John Bell, who plays the gloomy Jacques in “As You Like It”… “I don’t have to work my socks off and I don’t have to lead the charge as I have so often done, so I’m having quite a good time.”
“All the world’s a stage,” sometimes called “The Seven Ages of Man”, pronounced by the gloomy Jacques in “As You Like It” may be marginally less celebrated than “To be or not to be”, but only just. And it’s the only Shakespearean role John Bell can think of where the character is known just for one speech.
Had it not been for an unfortunate night in Moonee Ponds eight years ago, when he had to stand in as Jacques when an actor fell ill, we could have said that he was exiting Bell Shakespeare in a role he’s never played before.
Bell exemplifies the principle that “one man in his time plays many parts”, but it certainly is the first time he’s actually studied the role of the melancholic courtier who, whether living in the forest of art or the big city, just doesn’t want to fit in.
Melancholic? Yes, it’s that Elizabethan pop psychological concept that saw all human personalities divided into the so-called “four humours” – a bit like modern day astrology – and the “humour” everybody loves to hate is the melancholic man, the grump, the misanthrope.
“Because the role is so small, I’ve had to invent a lot of what sort of a person Jacques would be,” Bell tells me. “So I’ve combined a number of grumps… Patrick White is one of them and a now-deceased theatre critic and people from academia I won’t mention because they’re still alive… I put them all together and I found Jacques.”
Bell is pretty sure that Shakespeare was doing exactly the same thing, having a go at fellow playwrights John Marston and Ben Jonson, both savage public moralists with dubious private lives.
“You yourself have been a libertine,” the Duke tells Jacques in “As You Like It” – and as Bell observes: “There’s nothing worse than a reformed libertine”.
The play, of course, is a comedy, with the other characters romping around the Forest of Arden cross-dressing, falling in and out of love and generally misbehaving themselves.
“Jacques is a parody of the Hamlet type, one of those people who likes to look grave, serious and dour, but the melancholic personality is a fairly widespread concept, a mixture of bitterness and sadness and anger, it has various shades,” says Bell.
It’s quite a meaty role for an actor and that’s surprising, when you consider how small the part is, says Bell: “I spend most of the time sitting backstage, I don’t have to work my socks off and I don’t have to lead the charge as I have so often done, so I’m having quite a good time”.
Better still, with a lot of wryly amusing one-liners, he gets to “add a squeeze of lemon to all the sweetness and light”.
I point out to Bell that in the program notes for Peter Evans’ “kind of ‘50s retro-setting” production that we’ll see at The Playhouse soon, the plot description entirely omits any mention of Jacques. Fair enough, he says, “it’s Rosalind [played by Zahra Newman] who dominates the action and carries the show, but his pithy speeches are a corrective”.
As for Bell’s future plans, once he has pronounced the words:
Last scene of all
That ends this strange eventful history
and let go the reins of Bell Shakespeare, he won’t be sitting by the fireside.
He’s contracted to do a play at Belvoir before Christmas and he’ll be staging a new “Carmen” for Opera Australia next year.
“I’ll do less, but I’ll do some cherry picking,” he says.
“As You Like It”, The Playhouse, April 7-18, bookings to canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.
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