Published: Mon, May 29th 2006
By: SARAH LYALL
Images Featured in Article: Kevin Spacey in "The Philadelphia Story" at the Old Vic. & Kevin Spacey, playing the title role in "Richard II" at the Old Vic.
LONDON, May 28 — Between the relentless public attention and the sometimes scathing reviews, Kevin Spacey has had a rough year and a half as artistic director at the Old Vic Theater. But nothing was so disastrous as the debacle surrounding "Resurrection Blues," a star-laden production that drew horrendous reviews and closed a week early this spring, just in time for the announcement that the theater would go dark until September.
The news had London's ravening theater critics sputtering into their wine, questioning Mr. Spacey's judgment and even, in the case of Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard, calling for him to resign. But through it all Mr. Spacey has been his usual focused self, asserting his right to learn from his mistakes while announcing an ambitious program for next year that includes plays by Shakespeare and Eugene O'Neill.
"In no way, shape or form am I in any way less than delighted, less than thrilled, to go to work on behalf of the Old Vic Theater," he said in a telephone interview recently, in which he seemed variously philosophical, ebullient, confident and, in his sharp and controlled way, very slightly defensive about the news media.
He added: "I'm not going to make general comments about the British press. This is not a fight. It's not Us against Them. To some degree they're taking advantage of the fact that I'm a well-known actor and using it as a headline in their stories to sell papers. This is what they do."
It was inevitable that Mr. Spacey, 46, a bona fide Hollywood film star in the un-Hollywood world of the London theater, would become a magnet for attention when he took on the Old Vic job. Once the home of the National Theater under Laurence Olivier, the theater was on the verge of closing for good, possibly for conversion into a lap-dancing club, when Mr. Spacey arrived, along with the promise of glamorous productions and big-name casts.
Since then, even when things have gone well, Mr. Spacey has found himself under attack. The first play he put on, the Dutch comedy "Cloaca," drew terrible reviews — The Daily Telegraph and The Times of London pronounced it a "stinker" — and anemic ticket sales. Other productions, like "The Philadelphia Story," were more successful but tended to fare much better with audiences than with critics. Arguing that he wanted to focus on crowd-pleasing productions that would draw people in, Mr. Spacey was then criticized for not sticking to a more classical repertory.
He was also called too bigheaded when, for example, he took off several weeks from "The Philadelphia Story" to film "Superman Returns." (He plays Lex Luthor.) Unflattering stories were spread with glee around town. In 2004, for instance, the newspapers made much of a curious incident in which Mr. Spacey said he had been mugged in a park in Lambeth at 4:30 a.m. while walking his dog. (He later amended the account, saying that in fact he had lent his cellphone to a young man who took it and ran away, causing Mr. Spacey to trip over his dog's leash and hit his head.)
Plans for the next season include O'Neill's "Moon for the Misbegotten," in which Mr. Spacey is to star; "Twelfth Night" and "The Taming of the Shrew," which are to be performed by the all-male Propeller group directed by Edward Hall; and a revival of John Osborne's "Entertainer," which is to star Robert Lindsay. Future performances are to include a revival of Alan Ayckbourn's "Norman Conquests," directed by Matthew Warchus, and, at Christmas 2007, a pantomime version of "Cinderella," to be written by Stephen Fry.
The critics seem mollified, at least in part.
"I feel a certain sympathy for Spacey in that he is trying to square an impossible circle: to create commercially viable product in a theater founded on missionary zeal," Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian. "But, while one can't complain at a season containing O'Neill, Shakespeare and Osborne, one wishes there were a greater sense of creative ferment."
The decision to appoint three associate directors "to help us learn and grow," Mr. Spacey said, should help take some of the pressure off him. The three are Mr. Warchus, who directed "Art" in the West End; Anthony Page, who most recently directed the revival of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" at the Apollo Theater here; and Mr. Hall, son of Peter Hall.
"They're all different ages, and they've all got a lot of experience," Charles Spencer, the Daily Telegraph drama critic, said approvingly in an interview. Until now, he said, "my feeling is that Spacey's big problem is that he hasn't listened to other people." He cited the decision to bring "Resurrection Blues," written by Arthur Miller, directed by Robert Altman and starring Matthew Modine, Maximilian Schell and Neve Campbell, to the theater this spring.
The play had all the promise of a sure thing. But the cast feuded. The actress Jane Adams walked off in the middle of a performance, after a dispute, some said, with Mr. Modine over how hard she pushed him in a scene in the first act. Meanwhile Mr. Altman, 81, appeared to say in an interview that he didn't fully understand the play.
Opening night was an unmitigated disaster; Mr. Spacey said later that "the actors got hit by a set of nerves the like of which I've never seen." The Guardian called the play "clumsily inept"; The Telegraph said it was "a fiasco"; and The Independent pronounced it "bizarrely awful."
It is hard even in the best of times to fill the 1,000 seats in the Old Vic, a curious hybrid between a commercial theater — it gets no subsidy — and a repertory one, in that it sets its schedule months in advance. When "The Philadelphia Story" turned out to be a hit last spring, its run was extended to the end of the summer, and perhaps Mr. Spacey had similar hopes for "Resurrection Blues," which by the end was playing only to half-full houses.
Defending himself on BBC radio afterward, Mr. Spacey compared taking advice on how to run a theater from Mr. de Jongh of The Evening Standard to "taking war strategy from Donald Rumsfeld."
In the telephone interview, Mr. Spacey said that the plan all along had been to hold a truncated season, running from September through June.
"It's very easy for someone to say, 'The theater's dark for five months,' " he said. "But it was already going to be dark for three."
He declared himself to be unperturbed.
"There must be an impression that somehow this stuff bothers me, but they're selling newspapers, and I'm selling theater seats," he said of the news media.
"I'm having the time of my life," he said. "I love the people who work at this place, and the irony is that instead of all this attention having an undermining or a negative effect, it's galvanizing us."
Mr. Spacey reiterated his plan to stay in the job for the next 10 years, doing the occasional film.
"The fact of the matter is that we are getting an enormous amount of attention," he said. "Whether that's positive or not, people are talking about the Old Vic Theater again with passion and commitment and controversy and debate."
Published: Mon 22 May 2006
By: Alistair Smith
Kevin Spacey tells how he is answering his critics with what he insists is a risky new season at the Old Vic, writes Alistair Smith
If Kevin Spacey is feeling under pressure, he is doing a very good job of hiding the fact. Over the last month or so, he and his regime at the Old Vic Theatre have received the kind of press mauling usually reserved for politicians. Critics savaged the undeniable flop that was Resurrection Blues and then, after its premature removal from the Waterloo venue’s stage, it was revealed that there was nothing planned to take its place until September. The Old Vic’s famous auditorium was dark and the critics were baying for blood. Spacey’s blood.
Yet, when I meet him the day after he has announced his new season, Spacey is the picture of relaxation. As I am ushered into his office, he is poised, feet crossed and resting on his desk, cigarette in hand, a disarming smile spread across his distinctive features.
One thing he is not trying to disguise, however, is his obvious frustration at some of the criticism and “inaccurate reporting” that has been levelled at both him and his beloved theatre.
“I think to some degree part of the criticism we have come under is that I don’t think people have an idea of what our artistic ambitions are,” he explains, perhaps optimistically. “Sometimes I don’t think people realise what it takes to organise a schedule - it’s not easy.”
To counteract this perceived problem, Spacey has taken the opportunity to announce not only his plans for next season - A Moon for the Misbegotten, starring himself, The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night directed by Ed Hall, and The Entertainer with Robert Lindsay as Archie Rice - but also a few of his plans for the future.
These include a second collaboration with director Trevor Nunn, following last season’s Richard II, the first major London staging of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests trilogy since the seventies, a pantomime scripted by Stephen Fry and two new plays that are both products of the Old Vic New Voices development programme.
This is not, he insists, a safe, banker of a season. “I don’t think taking on the Norman Conquests is not a risk. It’s three different plays, which means it’s expensive. There are risks, certainly the two new plays are risks. So we’re not playing it safe but we are going along exactly as we had intended to go along. For example, I have known for three years that we were going to do The Entertainer right when we are doing it.”
And yet, despite apparently giving the people, or critics, what they want, it seems he still can’t keep everyone happy. Spacey himself is only performing in one production and not directing any. “It was always my intention to start to do less work [onstage]. Because, first of all, the novelty of my appearing on stage will eventually wear off and second of all, this theatre company cannot survive and live if the entire weight of its success is on my shoulders,” he explains.
“People will argue, ‘Oh, well, the theatre company only works because he was onstage’, but when I announce a huge amount of work with other people onstage, they complain that I am thinning out my role. They keep changing the goalposts.”
Another notable feature of his recent season announcement is the addition of three artistic associates to the Old Vic team - Matthew Warchus, most famous for his work directing West End hit Art, Ed Hall, director of the all-male Propeller company and son of Peter, and Anthony Page, former artistic director of the Royal Court and director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Kathleen Turner. This is not, he explains a call for help or a reaction to criticism.
“I’ve seen things written saying, ‘Oh, they’re now reacting to what we’ve said’,” continues Spacey. “The truth is this has always been our intention but things have to happen naturally. You can’t just wave a magic wand and have subsidy money come down from the sky and have a group of associates.
“When I began, David [Liddiment, the Old Vic producer] and I to some degree were outsiders. We knew that. As we’ve been going along we’ve been developing relationships. I don’t know that anyone would have wanted to come on and be an associate in our first season - they didn’t know what we were, didn’t know what we were about. Now people do and I hope that yesterday’s announcement is a fairly clear indication that the theatre community is supporting us and some incredible talents believe in what we are trying to do and want to come and be a part of that.”
In fact, according to Spacey, despite two box office failures - Cloaca and Resurrection Blues - and an elongated dark period this summer, everything is pretty much going to plan.
“I took a long hard look at what had happened in this theatre before we started and I decided not to begin with the classics, which seems what the critics have been harping on [about], almost, ‘How can you put anything else on that stage?’. It’s [perhaps] a desire for [Laurence] Olivier to come back, which unfortunately for everyone is impossible.
“You have to look at the practicalities of running a commercial theatre and I don’t think I was wrong in assuming that if we had started with Ibsen, Shakespeare, Shaw and Chekhov that we would have appealed to a very narrow audience.”
Another misunderstanding Spacey is fighting hard to dispel is that the Old Vic is the recipient of lashings of public money. It isn’t. The company relies on box office receipts and sponsorship - hence its decision to remove Resurrection Blues early. The show was losing money and the theatre took a commercial decision to close it.
“I think it’s a widespread misconception and I think it’s probably a hold-over from when the National was here that people just identify us as a subsidised theatre. [Equally] we are not a one-off West End theatre house, we are a producing company that does a season of work and when you know that it does in fact change the way that you think about things. We’re not just rolling the dice and hoping that one of our shows makes money, we’re about developing something here that we want to last until well after we’re gone.”
Nor, he is equally keen to stress, is the Old Vic chief executive Sally Greene’s plaything. “I love it how sometimes I read in the paper that Sally Greene owns the Old Vic Theatre,” he continues. “She doesn’t own the Old Vic Theatre, she is the chairman of a trust. It is owned by a charitable trust. And what’s wrong with that is that it leaves the impression that the theatre is her toy and it’s not.”
And yet, one can understand how the misunderstanding arises, certainly over the idea that the Old Vic might be the recipient of government cash. After all, in many ways, it behaves like a subsidised theatre with education, outreach and new writing programmes functioning alongside a cut-price ticket scheme for under 25s. However, the Old Vic’s engagement in “social enterprise”, as Spacey terms it, is often overlooked.
“Some of my favourite days are the workshop days when there are around 1,000 kids running around, charging through the place and developing and learning how to collaborate. I just believe in it because I was a beneficiary of it when I was a kid.
“I went to school in Southern California when there was an enormous amount of government money given to the schools for culture and the arts. I was running round doing workshops with professional actors. I met Jack Lemmon when I was 13 years old. The confidence that this gives a person - I just know that you can have a lot to do with a kid’s self-confidence, with their character building.
“If they get to a place where they are put onstage and put in front of their peers and their teachers and their parents and maybe even the public, it is an experience they will never forget. It’s not about whether they want to go into the arts. It’s about using the tools of theatre and the artists of theatre to teach them how to collaborate with each other.
“The truth is that people can do really remarkable things when they start to think they can accomplish stuff and when they discover that, as far as I’m concerned, they’ve discovered the first secret of success… It’s not that I have great pearls of wisdom but we do have a great education programme.”
Spacey talks with huge fondness of Jack Lemmon, whom he later starred alongside onstage in Long Day’s Journey into Night and on film in Glengarry Glen Ross, and it is clear he is keen to pass on his love of theatre to a younger generation.
“It’s incredible how if somebody takes an interest in you, if somebody says, ‘I think you can do something’, and believes in you way before you’ve even shown any potential, then it just has a hugely far-reaching effect on the rest of your life,” he explains.
His own ambitions of working in theatre have certainly been long held. “The dream of running a theatre for me started when I was 13,” he continues. “I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and my best friend lived on a ranch that was built by Roy Rogers, the old cowboy star. We dreamed of building a theatre there. We were going to do Shakespeare and new plays and we were going to broaden the world, challenge ourselves. I still have the napkins where we drew up the designs of the amphitheatre.
“I was a kid in junior high school and high school doing theatre. I was directing a one-act play in the speech club, doing a monologue for the Shakespeare festival, playing a leading role in one of the school plays, doing the radio show in the morning. I was multi-tasking even then.”
After high school and a short spell as a comic, Spacey trained at Juilliard in New York but quit before the end of his course and joined the New York Shakespeare Festival. A successful stage career in New York followed, culminating in a 1991 Tony Award for his performance in Lost in Yonkers. Meanwhile his screen work was also taking off. It was in the mid to late nineties that he really began to come to the world’s attention with a series of film successes and a pair of Oscars for The Usual Suspects and later American Beauty.
Then, at the height of his Hollywood fame, the actor decided he might like to try his hand as an artistic director. “I didn’t really like the hot spotlight of it all and I really missed theatre,” he explains. “I missed it as a consistent part of my life. Theatre was never a stepping stone to movies for me, it is as important and viable form of expression as movies are.
“The process of making movies, while fun, is not particularly hard work and the truth is you’re lucky on an entire 12 or 13-hour day if you end up with eight minutes of film, so it’s just a slogging, different process. The other truth of it is you are guessing a lot. You hope you’ve got a good director but the truth is you don’t have five or six weeks of experimentation and that’s what the process of doing a play is like.
“You get to come in every day and experiment and then you get a chance to get up every night and work on a different part of your game. I just happen to love the thrill of that - the high-wire act of it and the ritual of it. I love the ritual of coming into the theatre every night and working with the same people, creating a family, because everyone’s up for it.”
The difference for him now, he adds, is that he is fitting his film work around his time on stage, rather than the other way round. So, while he will soon be on screen as Lex Luthor in Superman Returns, his screen work has had to adapt around his day job at the Old Vic.
“I’m happier than I’ve ever been, I’ve a very normal life. I don’t feel that I’m in a place where there’s all this pressure about whether your movie is doing well and is it getting good reviews. I’m here trying to build something that is bigger than me and I want to have last long, long, long after I’m gone.”
Now moving into his third season at the Old Vic, Spacey is less than a third into what will be a ten-year stay and, he assures me, absolutely no longer. The Vic will need “new blood” by then, he points out - and there is still much to be done.
To start with, there is a £25 million refurbishment to overhaul the venue, without which “there is no telling if the building will survive 50 years from now, because the damp will kill it” and the small question of returning repertory and ensemble theatre to the Vic, both of which are long-term visions for the team.
“We’re slightly starting [repertory] with Ed Hall with Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew and there’s no doubt that when Norman Conquests happens that’s exactly what we’ll do. It’s three plays, we’ll put up one at a time and then run them in rep, which is how they did it originally.”
A resident company might take a little longer though, although Spacey is hopeful of having something in place around the halfway mark of his tenure. “I think a company happens organically, so maybe after season four or five we’ll know who our company is,” he says. “We’ll know the actors who had an incredible time and want to come back. And then you sit down with four or five directors and you say, now I want to cross-cast a season with this company and do some rep.”
Spacey still has ambitions of his own of course, as an actor. Richard II was only his first leading Shakespearean role and there are still some big parts out there he is looking to wrestle with. “Iago, Richard III. I’d love to do some Shaw, I’d love to do some Ibsen and Moliere. There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to tackle but at the same time I have to be quite smart about the parts I take and the parts I want other actors to take.”
He is also keen to introduce more international work to the Old Vic and extend the company’s reach beyond the boundaries of its historical home near Waterloo.
“What interests me is not just being able to develop the work here on the South Bank and having that theatre filled but also to be able to start to do some of the new work that we’ll see but think it’s not right for the Vic, let’s take it to the Criterion. Let’s present Old Vic work in other places. We don’t have the luxury of three or more theatres - we have one space and we to run our shows a certain length in order to be able to recoup.
“In some cases, we’re looking at other spaces where we might well want to take something, so that we can have a show running here but we can also have a show running somewhere else.”
Speaking of running somewhere else, our time is up and Spacey has to leave. He swings his feet off the table, puts out his umpteenth cigarette and reaches for his baseball cap. He is off to his next appointment - multi-tasking, as ever.
Published by: Algonquin Books
Publish Date: May 2006
I first met Mr. Lemmon when I was thirteen years of age. My drama class from junior high school took a trip to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to see a performance of "Juno and the Paycock" starring Walter Matthau, Maureen Stapleton, and Jack Lemmon. I remember vividly the workshop we all attended with the cat prior to the play, and the generous words of encouragement that all three actors gave to our group. When the session ended, I walked up to Mr. Lemmon and asked him to sign an 8"x10" picture of him that I had brought with me. While he was giving me his autograph, I asked him what advice he had for a young actor. He looked me directly in the eye and said that if I was serious about wanting a career, I should consider going to New York to study theater.
Six years later I took his advice and attended the Juilliard School of Drama in Manhattan. A few years after that I auditioned to play Mr. Lemmon's alcoholic son in the classic Eugene O'Neill play "Long Day's Journey into Night." That audition was a major turning point in my career, but even more important was the effect it had on my life.
For the audition, I prepared several scenes from the play, and Mr. Lemmon was there to perform with the actors trying out. I got to play about four scenes with him, and it was a truly remarkable experience. I recall I was somewhat relentless with my attack on the role and really gave it to Mr. Lemmon with both barrels blazing. At the end of the reading, he walked up to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said, "I never thought I'd find the rotten kid, but you're it. Jesus Christ, what the hell was that?"
I won the role, and opened a chapter in my life, headed in a direction that I've endeavored to follow throughout my career. My guide was, and remains, Mr. Lemmon. He became my mentor, and while I eventually did start calling him Jack, somehow referring to him as Mr. Lemmon in this foreword allows me to offer him the nod of deep respect that I believe he deserves.
Observing him day after day in that yearlong production--through rehearsals, dinners, lunches, events, late nights, early mornings, flights, car trips, piano playing, golfing, dog walking, and everything in between--as we moved from Durham, North Carolina, to Washington, D.C., to New York, to London, to Israel, and finally to Toronto, was the greatest lesson of professional humility that a young actor could hope to receive. My memories of Mr. Lemmon are vibrant and indelible, and his wisdom and words of guidance continue to inspire me to this day. He was a man who anyone could be enormously proud to know, and most especially anyone who has ever called himself an actor. He was a credit to his profession because he was a person whose humanity was bigger than his talent. And when you think for a moment about the size and depth of that talent, then you begin to understand how seriously he took his role as a human being. He was generous, committed, loyal, trusting, compassionate, and one of the funniest people you would ever be likely to meet. But he not only enjoyed making others laugh, he loved to laugh himself, and did so continuously throughout the years I worked with him (in three other films).
If you ask me what I learned in his presence, the answers come tumbling out. Most important, I learned about behavior, for he exemplified the way you should treat the people around you--always making sure your coworkers feel important and confident, and are having an enjoyable experience. I realize that being an actor--in Mr. Lemmon's case, not just an actor, but also a major film star--elevates you into a position of responsibility because everyone around you looks to you as a leader. Playing a major character in a film or the stage production puts an actor at the center of the experience, and the likeability and relatability of the actor can have an enormous effect in creating a pleasurable atmosphere for everyone involved, most especially the audience. I've seen actors playing major parts who do not achieve this level of likeability, and the work suffers. I've seen some examples of bad behavior by stars that would light you hair on fire. Mr. Lemmon would only light you heart, and, of course, tap your funny bone.
He always knew the right thing to say, and was concerned if someone was having a bad day. If he discovered that a member of the cast or crew was confronting a difficult personal problem, he would always take the time to give that person a little wave, or his patented cheeky smile, in hopes that he might brighten their outlook. Sometimes he'd sidle over and tell a joke, just to ease the tension. That kind of effort did not go unnoticed or unappreciated. Talk to anyone who had the pleasure of working with Jack Lemmon, and you will hear story after story of what a wonderful person he was. He concerned himself with others and was the true captain of every ship he sailed, no matter who was actually at the helm. He never allowed all the Hollywood glory he obtained to diminish his inner spirit, and it was that spirit that also made him a fine artist. He often said that he didn't think a great actor could be stupid. I'm sure one could argue that there are some great actors who, while not necessarily stupid, certainly can act stupidly, but Mr. Lemmon's belief was based on the idea that if an actor can reach into himself to understand human nature and portray it with accuracy, how could he fail to lead with that positive outlook in his everyday life as well?
Mr. Lemmon used to begin each take on a film set with the words, "It's magic time." I heard this little phrase, which he would say under his breath, just before the slate was clapped to begin a scene, and I came to realize that it was much more than the simple calling of an artist to his muse--it was his calling to life itself. With Mr. Lemmon, the entire journey was a magic time, and I am sure that this book will give all of us who loved and admired him a bigger window into that heart that beat so warmly. I still have that photograph that he signed when I was young, and I treasure the inscription: "With my very best wishes always." With Mr. Lemmon, "always" meant "always," and on couldn't have wished for anything better , for he was true to his word and always at his best.
Kevin Spacey