Poking fun at the pundits

Celebrated American actor, director and playwright Nagle Jackson visited Luxembourg this week to see one of his plays, Opera Comique, being performed for the first time in 20 years.

The 75-year-old, who still keeps a hand in the theatre talked to wort.lu/en about Opera Comique's renaissance and how he became the first US director to be invited to the Soviet Union.

Opera Comique was written around 1985 and is now being performed in Luxembourg by BGT. How does it feel to have it staged 20 years on?

It's interesting for me as I've not seen this play in 20 years. I directed the first two major productions in San Francisco and Washington DC with a lot of well known people. That was 20 years ago.

It's been done here and there and it's about to be done in Istanbul at the State Theatre there. It's as if suddenly the play has been rediscovered. I'm pleased that people are getting interested in this play again.

Why the renaissance for this work do you think and how is it still relevant to today's audiences?

I think it's a subject matter which is timeless. The public perception of the artist and what goes on or rather the lack of a public perception. It's the way the way an audience takes an artistic work, whether it be theatre, dance, visual arts, and tends to take it for granted, that is relevant.

They are very quick to criticise. If something is bizarre it must be wrong. I'm often amazed when I see audiences in the lobby of a theatre in which they've seen something marvelous and all they are talking about is what they had at lunch!

Where did the idea for this play come from?

I was so moved when I read a biography about Bizet years ago in San Francisco. I was so moved by the fact that he died 30 days after Carmen opened, convinced it was a failure.

It's probably the most popular opera in the world. The French in Paris just weren't ready for it. It was just too bizarre that the leading lady would be murdered onstage. Those things just weren't done. Rather than listen to the beautiful music, they complained on moral grounds.

Some of your plays are set in France and you spend a lot of time in Paris. Why the French appeal?

My father was an English professor and he took a sabbatical year off to take the family to France when I was a boy. It was the 1950s when you could live so cheaply in Europe. I went to the American School and started going to the theatre a lot. I saw a lot of things, I had no idea how important they were until later.

I saw Marcel Marceau in his first shows in Paris in a studio in Champs Elysees. I was so impressed I went back after university and studied mime there. Now I travel abroad once a year and come to Paris for a month every November. I really just come to go to the theatre and opera which I dearly love.

What pushed you to pursue a career in theatre?

My parents started the little community theatre in the small town where I grew up. As a kid I would be doing my homework in the back row of the hall while my father directed and my mum painted the set. I never thought I would do anything other than theatre.

What projects are you working on now?

I don't have a project right now but I just saw a wonderful play in Paris I want to translate. I love translating and adapting, it keeps your mind going when you don't have an original play in you.

Is it true you were the first American to be invited to direct a play in Soviet Russia?

Yes. It was in 1988 and I was running the McCarter Theatre, a professional theatre in Princetown University campus. I started inviting foreign directors. They would come over from Norway, Russia and Greece. The Russians returned the favour and asked me to come over to the Bolshoi dramatic Theatre in what was then Leningrad and today St Petersburg.

I directed Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie. It remained in their repertoire for 20 years. I went back last year. It was so wonderful, I hadn't seen it since it opened.

The thing is not much was made of it at all. I went there a couple of months before rehearsals were due to begin to sign a contract. When I signed it the head of the theatre said there should have been fireworks because I was the first person to sign a private contract in the Soviet Union.