INTERVIEW:Veteran actor Vanessa Redgrave describes her role in Joan Didion's remarkable play 'The Year of Magical Thinking' as one of the toughest of her career, writes Susan McKay
SHE IS EXTRAORDINARILY beautiful. Tall, dressed in loose black trousers and a black polo neck, with a string of red beads and silver earrings, her glossy, silvery blonde hair is tied back with a red ribbon. She moves like a panther. She has cobalt blue eyes in a luminous, sculpted face.
"Did you like the play?" she asks me, in the enthralling voice once described by Jane Fonda as coming from "some deep place that knows all suffering and all secrets".
"Yes," I reply, and return the question: "Do YOU like it?" My voice sounds tinny and the question inadequate, the verb too weak. She draws back. "I worship it," she says. "It is an astonishing cantata for a soul." When, early last year, Joan Didion sat down in New York with David Hare, the director of her play The Year of Magical Thinkingand its producer, Scott Rudin, to discuss casting its sole actor, only one name came up. Vanessa Redgrave alone, they agreed, had the emotional intensity, the honesty and the perfect control that would be required. As Didion put it, "We knew we needed quicksilver, and she has it".
Redgrave and Didion knew each other in what Redgrave calls "the American side to my life". She was married to the actor, Tony Richardson, in the 1960s, and he was a close friend of Didion and her husband, John Dunne. "I am passionate about her writing," Redgrave says. "To me, she is one of the world's great writers. Not that I am an expert. Mine is a rather undeveloped mind that seeks and explores and asks a lot of questions."
The first question Redgrave had for Hare was, she says, "'I'm not supposed to be Joan, am I?' And he said, 'Absolutely not'. So that cleared that up. The art of acting isn't to do with creating a facsimile of that person. I remember an Italian lady when I was rehearsing my dancing for the film about Isadora Duncan, and she said, 'You aren't like Isadora at all!'" Redgrave turned on the woman. "I said, 'I'm so sorry'," she says, and laughs. "It is," Redgrave goes on, "about the spirit of the person."
Didion has also expressed exasperation at those who ask her if she finds it strange that Redgrave is playing her. She explains that Redgrave is playing "a character, who, for the sake of clarity, is called Joan Didion". This has not convinced everyone. Some have pointed out that Redgrave does not look like Didion, that she is, for example, taller.
And she is. Both of them are striking, but Redgrave is on a grand scale while Didion is a fragile miniature. "I try to suggest," Didion has written, "that her task in this play, for better or for worse, offers more elusive challenges than height impersonation." They share, then, a sense of humour. It might, Hare allows in a programme note, sound callous - given that the experience involved working with "a 72-year-old first-time playwright whose agony of grief was plainly so raw" - but the time he spent working on this play was among the happiest times of his life. "I felt the same," says Redgrave. "Joan came every single day. It was quite frightening but David and Joan just generated so much fun. There were a lot of laughs. It was so great in every way."
Didion has described her anxiety last year as opening night in New York drew closer. Then Vanessa came to the theatre for the first time. "Like a mermaid sensing water, she moved to the stage," Didion wrote. "She began saying the play. There it was, Vanessa Redgrave . . . was telling me a story I was hearing for the first time."
The play is powerful, a searing cry of loss, a requiem, an exploration of madness precipitated by grief, and the tentative transition to mourning. The speaker is eloquent, amusing, even, but at times a painful gap opens up and we glimpse the terrifying emptiness which has invaded her life. The people she loved are gone. She is alone, "sending back a dispatch from a far country". A writer, she is used to being in control of her narrative. She struggles, but this story has swept her off her feet and carried those she loved away, never, despite her obsessive search, to return.
Redgrave is magnificent, wrenching the full, complex poetry from the script, holding the audience for a riveting 100 minutes. The set is simple. There are only a few, muted sound effects. Her face, brilliantly lit, is astonishing. One moment she is shaking out her hair and laughing at the memory of happy times with her family and friends in Malibu. She looks and sounds young and sensual in summer sunlight.
Then panic strikes. She cries out. She pulls her hand across her face and tears away that mask to reveal a frightened old woman, haggard and harrowed, with wrinkles furrowed across her brow and around her eyes. The light is wintry and grey. The voice becomes a hoarse, painful whisper. That passes, too, and a soft-spoken person talks to us, twisting a gold bracelet around on her wrist. It is, though she is seated for most of the play, a highly physical performance, and Redgrave finds it exhausting. We meet in the morning, and she is busy chopping bananas and slicing grapefruit for breakfast.
"I've never acted in anything approaching this. It is totally unique. For me, it is not a role, it is an existence," she says. "It isn't a soliloquy - it is talking directly to the audience. I need massive stamina. I need to eat like this, and I play tennis and go to the gym."
There is strong black coffee, too, made in an old Italian stove-top coffee-maker she carries around with her when on the road. Dark chocolate truffles. And cigarettes. Spanish ones with the warning, Fumar puede matar (smoking can kill), printed loudly on the pack. She moves to the back door of the rented apartment she's staying in while performing the play in Bath, and lights up. There is a considerable silence. I observe the amazing bone structure of her face as she draws on her cigarette. "I'm a nicotine addict," she says. "If I stand here, it will make me feel less guilty. A lot less guilty, I hope."
I ask her about coming to Ireland to do the play. She came over in 1971 for the civil rights march in Newry, a week after Bloody Sunday. She had been invited to the march in Derry, but couldn't come, she says. Bernadette invited her, she thinks, meaning Bernadette Devlin. "And I attended the funeral of a lady who was shot in her hospital bed. Mary, I think her name was . . ." (She must mean Máire Drumm, the former vice-president of Sinn Féin who spoke of sending British soldiers home in their coffins and was shot dead by loyalists in 1976.)
She smokes, gazing out into the garden, wet with September rain. "I get amnesia, now. More and more," she says. She is 71.
She starred with Brenda Fricker in the 2007 film, How About You?"Part of the filming was in Northern Ireland and it was wonderful to be there now, not all locked off and tragedies all over the place," she says. "But, as in so many places I've been where there has been conflict, that terrible, terrible sorrow remains. Why did human beings get forced into a situation where they did unpardonable things? But, as Dylan says . . ." She is murmuring now, her back to me. I can scarcely hear her. I ask her which Dylan song she means. "Maybe he got it from an old spiritual," she says. "A time to live, a time to die . . ." "It is from the Bible," I venture. "Yes, of course it is from the Bible," she says, sharply. "I know that."
She begins to talk about how great it was for her to attend a lunch in Belfast recently and hear from Desmond Tutu about the Northern Irish Truth and Reconciliation Process. "He had been at a reunion of the participants the night before," she says. Puzzled, I tell her that he must have been talking about the series of programmes he made with the BBC. (Some of these were awful - victims of the conflict met killers and were urged by Tutu to forgive them.) She rejects this, and seems to remain convinced there's been a Truth Commission. "There is no one like Desmond Tutu," she says, adoringly.
Didion has said that she and Redgrave understand certain experiences, including creative anxieties, in the same way. She ventures that Redgrave has probably had that dream about being pushed on to the stage without a script. "Well," says Redgrave, rather dismissively, "every actor has that dream. In my case, it is that I have got a script, but it is the wrong script. Everyone else seems to think it is all right, but I am going wild. I don't know what that denotes."
Redgrave is from one of England's great acting dynasties. She's played some of the most famous roles for women, on stage and in film, and has won an Oscar, Golden Globes, Emmys, and nearly all the other major awards. Her birth was famously announced from the stage by Laurence Olivier, who declared that a famous actress had been born. "So my mother was told, anyway," says Redgrave. "And knowing Olivier, it may well be true." She wanted to be a dancer and was humoured by her parents, who let her train, from the age of five, with the Ballet Rambert, while knowing, she says, that she was going to be too tall. "They wanted me to be at ease with my body," she says.
First nominated for an Oscar in 1967, she won in 1977 for Julia. During her awards speech, she denounced Israeli treatment of Palestinians, and was in turn denounced by Zionists. "That happens to everyone who speaks up for the Palestinians," she says. For years, she was in the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party, though she is also a Commander of the British Empire. These days, she's irritated by questions on politics. She and her brother, Corin, set up their own party, Peace and Progress, a few years ago, and fared disastrously in elections, but she insists they simply wanted to highlight human-rights issues. She's a goodwill ambassador for Unicef, and also works for Amnesty International. "My preoccupation is with the fact that governments all over the world are riding roughshod over human rights. Guantanamo is the outstanding example."
Her 1991 autobiography has been unkindly dubbed "a mother's desperate flight from her children". She reveals in it that the children used to beg her to stay at home with them but she would leave, intent on saving the world. "I don't regret anything I've done," she says. "Which isn't to say I haven't made mistakes. I wish I had understood that it isn't an either/or, that to spend time with my children is as important as any other work with any other human beings."
She's married to actor Franco Nero, and her daughters, Natasha (married to our own Liam Neeson) and Joely Richardson are actors, too. Her son is the writer and director, Carlo Nero. "I'm a grandmother now, and I want to spend as much time as I can with my grandchildren," she says, though she has no plans to give up acting. She loves it, she says, and "it pays the mortgage". On cue, the doorbell rings. There are shrieks of happiness. It is her daughter-in-law and her little granddaughter. It is time for me to leave, time for the great Vanessa Redgrave to turn into Lily's Granny.
• The Year of Magical Thinkingis at the Gaiety Theatre from Tuesday, September 30th, to Saturday, October 4th
INTERVIEW
WORDS SUSAN McKAY
PHOTOGRAPHY BRIGITTE LACOMBE