anything. It's just my way of life." You sound as if you’re a lot like that. You are both Picasso and a Picasso since you create something from yourself.
I also love and cherish all aspects of life. I had a revelation early on in my career. I was in my 20’s. It wasn’t a revelation, come to think of it. Someone said something to me: “It is as important to be out of work as it is to work.” It was a simple thing but it clicked in my head. Especially as a young actor, you’re, “I have to do this. I have to do that." Grrr-grrr … You sort of get bogged down into the not working. But all of life is extraordinary.
Young actors are worried about having a career. But when you’ve built that career I would presume one is more relaxed about not working.
I love it now. Yet I am sort of always working.
QUESTION FOUR
You are not only about to play the vampiric character Santiago in the AMC series Interview with the Vampire based on the Anne Rice books, but you were also in the television series Jupiter’s Legacy in which you played a role with supernatural powers. Medea is about the supernatural in its way. You played a priest on the series The Exorcist and are on second season of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. That’s a lot of supernaturalness. Your character, Walter Sampson/Brainwave, in Jupiter’s Legacy had psionic powers. “Psionic” is a portmanteau consisting “psi” for psychic phenomenon, or the paranormal, and “onic” for electronic. If you had to form a portmanteau for yourself what would it be?
I am a horror nut. I love horror films - especially that kind of deeply psychological, character driven horror story. Medea plays out like a psychological thriller. It could have been written by Hitchcock.
But oh gosh - a portmanteau for myself? I can be incredibly stupid. I can be very intense. I can also be very emotional.
So you’re stemotional.
I love it. Yes. I’m stemotional!
That’s Ben’s charm, you know. He’s so stemotional.
That I am.
QUESTION FIVE
Let’s keep talking about words and being emotional. Here’s another quote from George Eliot’s Scenes from a Clerical Life set in your hometown: “It is so with emotional natures whose thoughts are no more than the fleeting shadows cast by feeling: to them words are facts, and even when known to be false, have a mastery over their smiles and tears.” It was recently Glenn Close’s birthday and I was reading about her. She studied with acting teacher Harold Guskin who was all about the text, the words. His whole approach seemed to be “just say the words” over and over without thinking until the character begins to emerge from the text. How do you work as actor?
I am all about the text. I really focus on the text. When I arrive at rehearsals, I know it. I have memorized my lines. I just feel that you can be open to more that way. I know my lines before I start rehearsals. It was about 1999 when I was working with director Michael Grandage [as Orlando in As You Like It] who asks that from the actors. Because, knowing the lines, you just get extra rehearsals if your head is not buried in the script.
I have worked with director Katie Mitchell twice and my process changed in those instances. I did the Iphigenia, but before that I did Three Sisters with her at The National. It’s a long rehearsal period; you get eight to ten weeks with her. She teaches The Method, but not the kind of wanky Method that people go, “You can’t look him in the eye!” That kind of shit. It is about you’re all playing the same event at the same time onstage. No one is off doing their own thing. It’s all about not showing off. It’s about telling the story and how Stanislavsky developed that method because he had such awful stage fright and it enabled him to go onstage. As I said, I like to work out a very, very strong backstory from the text and the pieces that aren’t in the text for which you use your own imagination.
In real life we tend to keep our deepest backstories to ourselves.
When you work with Katie you share it with other actors. One of the themes of Three Sisters is death. So you all sit around - you don’t work on the text for a few weeks - and offer up stories about death that are relevant to the play. Then you improvise pieces from your own life. So the backstories for her are not kept secret; they are quite open. But I think you can keep them secret or let them out.
You have not kept secret your being gay. You let that out. You have long been an out actor before it was safer to be one. I have always admired that about you as well as your brilliance as an actor. Thank you. Let’s talk some more about that …
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