Glenda Jackson tests her middle-age mettle

Press, 17 May 1984, Page 6

Glenda Jackson tests her middle-age mettle

NZPA-Reuter London In faded blue jeans, a knitted cream cardigan and no make-up, Glenda Jackson looks more like a student than a famous stage actress and double Oscar-winner. Unglamorous and unpretentious, she may become just that; giving up acting to train for social work in the Third World. “My thinking is that when my son goes to university or slings himself on the dole queue, I shall do Voluntary Service Overseas (V. 5.0. for two years,” she said in an interview. “As a retired actress is of new use to anybody, I would have to get some education.” V.S.O. is Governmentsponsored scheme for volunteers to work in developing countries for subsistence wages. Miss Jackson, whose son Daniel is 15, has long spoken of leaving the stage. She is 48 in May, and believes that there are just not enough good parts for middle-aged women.

“An actor can start with Hamlet and end with Lear and have an enormous range of parts in between,” she says. “Women have to scrabble around.

“There is just no continuum, and I see no point in

working if you are not being extended in some way.” She began a degree with Britain’s Open University, but challenging professional work kept coming her way and she could not keep up. An application for a three-year humanities course in South London came to nothing last year for similar reasons. Miss Jackson is starring in Eugene O’Neill’s "Strange Interlude” at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre. The part of Nina Leeds — said to be the longest ever written for a woman — must be among the most challenging she has ever faced.

“Strange Interlude,” which first appeared in 1928, lasts from 6 p.m. until after 11 p.m., with only two 15-minute intervals; probably the longest piece staged in London’s commercial theatre since O’Neill’s play as first (and last) seen here in 1931.

Nina is the daughter of a university professor in New England, and is haunted by the image of a fiance killed ih World War I. The nineact play covering 25 years explored her subsequent strained relationships with her father, husband, lover, friend and son.

“O’Neill was trying to present the kind of emotion one would find in a Greek tragedy in an American landscape,” Miss Jackson explains in her modest basement dressing-room. “Strange Interlude,” is at

45,000 words half as long again as “Hamlet,” Shakespeare’s longest play. “I thought there was no way I could ever learn it all, but now that is the least iof the problems,” Miss Jackson says. “The play is so rich ... the difficulty is tugging it all out.” O’Neill, who died in 1953, ’ was a leading American dramatist whose work has enjoyed something of a revival in London recently. He also experimented in “Strange Interlude” with a technique of interior monologue, which other characters must pretend not to hear.

As the characters are not reflective people, the asides are expansions of an interior emotion rather than traditional soliloquies. The actors must play the inside and outside of their characters in quick succession. Never one to inflate her .own work, Miss Jackson describes playing the part of Nina Leeds as “like emptying a big bath which has got to be filled up the next night.” She aims to create the part anew every time, leaving room for the unexpected to occur.

“At its best, the technique is being totally relaxed and totally on your toes,”, she

says. In spite of the length of the play — it was once said that one does not attending "“Strange Interlude,” one enlists for it — audiences are enthusiastic.

“We have never had an audience which has been bored or shuffly,” Miss Jackson says. The critics have been unanimous in their praise. "Glenda Jackson’s performance consists of an amazing series of acts of ■ self-presentation switching in a flash from mordant challenge to coquettish appeal,” wrote the critic Irving Wardle in “the Times."

“Miss Jackson’s performance is one of her greatest, emotionally and intellectually fascinating,” applauded Michael Coveney in the “Financial Times.” The idea of taking the

production to New York has been raised, but Miss Jackson believes stagehand overtime rates in the United States would make the cost prohibitive. She also doubts whether the American actors’ union would allow the whole British cast to perform there. I wouldn't want to go if we couldn’t all go.” Miss Jackson was born in Cheshire, northern England, and left school at 16 to work behind the counter for a large chain of chemists. She joined an amateur theatre group and won a two-year scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She played in repertory around Britain for eight years before joining the ,Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford. Critical acclaim led to film parts, and she has twice won Hollywood Academy Awards as best actress: in 1971 for “Women in Love” and in 1974 for the comedy “A Touch of Class.” Her lastest film role is as Yelena Bonner, wife of the Soviet dissident, Andrei Sakharov, in a film entitled simply “Sakharov.” The film was made last year, and covers the Nobel Prize-winning scientist’s awakening interest in human rights, his subsequent sacking, his marriage to Bonner and their exile to Gorki. “It is very nice to be able to use your work in something that you believe in,” she says. “If it does any good, then that will be wonderful.” Her next project is a film of Russell Hoban’s “Turtle Diary,” from a screenplay by Harold Pinter, and she may play the title- role in new translation of Racine’s “Phaedre” in the autumn. Her former husband, Roy ‘Hodges, has said that Miss Jackson would have been Prime Minister if she had gone into politics. She campaigned for the Labour party before last year’s General Election and says she would like to be engaged more fully in the political life of Britian. Perhaps Margaret Thatcher should watch out.