Dame Janet Suzman
A Discussion of Dame Janet Suzman’s Work at The Royal Shakespeare Company and South African Productions of Shakespeare

A Discussion of Dame Janet Suzman’s Work at The Royal Shakespeare Company and South African Productions of Shakespeare | 05.16.24

- Hi everybody, everywhere, and I have great pleasure and honour to welcome Dame Janet Suzman, who for me is one of our truly great South Africans. And it’s just such a fantastic pleasure to be interviewing and talking to Janet today. Just to give you a very brief intro before we’re going to dive straight into questions, I’m going to ask minimally, and it’ll be over to Janet as we go along. As I’m sure many people know a lot about Janet’s life anyway, just a couple of things which people may not know is that Janet’s father Max was a member for Parliament for South Peninsula, obviously Cape Town, and a colleague of General Smuts in the old United Party in the old period of South Africa and a friend of Smuts who, as we all know, was a good friend of Churchill’s during the war and instrumental in helping to set up the League of Nations.

And then Janet’s aunt, as everybody knows, I’m sure many people, was Helen Suzman, one of the most important people in the country during the terrible dark times of Apartheid in terms of splitting from the United Party and setting up the Progressive Party during Apartheid. Janet went to Wits when there was still the horrific old law of the Separate Universities Act and they left South Africa and came to England where she went to LAMDA, the drama school in London and from there onto the Royal Shakespeare Company, Janet has won many awards in her lifetime and been nominated for many really prestigious top awards, too many to go into now. The one that I do want to mention is that in 2011, she was made a dame, the Order of the British Empire, together with all other awards for contribution to drama or acting or directing theatre, the arts specifically. So Janet, welcome. If we can start with, you joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, for those who don’t know, the RSC. How did you join?

• First things first, Max was my grandfather, not my father.

• Thank you.

• I’m pretty ancient. I really am.

• Okay, thank you.

• Okay, anyway, he was a grand old man, I remember him and I remember General Smuts when I was very tiny getting off a plane in Cape Town when you went down the steps onto the tarmac, none of these passageways.

• Right.

• I remember looking up at this tall, old, bearded old man and he ruffled my hair and he said, hello, obosgop. Moose head, I must be.

• Great.

• Anyway, that’s my only memory of General Smuts. How did I join the RSC? So, mm hmm, I’m in Manchester when this happened and I’m doing a really very kitchen sink drama with somebody you all may have heard of called Patrick Stewart. We were just starting out and he’s in a terrible string vest and I’m in a little frock with an apron on, and it’s an early play by David Mercer called “The Buried Man.” And so I’m a South African, okay, but I’m in Lancashire now, Manchester’s in Lancashire and I had to do a lot of Lancashire accent and I remember getting laughed at quite a lot because my glottal stops were not up to scratch. Anyway, as I’m going on for a matinee, the stage manager sits at the side just behind where the curtain is when you’re going on stage, said, “guess who’s in?” I said, “do not tell me, I don’t want to know.” Anyway, it happened that John Barton was in and Peter Hall was in to a matinee.

And you asked me how I joined the RSC. Somehow they didn’t mind my accent too much and they asked me to please come down and audition, but because I was playing, I had to go down on a Sunday and I remember going down to the huge theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, it was completely dark, the auditorium was dark, but I could hear voices in the distance far away. It was Peter Brook, John Barton, various other Cambridge Fundies and I had quickly learn a very short piece from Shakespeare ‘cause I wasn’t ready with my Shakespeare. I didn’t know what I was doing. And oh, I have to, funny story to tell for those who are South Africans. Anyway, I appeared on the stage, it was just a working light, what we call a working light, just an ordinary old bulb up top, no stage lights And I did crescent a sonnet. A sonnet, as you know, is only 14 lines.

So I’d found the shortest thing I could possibly do to show myself off a little bit. And I was nervous as anything, and I disappeared after my, there was a silence and I wandered off into the wings and I got completely lost because there were huge flats there and sets. And I heard a voice saying, “Janet, Janet.” “Yeah,” I said, “I’m here.” Anyway, Pete Hall dug me out from behind some sets and he said, “we would like you to play la Pucelle. Now I am so ignorant, I have no idea who la Pucelle is, so I have to say, "I’m so sorry, that’s lovely, but who is she?” And he said, “that’s Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc.” And I was plunged from then on in into this extraordinary excitement of the founding of the new Royal Shakespeare Company. Before that it was what called the Stratford Memorial Theatre. And this was a new company. I don’t know if any of you know, but there was a big change when Peter Hall came in.

When I mentioned Cambridge, I mentioned a new desire to look at Shakespeare rather for the meaning than the music, let’s put it that way. As I understand, I didn’t see those productions prior to the time I was there for the history plays, but some of you may have seen the “Wars of the Roses,” some of you very likely did not, but it was a mighty kind of look at what Shakespeare’s history plays were saying about England at the time and this was the early '60s. This started really my interest in seeing how great plays could reflect the times we were in because obviously Peter Hall was trying to see whether politics then and politics now had a great deal in common, which of course they always had. And so as brief as I can be, that was the beginning of my association with the RSC.

• Oh, that’s great, Janet. Just for those who may not know, Peter Hall was one of the most important, I’m sure you’d agree, Janet, not only artistic directors of the RSC, but directors and innovators in world theatre, not only British, and Peter Brooke, who you mentioned as well, one of the most renowned and innovative directors ever, not only 20th century. So just to give a context for everybody. You mentioned-

• The main thing really-

• Yeah.

• Yes.

• What you’re saying is right, absolutely, but when I say they were looking at the meaning of the words rather than the music of the words, that was the big change because as I understand it, Shakespeare was very poetical. Now he ceased to be poetical when we started with this company, it now started to be much more about what is actually being said rather than the sound of what was being said. And so I think that was the new pragmatism that started being examined by these very extraordinary directors that I was working with. So that was my introduction to Shakespeare, which means that I am of a breed that likes to understand what is being said. I actually thrive on that, and that’s what I’ve learned. It’s like being fed at the zoo. If I’m fed words I understand, I feel better, you know.

• Absolutely.

• I don’t like meaningless stuff as sometimes Shakespeare could be in hands which haven’t done the homework, I suppose. Anyway, that may be a little side road you don’t want to go down.

• You also, you’ve mentioned to me before, I know that it’s all about how to speak the verse. And how would you say that Peter Hall and others changed that in your time compared to, you know, before when you said music versus speaking?

• Speaking is to do with understanding what you’re saying.

• Mm hmm.

• Really, rather than making beautiful sounds, and anybody will know that a poetic voice seems to come into people when they start speaking poetry. I dunno what affects people, but they do start being poetical. And that was anathema to all of us, really. So the wars, which are, these early plays of Shakespeare, which Peter Hall wanted, their corrupt text, as we say, some of them, some of them were collaborations between Shakespeare and others. They’ve discovered more and more that Shakespeare collaborated with other writers at the time, but he has an inimitable kind of instinct for what is true in a way.

Here behind me somewhere is a book that says, oh, there it is behind me up there called “Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human.” That’s a great critic called Harold Bloom. What Shakespeare did essentially was invent human beings. Before his writing, there were types on the stage if you could put it that way, the warrior, the queen, Oedipus the King. Now he had human beings with all their contradictions and that’s what his writing is about. And it’s those contradictions that Peter Hall was intent on drawing out of the characters.

• Fantastic. Great, so exactly as you’ve said before, much more the inner world of the characters relate to real life as opposed to reciting verse.

• We’re all post-Freudians, we all think we know how people work. We don’t, but we do. I mean, there’s a bunch of hamster psychoanalysts that meet on the third Sunday of every month to discuss, you know, Shakespeare characters as if they were a proper case, so extraordinary as his insight into human beings’ behaviour.

• It’s fantastic.

• Yeah.

• To go ahead, you mentioned Joan of Arc when you spoke earlier and the Shakespeare and then later, I know you did “Saint Joan,” Shaw’s, George Bernard Shaw.

• CBC, yeah, yeah. I did, yeah.

• Yeah. Can you tell us a bit about the difference for you?

• The difference, okay, yes, why not? Shakespeare’s is a lying little sod. She’s not to be trusted at all, full of grit and wiliness. And Shaw’s Joan is a completely religious construct. She believes in her voices. To do those two was a really interesting- They were years apart, of course. Shaw’s, I had the immense luck to have the great John Gielgud as playing the Inquisitor. How do you play Saint Joan if you are an atheist like me? Well, it doesn’t matter what you are. Although, you know, it’s like Laurence Olivier saying, “try acting, dear boy.” You believe what it is you must believe. We don’t find that difficult or strange to do, actors. We like to embrace difference, I guess.

But Shaw’s Joan has a kind of shine inside her and she has a total utter belief in what she believes in. And it was wonderful. Oh, there was a scene. We were on location in some hills. I can’t remember where it was. It could have been Hampstead Heath or Richmond Park, something like that. Anyway, I had to ride a horse. I’m not great riding horse ‘cause once when I was 10, a horse ran away with me and I stayed on, I dunno how, I clung to its mane like mad and stayed on. Much to everybody’s amusement, I came back alive. Anyway, this horse was called Katie and she was a, she hated me.

This was a real dramatic horse. They’re meant to know how to behave on a film set. This one was determined to get me off her back. And there were two trees I remember way in the distance on the way hill and I am now saying, “to Orleans.” I’m about to fight the great battle to save France from England, aren’t I? And I’m on a horse and I’ve got a banner in my hand and the director said, “towards those trees, up that hill so I can get your cloaks flying, guys.” So we set off, my horse turned round and went in the opposite direction. The cameras didn’t know where to and made straight for those trees I’m telling you about, straight for the middle, so they wanted to get me off. I know, we had this mental battle. So I wouldn’t have won Orleans as myself.

• That’s great. And then, Janet, just moving on to also, one of the big highlights I know of your career from an external point of view as well, 1973, “Antony and Cleopatra” and you playing Cleopatra and so many people, not only in my time living in England, but wherever I’ve been and lived, have known about that performance of that role that you did sort of, you know, defining in a huge part of the 20th century that role specifically. What for you was so powerful and intriguing about that character?

• It’s a big question. Listen, she’s unlike any of Shakespeare’s other female characters. Let’s get this straight. It’s weird, isn’t it? Actresses have a pretty mean time of it, really, as regards to the great classics. There are very few written for women and of Shakespeare’s output, only 16% of it are women’s roles. But she, Cleopatra, is quite different from any of the others. Why? Because she’s neither old nor young, she’s not a baby dressing up in boys’ clothes like some of the beautiful travesty younger parts like Rosalyn and Viola and then there’s Juliet and Cressida and there’s quite a little batch of young ones and then there’s a batch of old ones like Volumnia, the great Volumnia who saves Rome from being sacked by her son, and there are bloodier rolls and there are queens usually dethroned or sad or about to be killed, certainly about to be done away with.

But Cleopatra is a woman in her prime, she’s 38, she’s on a throne, she needs a man by her side because women always, in order to placate other men, need a man by their side, so she’s set up to get Antony. You will remember the barge she sat in and that amazing speech about sailing down towards Antony, down the river of Cydnus where Antony is sitting in his throne waiting for her, and she beckoned and he came. And really it’s thought of, I think the mark of Elizabeth Taylor is written all over, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, ‘cause when they made the great Mankiewicz movie, it was all cleavage and beauty 'cause nobody could be more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor, and somehow, as you probably might know in the back of your brains, it was Octavius Caesar who succeeded Julius Caesar as emperor of Rome and after Antony had killed him.

And it was he who succeeded and put about after her death that she was a whore. He spun her, I think that’s the modern word, which means that we think of Cleopatra as, you know, the grand of history. Actually she wasn’t, she was an extremely canny ruler who probably was ruler of the most efficient theocracy in the ancient world, Egypt, at the time. Anyway, there’s so many aspects about her, which Shakespeare has got sometimes in very brief little windows open into a much deeper soul of hers, which has intrigued me all these years. You say I did it in '73 and I did and it was a marvellous production by my then husband Trevor.

And well, thank you for summing up what you say, but it’s been a part that has haunted me 'cause I don’t think she’s given enough thought by many people. And also the most interesting thing about it is that we all believe that all the women’s parts in Shakespeare’s day were played by boys and I don’t, in this instance. I’m very sure for all sorts of reasons and I’ve written a long paper on it, so I’m not going to give that to you now, I promise, it was played, it was made for a woman, it was written for a woman, I know this. We don’t have proof. We have a report in 1608 from a guy who went to the theatre in Venice, same year that “Antony and Cleopatra” was published around about 1606, 1607, 1608. And he said, so- Sorry?

• No, no, please go on.

• I thought you said something, I don’t know what. Anyway, that’s because in Italy, and he was in Venice, in Italy and on the continent, lots of women acting. Some very good places, you know, Spain and Italy were full of interesting playwrights, not quite as interesting as Shakespeare, but really, you know, full of creativity. There again, they travelled, there’s no doubt at all that people crossed the Channel and came to London and Shakespeare will have seen them, and whether he travelled across the channel and had a look, we do not know. There are lots, the wonderful thing about Shakespeare is we know nothing about him, he’s a mystery, and the less you know about somebody, the more interesting they become.

Anyway, I just find this whole Cleopatra myth really, really interesting, partly, I mean, we’ve talked a little about “Saint Joan,” playing real people is a kind of interesting thing because you defend them, they’re dead now, so I, if I am going to be playing, and I have played quite a few people who actually lived and walked the earth and loved and walked and talked, and so when you are playing them, you sort of speak for them in a way. You can’t despise them, you can’t judge them. You must bring out what it is you think is valuable about them as strongly as you can 'cause you’ve got to love the person you play. That’s probably the difficulty of playing Hitler, but you know.

• Sure, sure, sure. And the sense of Cleopatra, the intelligence, 'cause I’ve seen, unfortunately, I was going to show them today, but they’re very bad clips on YouTube, you know, they’re very grainy and that. So, but what struck me watching, the sheer-

• What’s grainy?

• The old BBC clips on YouTube that I found.

• Of ours?

• Cleopatra. Yeah, of your Cleopatra in '73.

• Going to the wrong thing, David. You can easily see it. I don’t know what-

• Okay. We’ll look into, okay. What strikes me is the intelligence you bring and the passion for politics, the politics of passion, the love, you know, all of it’s moving so quickly in her mind and so fiercely. Am I accurate?

• Yes, sort of. Yeah, thank you very much. I mean, there’s a wonderful thing when she’s beating up the messenger, which is a wonderful comedy scene and her maid Charmian and says, you know, “be nice to him, he’s frightened of you,” kind of thing. And she says, “fetch him in, fetch him in, I wish to speak to him.” And she says, Herod of Jewry, Herod of Jewry would be frightened of you in this mood, so pull your socks up. Anyway, she goes off to get the boy and she says, as an aside, Cleopatra, “that Herod’s head I’ll have, but how when Anthony is gone, through whom I might achieve it.” So there’s a very exquisite little couplet about the way Cleopatra is thinking about the wider scene.

• Yeah.

• So-

• Trying to keep Egypt-

• Play the politics. There it is, Shakespeare wrote it. He wrote about the queen who’s frustrated that her army can only be commanded by the captain that she wants to be doing the job.

• That she’s a queen, which is going to have to be a province of Rome maybe, but also she’s in love and with such passion, so yeah.

• I don’t know if she’s in love. You’ve just brought up a very interesting thing. Most people say, oh, I don’t know, Cleopatra is a bit of a love story. Frankly, I think it’s a much more interesting play. I think a play about the end of the affair, the end of the marriage. It’s not in full blossom. It’s the end of it. It starts off badly and it gets worse.

• That’s fascinating.

• They come together at the end. She only marries him in the last 10 minutes of the play. “As her husband, I come,” and she kind of marries him mythically. It’s a bit too much of it for us to go into, but it’s a more interesting play than is usually thought of.

• Yeah, yeah.

• In my view anyway.

• Great, and then moving on, Janet, you also, you played Empress Alexandra in the movie, 1971.

• Yes, I did, poor thing.

• Could you share with us a bit about that, that experience, the character?

• I had trouble with her because Alexandra was pretty much everything I’m not, as in my thinking. She was born a Lutheran, she was Victoria’s granddaughter, she was very proper. She did fall in love with Nicholas of Russia and they had a very warm sort of puppyish relationship, it seemed. The tragedy about her was that she had a hemophilic son and my way into her blinkered view of her world brought up only in royal nurseries, no experience of the outside world at all, was to see how any mother would, whose heart would be broken by a sick boy, her son, who was in pain most of the time, Alexei. So that was my way into finding the requisite amount of sympathy for Alexandra. But I respected her because in a way, you have to respect people whose thoughts you really cannot adopt in some way. She wasn’t deliberately cruel, she was simply ignorant of the outside world.

• It’s a wonderful way of putting it, yeah.

• I had wonderful clothes, though. I had Antonio Castillo, the Great Castillo making my clothes. I said to him, Antonio, please give me a beautiful mink coat for the empress that trails behind me when I moved through the palace. And he said, “oh my God, no, this is terrible. Sable for the empress, mink for the coachman.” Like that.

• That’s great, that’s great. I know people forget it’s period pieces with all the costumes and you know, everything to look as believable as possible. “Doctor Zhivago” was, I think, film in Spain in summer, so with all the fake snow and…

• Fake snow and sheets, bed sheets.

• Okay, and thick coats, and all the actors sweating like hell underneath them. That’s another whole story.

• That’s what movies are, that’s how they are.

• Yeah.

• It’s all fake.

• Mm hmm, magnificent fake.

• If you didn’t know that. Okay, I want to ask you also, because there’s so much we could cover, but just to, you know, highlight a few.

• [Janet] Sure.

• 'Cause you’ve done so much of the Shakespeare, not only the great roles, but the most, as you said earlier about Peter Hall, the roles of contradictions, the human roles. Lady Macbeth, what was that like for you?

• Oh my goodness. Well, I kind of liked her in a terrible way. I played her with Eric Porter. That was a BBC production. BBC had the sagacity to wipe most of their interesting pieces of television because they said there wasn’t room in the library or something. I don’t know, there’s no excuse, but they have wiped a lot and that’s one of the ones they’ve wiped. Lady Macbeth, I don’t know, it seems that Shakespeare didn’t know what to do with her, so he rendered her mad. I can sort of see why because she was a girl who wanted it now, which is very contemporary. Everybody wants everything now, they can’t wait. And so she wanted the crown now and through foul means got it. And that must have worked upon her emotionally because it all went bad after that and she didn’t know how to cope.

So I guess madness… He sends Ophelia mad too, Shakespeare. I don’t think it’s a view he has that women are feeble-minded and therefore they can’t take too much and must be driven mad by extremes of emotion, I don’t think it’s that at all, but I think it’s a way of debarrassing the hero of a useless relationship which is now no longer necessary. So Macbeth is now alone. She should have died hereafter, says he, and goes on alone in his terrible… Macbeth is the man who can see consequences. He can see if you shoot an arrow of the house, it might kill somebody on the other side. She doesn’t. People who want things now can’t see the consequences. They can’t play chess, life’s chess, let’s put it that way. Right? So she has her interest, very much so, Lady Macbeth. And I think she mocks him into action and I think she’s overexcited by murder. There’s something a bit weird about her. Do you want more? What more can I say about her without-

• No, it’s fantastic to hear because it’s iconic and everybody knows obviously the character. Just, I want to move on if we can to your connection with South Africa, doing plays in South Africa, doing Shakespeare in South Africa. And you’ve said to me before, and I want to share this with everybody, which I’m sure you’re fine with, that you never lost touch with South Africa, which is really important to you. And that the such seminal times were at the Market Theatre and working with Barney Simon and Athol Fugard. Could you just elaborate on that a bit?

• I have to say, South Africa’s been the hectic in my blood. I think I’ve always said the land of your birth is a little bit like your parents, there’s nothing you can do about it, you just happened to be born there and it’s part of you, it is you and I haven’t been one of those expats that have left the place and thought phew, phew, that’s it, I’ve never want to see it again. Not in the least. I absolutely love that place. I love it and I hate it, too, as proper relationships should be a mixture of those things. But I can honestly say that the most exciting theatrical times I have had have been in South Africa. I did an “Othello” there in 1987, which was three years before Nelson Mandela walked out into the sunlight.

I remember Helen Suzman saying to me, “there’s nothing more that that House of Assembly can do to that concrete edifice of Apartheid.” We have filled every bloody hole. There’s nothing more to do. I don’t know why we even go there. To debate what? Such was the sort of edifice of Apartheid that we thought was impregnable. Well, ah, it wasn’t. Anyway, three years before all that wonderful thing happened, I was doing “Othello.” Why? Because I went to the Market Theatre and I used to go back in my school holidays and as often as I could, and I went one April back to see my parents in Johannesburg and I went to the Market Theatre. The Market Theatre, in case people don’t know, was founded in 1976 by a great man called Barney Simon. I would describe him as the Peter Brook of South Africa and an enormous theatrical presence.

And he was closely allied, of course with Athol Fugard. Athol Fugard was, as everybody knows who Athol Fugard is, I don’t have to describe him, but he had a collection of young players called the Serpent Players, of which the young John Carney was a member. And I remember meeting John right at the end of the '60s, 1969, I think it was even earlier, '67 maybe, yeah, at a party and we had a terrible fight straight away because he said, “you haven’t even bothered to learn my language, .” And I said, “I’m the loser. You at least can understand what I’m saying, even if it’s not worth listening to, but I can’t understand what your-” Anyway, we had a nice, Barney, and we became firm friends ever since.

So now moving on to 1987, I was sitting and watching a play in the Market Theatre and I watched it and I thought, and John was in it and it wasn’t a very good part, and I thought, John, my friend, you need something much better than this for yourself. And as I sat there, the idea of “Othello” popped into my brain and it wouldn’t go away and I remember my mama had a library of folio versions of Shakespeare’s, they were rather large and full of F’s for S’s and things like that, you know, difficult to read. But I sat and read it till three o'clock in the morning, and when I got to Act Three, Scene Three, if anybody wants to look it up, please do, I see Iago dripping poison into Othello’s ear and talking about what I saw as Shakespeare writing about the idea of grand Apartheid, the idea of Apartheid.

He says, “not to affect many proposed matches.” He’s talking about Desdemona, why did he marry Desdemona “of her own clime, complexion, and degree.” Clime, complexion, and degree. To put it in brief, you must only marry people out of the same drawer as you, and certainly not of another colour. Clime, complexion, and degree. And then he goes on to say, “we may smell in such a will most rank foul disproportions, thoughts unnatural.” Well, if you cast your minds back, everybody, you will remember that the idea of Apartheid was that it was unnatural in their view for people to mix. It was unnatural. Of course it isn’t, but that was what Apartheid was founded on, the idea of it being against nature.

Well, the first two acts of Othello discussed this very thing, the unnaturalness. It’s Desdemona who says, “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.” Not in his skin colour, in his mind, his imagination. And so on and so on, so when I read that speech, I thought, this is Shakespeare. He’s imagining a state where races are not allowed to meet, not allowed to hold hands across a colour line. And I thought, well, this is the play I’ve got to do. This is about Apartheid. And if you sum up the plot of Othello, what is it? It is the story of the humiliation of a Black man by a white thug. And excuse me, what were all those people in uniform killing people? White thugs, murderers, thugs.

Anyway, so it had to be done. So I got hold of John the next day and I said, you take my arm, and we are going to walk very slowly round the precinct of the Market Theatre. I’m going to tell you what I hope we should do together. 'Cause this is the part you should play and I took a deep breath and I said, and because it’s coming clearer in my mind what should happen in it, I said, and I’m going to direct. So that happened to be the first play I ever directed. And that’s how it became a sort of-

• Fantastic. Just taking on what you said about the unnatural of the other, you know, that you saw in “Othello,” obviously during Apartheid South Africa. And if you think of Shakespeare from your own experience and very intimate and extensive knowledge of Shakespeare, how he is able to imagine in an extraordinary way the other. You know, it could be the Jewish, “The Merchant of Venice,” it could be the Moor, “Othello,” the Black Arab essentially, or North African, Aaron in “Titus Andronicus” and so many others that he’s able to imagine people he’s probably never met or doesn’t know or anything like that, maybe seen vaguely on the street somewhere, but that extraordinary contribution to what you said earlier about that insight into human nature, what do you think of that?

• The guy’s a genius. None of us can understand. You can’t understand genius, it’s beyond one. It’s so rare.

• The unnatural other.

• Huh?

• Yeah. The unnatural other who’s seen like that by the society.

• I think he’s got a soft spot for others. I mean, Shylock is extraordinary, Cleopatra is another. She’s very, you know, she’s the tawny Egyptian. She doesn’t fit into any Roman mould. Mm, and Othello of course, and Aaron, as you mentioned, of course. He’s written three great roles for others.

• Yeah, and would you say that’s one of the reasons that he’s still, so those plays, partly anyway, or so resonant today?

• That’s one of them. A mix, a huge basket full of meanings. I mean, that’s just one little egg lying in there.

• Sure, sure.

• You know, Apart to Harold… Sorry, what am I saying? When I asked the, here, the man who Harold Bloom, who wrote “The Invention of the Human,” he published four, but he died about three years ago, and just before, about three years before he died, he wanted to publish what he called his personalities and he published four little monographs about his favourite, favourite people in Shakespeare 'cause he was a Shakespeare scholar. The sort of people like in Dickens, in great writing, there are people who could sort of walk off the page and walk down the street and you’d turn your head and say, God, that’s Mr. Pecksniff. You know, know what I mean?

They are so vivid, the characters are just so strong. So his four personalities, you can always guess, Hamlet, Falstaff, King Lear and Cleopatra. So he wrote and he said, could he use my photograph for- Oh dear, of course he could. Anyway, I wrote to him and I said, do you know, it’s astonishing that he knows so much about- This woman is written with such nuance and such extraordinary detail of a feminine mind on a throne, and he wrote back something wonderful. Excuse me, gentlemen, you all have to just swallow this. He wrote back and he said, “only Shakespeare can overcome the limitations of being a male.” It’s nice, isn’t it?

• Fascinating, fascinating. Then moving on with another female character, you also adapted Brecht, “The Good Woman of Setzuan.”

• [Janet] Yeah, I did.

• And into “The Good Woman of Sharpeville.” Yeah, if you could just talk a little bit about that.

• Well, there’s another. Whenever I go to South Africa, I realise that there are three, well, I had the luck or the energy or the madness, I don’t know which to do three of them because I could see that the audience would respond because the subject of the plays were just so relevant to them. And this was one, the Brecht play. The play is “The Good Woman of Setzuan,” about poverty. Can you be poor and good? If you’ve got a child and you are starving, can you resist stealing a loaf of bread? The answer is no, of course not. You know, how do you equate poverty and desperation with goodness? It’s a sort of allegorical play. And I had a wonderful cast. I had Pamela Nomvete playing Shen Teh, Shui Ta and wonderful actor called Selomarke Cancube playing the Airman.

So I’ve been working with wonderful actors all these years and I love working with them because they’re so receptive and talented. For instance, the last scene, Shen Teh is rent with agony about her life. She has to become another person. She has to become her wicked brother in order to survive, to put on a suit and be cruel to people and kick people out of her rented, you know, house, and that that will knock them about. And she can only do that as a man. She can’t do that as her little self. Anyway, the gods come down at the end. There’s a wonderful mad scene about the gods. And she said, why do the gods always punish the poor? And from the audience you could hear voices saying, “yes, why?” You know, there was some link between what was happening on stage and what was the state of people sitting in the audience.

• Yeah, great, great.

• Very exciting. And the other third play I did about South Africa was Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard.” Because the peasant buys the estate. And what happened to us, thank God in '94? The peasant, as it were, bought the estate. And “The Cherry Orchard,” I relocated it to the Eastern free state where they grow cherries on the Maluti mountain hills and there’s a cherry festival there and there are vast estates and old families and everything that you could possibly want from a Russian novel and Russian play. And it fit it beautifully, so I did that too.

• Just for everyone to know, that was 1996, 2 years after the first Democratic election. So it’s a fascinating development from “Othello” and then ending up with your adaptation of Chekhov.

• Yeah, yeah.

• Yeah. And I have to ask you this, and I think a lot of people, well anyway, I have to ask you, you also worked on a movie, you acted in the movie of Andre Brink’s film, play, Andre Brink’s novel, “A Dry White Season” with iconic Marlon Brando.

• Marlon Brando.

• You have to share with everybody what that was like.

• Marlon Brando, he appeared as George Bizos. You remember the great George Bizos, the advocate? Always been in great admirer. And he played George Bizos, did Marlon Brando because he thought this was a film he would lend his greatness to. And I remember we were sitting in the mock-up of a courtroom one morning early 'cause films always start very early. Susan Sarandon, Donald Sutherland, Michael Gambon, myself, a whole crowd of actors waited impatiently in their pews and bits of wooden seats waiting, he was a little late, the great man to appear, and then one of the panels moved and Marlon Brando walked in and it was exactly like watching a Roman coin with that profile walking in. And I swear he was taken round to all of us to be introduced and I swear we all curtsied and bowed. I certainly did a little involuntary bob. 'Cause the man is great.

• Amazing.

• [Janet] He’s just a great, great, he was a great actor.

• What was he like to actually work with him, Janet?

• I hardly worked with him. He worked, like, on his own. I was very taken by watching him like a hawk. We all watched him like a hawk. You know, you can’t learn from great actors. You can really only learn anything from quite bad acting. Great acting is a bit of a miracle. You can’t analyse it what happens, really. And but we were watching out of fascination to see how he behaved. And I remember watching him with his eyes down a lot. You know, when your eyes are down and you don’t make eye contact, you are cut off from the world. You can’t approach somebody with their eyes down.

There is no permission for you to enter their space. It’s why mediaeval ladies used to do a lot of sewing. It was their protection, their only protection was to have to keep their eyes down in a modest way so that nobody could come near without some permission or other. Anyway, he kept his eye down, which meant that all the people who have to flutter around you on a film set to dab your nose or do something to your hair or twitch a bit of dust off your, or something, couldn’t go near him, he was left alone and one understands that. Actors need a bit of time when they’re just getting into the zone. Like, you know, focusing. Like you see violinists do. They tuck their chin into that chin rest and they and the the instrument are the only thing that’s there. Same with the piano.

• Beautiful. Beautiful.

• [Janet] Anyway.

• And then to just take a leap forward into another world completely. Fellini cast you in “And the Ship Sails On.”

• Yes, he did.

• And you said to me, Fellini was the genius. Could you share that with us?

• He was a genius. His imagination, his ebullience, his outrageousness on film was just, is just stunning. I was so overwhelmed being able to work with Fellini and I was with him by myself in Rome 'cause he filmed my bits before everybody else. It was a pre-film, if you like. So I was in Rome for a week with Fellini. He took me every single night to the same restaurant. The best food I’ve ever eaten in my life. There’s a whole story about that restaurant. I don’t know if we’ve got time for it. Anyway, but he was just, some people have a spirit that you just want to be around, you know? They’re just so original. Very few, so that’s why they’re rare and miraculous. Once somebody said, would you like to have met Shakespeare? And I said, I’d be so nervous because what if he’s, I don’t know, got acne or isn’t very nice or something. No, but I can’t imagine that being the case. I simply can’t. But anyway, Fellini didn’t have acne.

• Yeah, yeah.

• Anyway, all the policemen on the street corners, “hey Fellini.” They recognised him immediately. They stopped the traffic for us, wherever we went, it was fabulous.

• Did they have, sort of a combination of sort of reverence as well as, you know, sort of…

• They knew him.

• Friendliness?

• You tell me one bobby in London who knows a great film director.

• I know, you would certainly wouldn’t get a cop. No, exactly. And then you also did, you acted very interestingly playing Frieda Lawrence.

• Oh yes.

• For those who don’t know, D.H. Lawrence’s wife in the movie “Priest of Love.”

• Yes.

• What was that like?

• Ian McKellen and I, Ian played D.H. Lawrence and I played his charming wife, who was a quite a number, she was. I enjoyed playing that.

• Wasn’t she the wife of D.H. Lawrence’s school teacher or university teacher, something like that.

• Oh yes, she left that person and her two children, which meant that everybody tsked, tsked a lot because women are not meant to ever leave their children. But she did for Lawrence. Lawrence, Lawrence. And we had, I mean, just magical locations. We went to everywhere for real, not like the bedsheets I’ve described where there was no real snow. We went everywhere the Lawrences went. So we even went to their villa in Italy above Florence to film and we went to Lake Como and we went to Oaxaca in Mexico where they- Ava Gardner was in it. That was the great thing. Yes, I have acted with Ava Gardner. Wonderful.

• And Marlon Brando.

• And Marlon Brando.

• I know. Okay.

• Not complaining.

• And so Janet, as we bring this to a close, I know you told me yesterday that the one, there was a Jewish comedy you acted in going way back, “Leon the Pig Farmer.” Can you share that with us?

• Not many people have seen that. Most unseen film on Earth. But it was fun. It’s a terrible little film. I mean, I think the actors paid to be in it 'cause they were trying to be nice, but it was a really funny, stupid little film. But another funny film I’ve been in is called “Nuns on the Run.” I mean, I would like to have done more comedy 'cause it’s just fun to do it. Eric Idle, Robbie Coltrane, and I had to play a real nun and they had to play robber nuns and dress up as nuns and everything. It’s a really nice-

• What do you love about comedy in a way, contrasted to all the other great-

• That’s a stupid question. What does anybody like about comedy?

• What do you love?

• Yes, it’s fun.

Q&A and Comments

• Okay. Okay, great. Well, all right, we are going to draw this to a close and we’ll take some questions and I can see the questions in the Q&A if that’s okay Janet. And we’ll go, let’s go straight into it, okay?

From Denise, “the great Dame Janet Suzman herself, there she is, welcome in our midst. I’m going to love this,” she says. “I’m South African, too, and an ex-thespian.” And Denise goes on, “I loved how Olivier played Shakespeare with melody of the poetry, but also the more modern style of speaking to make it understood by the public. I hated the old style.” And she goes on, “I knew your wonderful Aunt Helen. I always think of her wearing her black sash.” She goes on, okay. By the time he came back to the Market Theatre. Okay, Denise Samuel, and then she left for Rhodesia. Just going here and how she loved you in Nicholas and Alexandra, “Dry White Season.” “And you talk my language, my dear,” says Denise. “You still love South Africa, as do I. I lived in all four provinces. We are kindred spirits. I’m sorry we never met. Anyway, thank you so much for appearing today.” Then we go on to Monty, “a granddaughter of General Smuts recently published a book, where she called him a racist.” Okay.

• What?

• “In which she, a granddaughter of General Smuts recently published a book in which she-”

• I got that, but called what?

• She called him a racist.

• Horatio?

• No, a racist.

• A racist.

• Yeah, a racist.

• Ah, I wouldn’t be surprised. I think everybody was.

• That’s from Monte, okay. Then from, I dunno the name here, Mumley, “I saw 'Hamlet’ in Stratford 1958.” Okay.

• Hamlet was another big experience, I have to say. I did a Hamlet at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town.

• Yes.

• And it was tragic. This could only have happened in bloody South Africa, as it then was. The young boy, the young man playing Guildenstern in my play was murdered over the Easter weekend in April, 2006. His name was Brett Goldin and he was a golden boy. But he was murdered by two thugs from Athol, Cape Town that weekend. It’s not often that a young company blessed with a really throbbingly alive production, have their day darkened by a murder of one of their company. I mean, we were expected in Stratford-upon-Avon on the Thursday to open on the Friday. This was the weekend when this unspeakable thing happened. So I don’t want to dwell on it, but “Hamlet” is on my heart, burnt into my heart, like Dallas. But if it hadn’t been “Hamlet,” only “Hamlet” could have embraced the tragedy ‘cause it’s a play about death. It’s a black diamond of a play. You hold it up and every facet of it reflects something not depressing, thrilling about life.

• Thanks for that, Janet, because for those who may not know Brett Goldin, you know, a fantastic young actor, fantastic human being, you know, to be, his life just cut short so terribly. Sure. Okay, thank you. Then Elaine goes on about, Elaine asks, she saw “Hamlet” in 1966. David Warner played Hamlet and you played Ophelia.

• Oh yeah, I forgot that one.

• And Elaine says, “it was one of the highlights of my life. Thank you.”

• Gosh.

• What’s the contrast for you? Just out of interest. Ophelia, Cleopatra. I mean, all the other female characters in particular, obviously, that you’ve played from Shakespeare and Ophelia, what today looking back intrigues you about that character?

• Nothing.

• Interesting. Very different to all the others. Totally different.

• Everybody in the plays are different, you know?

• Yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you.

• Then Marian, “I’ve always been a fan, but I’m in awe of you, Janet. You’re still so beautiful, bright and strong, a privilege to share and be inspired today by you again.” Okay, that’s from Marian. Michael, “is Dame Janet related to the former MP?” Well, yeah, we’ve spoken about that. Okay. Paula, she’s thanking us for the interview and she says, “Dame Janet is so amazingly articulate and what a memory. Even without meaning to, with Dame Janet, you have provided a masterclass. Thank you.” Many thank you’s here. That was Paula, then Romane.

Q: “You are so generous to genius. Are you equally kind to mediocrity, Janet?” asks Romane.

A: Oh, what a terrible question.

• I love that question, Romane.

• I’m sure I’d like you.

Q: Okay then Anna, “what was the name of Fellini’s restaurant?”

A: This is the point of my story, it had no name. It was somewhere near Piazza Navona. And I could tell you a brief wonderful story if there’s time, but is there time?

• Yes, go for it.

• Okay. So I said to Fellini on the third night, we were in this restaurant, this is such a fabulous restaurant because every time we went in, the padrona would arrive wearing slippers, their hair drawn back in a bun and a nice little apron tucked in with safety pins. And she would say, they would, the two of them would go through what she had in her kitchen, no menu on the table. And they would choose, ah, you know, Italian food is the best, isn’t it? It just is. And so dish after dish after dish would arrive and it was fabulous. And I said, tell me about her, tell me about them. He said, “ah, well he was born in Bologna.” Bologna, the foodie capital of Italy. And when he was very young, he always liked good food and he saved up, he was very poor 'cause there was a restaurant there in the main street and he wanted to go to it, so he did and he had a wonderful meal. And when the bill came, he went, oh, he’d forgotten the thing called the cover charge. We call it the service charge today or the VAT or whatever. And he couldn’t pay it in full.

So the padrona come out and said, get out, you come here as a cheaty boy, you get out, you can’t pay the bill, out. And the next morning he says he was walking down the street and he bumped in a hurry, he was going to work, and he bumped shoulders with somebody and he turned around, it was her. And he was so scared because of the last night, he turned and he started running off and she said, “Hey, you, come back here.” He said, “not only do you cheat and you don’t pay your bills in my restaurant last night, but you’re such a rude young man, you don’t even say good morning to me this morning. What’s the matter with you?” So they became friends.

They had this terrible fight and she said, “I see you like good food. You can come to my restaurant.” And he said, he was getting fly already, and he said, “oh, well I’m busy tonight. I can come Thursday.” Anyway, they became friends. Both of them went on their way, she a great cook, he a great filmmaker. And she left and went to Rome and he left and went to Rome and he said, “I paid her back by holding the press night of "La Dolce Vita” in her new restaurant in Rome and we both became famous together,“ he says. Nice, anyway.

• That’s a great story.

• No, but this is not the point. The point is, you said, what’s the name of the restaurant? Yeah, she got bored with cooking. She sold up, she bought a villa on the Tiber and got bored with being in retirement. So she came back into Rome to start cooking, but she’d sold the name. So now she had to open a restaurant. Everybody knew, like following your hairdresser. Everybody in Rome went to her restaurant with no name. So that was what happened to the name.

• That’s great, that’s great, Janet. Then Susan says, "thanks for the interview. Please come back again.” Linda says, “thank you Janet. I’m going to take up sewing.”

• That’s it, that’s it.

Q: Then Barry says, “I saw Dame Janet in 'Taming of the Shrew,’ 1973,” yeah, we spoke about that yesterday, “and it seemed you played it straight as a very compliant woman. Is my recollection wrong or was it tongue in cheek and was I too young to understand?” Barry asks.

A: A, I didn’t do it in ‘73, I did it in '67, B, you can’t pay Kate compliantly, so I don’t know who you saw, but it wasn’t me. See the play again, it see if it’s gone awry.

• A fantastic character. Then Melanie says, “Solomon and Marion,” which is our wonderful mutual friend’s Lara’s play.

• Yes, Lara’s play. Yes, a good friend and your friend.

• Janet, you were superb in that role.

• She’s a good one.

• Yeah. She was my ex student for those that don’t know, she’s a fantastic, fantastic person and writer and director and Janet, you worked so often with her. And Melanie says she saw you in “Solomon and Marion” and that you were superb in it. Melanie says again, “tell us about the restaurant in Rome.”

• I did.

• I think that restaurant’s going to be a hit for a whole lot of people flocking to Rome.

• You’ll never find it. You will never find it, but you can try.

• No, okay. Then Rhonda says, “I like your comment about the importance of understanding what the person is reading. My husband’s a journalist. From time to time he’ll comment that the announcer has no understanding of what she’s reading. You are indeed a beautiful dynamic woman, Janet. Keep safe and well, thank you,” Rhonda from Toronto.

• Thank you, Rhonda.

• Okay, and on that we can end it because there is the end of questions and it just is for me to say, Janet, thank you so much. I agree with what Rhonda and others have said here. You’re a beautiful human being, a brilliant actress and an amazing South African, you know, to celebrate together in these couple of weeks at South Africa that we’ve been looking at. So for myself and everybody, and Pumi and George, everybody as part of the team, thank you.

• Well thank you, David, very much for bearing with me.

• The restaurant in Rome. Okay, cheers everybody, take care.