Even in grief, the show goes on for Lynn Redgrave
NEW YORK—On the day his mother died, the celebrated actor Sir Michael Redgrave had a matinee and an evening performance to give as Hamlet. Backstage at the theater, he sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Then he went out front. “And he did two of the greatest
Hamlets he ever played.” Lynn Redgrave relates this
tale about her father as a way of explaining the family’s indomitable work ethic. Theater to the Redgraves is what politics is to the Kennedys: family business, family birthright, family shelter. The stage entered the bloodstream of the Redgraves circa 1824 with the birth of Lynn’s great-great- grandfather Cornelius Redgrave, who would become a pub owner and theater ticket agent. Like a hereditary virus, it has tenaciously spread through every generation since.
Grasping this genetic predisposition is helpful in understanding why, at this awful moment in Redgrave history, the award-winning actress nevertheless plans to open “Rachel and Juliet,” her one-woman memory play about her actress mother, Friday in Washington. With the ache still throbbing from the death of her niece Natasha Richardson in a skiing accident, no one would have uttered as much as a mild groan if she had canceled the weekend of performances to nurse her grief in private.
That, however, is not the Redgrave way. “Natasha would have been appalled if I didn’t do this,” Redgrave, 66, says by phone from her home in Connecticut. “If I could talk to Natasha, she would say, ‘What’s the matter with you?’
“I can’t speak for others in other professions,” she adds, “but very often work is an enormous solace, just keeping to the routine, showing up at work. For those of us in the theater, it’s like almost a no-brainer. Because what we do has so much to do with conjuring spirits.”
Redgrave was not ready to disclose much of what was in her heart after the death of Richardson, the actress daughter of her older sister, Vanessa. But she was willing to discuss how the sad event might affect what she brought to the stage.
Because she fully intended to keep her appointment with the stage.
“Rachel and Juliet” is the latest in what has turned into a cycle of solo shows about her acting family. The first, “Shakespeare for My Father,” was a poignant and painful account of her relationship with her indifferent father, Sir Michael, who had so little time for her as a child that her birth did not even warrant a notation in his diary. In December 1991, that play got its start in Washington and eventually went to Broadway, where amid mixed-to- positive reviews it ran for nine months and 266 performances.
“Shakespeare for My Father” was a reaching-out to a parent by a daughter who was never sure whether she meant as much to him as the theater did. Although she’d had a successful film and stage career, earning an Oscar nomination for her first title role, in “Georgy Girl,” part of her always wondered what precinct of his consciousness she occupied.
So the production turned out to be both psychotherapy and occupational therapy. Developed in response to an out-of- the-blue inquiry from Janet Griffin at Washington’s Folger Theater, about whether she’d be interested in coming to Washington and offering theatrical reminiscences, the event was originally called simply “An Evening With Lynn Redgrave.”
“Her career wasn’t very active at the time,” recalls Griffin, director of Folger’s public programs. “She was finding herself in a bit of a lull and she thought, ‘Why the heck not?’ ”
Unbeknown to Griffin, Redgrave was home in Los Angeles, where she lived with her then-husband, John Clark, creating out of even his earshot a much more ambitious piece.
“I began improvising in my living room,” Redgrave remembers. “I just got up every day and started. I was totally haunted by it — it was almost an obsession. The need to hunt for a resolution to my relationship with my father. Did he even know I was there?”
Her rummaging publicly in the family attic was not welcome for her kin. Owing in major part to her father’s bisexuality, home had not exactly been filled with ebullient memories. “They had a long marriage, but they had a difficult marriage,” Redgrave says. “The difficulty took over and did shut her out.”
Neither Vanessa nor her mother attended “Shakespeare for My Father” until six months into the Broadway run. But then, Redgrave recalls, her sister— with whom Redgrave had had her ups and downs — told her, “You gave me a window into your soul and also gave me a window into Dad’s.”
There had been no void between Redgrave and her mother, Rachel Kempson, who died in 2003 at 92. “I was very, very close to my mother,” Redgrave says. “I was the beloved third baby.” (Her elder brother, Corin, works as an actor chiefly in Britain.) From Redgrave’s description, the play sounds as if it is a tribute to a gifted actress who did not achieve as much as she might have.
Kempson made a famous debut in the 1930s in “Romeo and Juliet” in Stratford-upon- Avon, England, and worked as an actress all her life.
Redgrave describes her mother as a funny and perceptive woman, afflicted with self-doubt. “She suffered from her lack of security, making room for my father’s career,” she says. “Rachel and Juliet,” then, is “a love letter” to Kempson, who retained an attachment to Juliet into her golden years: At 90, she recited a speech of Juliet’s at the wedding of one of Redgrave’s three children.
When Kempson died in May 2003, Redgrave was working off-Broadway in a production of Alan Bennett’s “Talking Heads.” She took off the matinee. But she was back the next day.
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