DEREK JACOBI AUDITIONS FOR NIDA

Recently the ham British actor, Sir Derek Jacobi, auditioned for NIDA, the premier Australian acting institution. The audition was archived  and reproduced, unedited, below.

NIDA: Next...name? Holy shit...it's...

DEREK: Derek Jacobi

NIDA: ..Mr Jacobi..

DEREK : No need for formality. You may call me Sir Derek.

NIDA: Sir Derek, I'm a fan, but aren't you a little old for this?

DEREK: Whatever do you mean?

NIDA: Only that you may feel uncomfortable working with young actors decades younger than yourself...

DEREK: Not at all...quite the contrary...I'm very comfortable working with actors decades younger than myself.

NIDA: I see..and what will you be performing for us today?

DEREK: I beg your pardon?

NIDA: Your audition.

DEREK: Audition??Audition??! I am Sir Derek Jacobi, RADA graduate cum laude, knighted for services to the theatrical Arts, my credits include Men of straw, The Borgias and Anonymous. My Queer Lear was a cause celebre in Shaftsbury Avenue, my Camp Richard a triumph. Surely my admittance to your establishment is a formality. A fait accompli.

NIDA: Well I'm afraid not Sir Derek. You're going to have to audition...just like everyone else.

DEREK: You do know I was Pope Pius the tenth?

NIDA: Yes I do.

DEREK: Time does not weary me nor custom stale my infinite variety...

NIDA: Is that part of your Shakespeare today?

DEREK: Shakespeare?? Who? Oh.. you mean the Earl of Oxford .

NIDA: Whoever, whatever...begin. With whatever you have ready.

DEREK: Well , I suppose, I could summon up some Hamlet...

NIDA: Splendid Sir Derek. Which character?

DEREK: How dare you, you Ocker Orangantang ! Hamlet himself of course.

NIDA: Don't you think..ah.. Polonius more suitable, for example?

DEREK: Listen to me you colonial clot - it was I who created Prosperina, the Al Queda McBeth...and the menopausal Ophelia. Shakespeare is not just for all ages, he is for all ages.

NIDA: So it's Hamlet the pensioner...brilliant concept. Let's have it.

DEREK: Do you want a soliloquy or an exchange?

NIDA: Soliloquy.

DEREK: High or low diction?

NIDA: er...High.

DEREK: Prose or Iambic pentameter?

NIDA: Prose.

DEREK: OP or MP?

NIDA: Modern pronunciation will be fine today.

DEREK: Would you prefer the Keene version, or Laurence Olivier, ? Richard Burton or Richard Harris, Ralph Richardson, Ronnie Corbet, Ronnie Barker or someone beginning with ...S?

Anthony Hopkins' leering lurching Hamlet that flouted convention, the old tote Oliver Reed performance in which he famously peed on the entire front row or would you prefer my own subtly nuanced Hamlet as praised by Time Out, 1959?

NIDA: Peed on the front row? We have incontinence pads for that these days, Sir Derek.

DEREK: How dare you! The impertinence!

NIDA: I dare because I care. Can we get on with it?

DEREK: Which interpretation do you prefer?

NIDA: Interpretation?

DEREK: Do you want the existential nihilist Hamlet, the Freudian Hamlet, the Anarchic Hamlet, the Imperialist Hamlet, the sexist Hamlet, the racist Hamlet, the Che Geuvera Hamlet, the Stalinist Hamlet, the Maoist Hamlet, the sensitive New age Hamlet , the Ham Hamlet, the Jon Ham Hamlet, the flouncing fop Hamlet, or the east end lout Hamlet, my specialty... 'oi didn't you kill my farver?'

NIDA: Are you fucking with my mind Sir Derek?

DEREK: I'm trying but you're not giving me much to work with!

NIDA: Can you in fact remember any Hamlet at all?

DEREK: Period or modern dress?

NIDA: Does it matter?

DEREK: It's part of my process.

NIDA: Modern.

DEREK: Modern it is. Which act?

NIDA: Any act.

DEREK: Good Lord! What kind of acting school is this? Any act? Direct me, you Antipodean upstart!

NIDA: Very well. Hamlet's Advice to the players.

DEREK: Excellent choice. Meee meee moi moi moi maa maaa.

NIDA: Excuse me Sir Derek, you're meant to do your warm up exercises before the audition.

DEREK: No, no no this is part of my process. Warming up is the first thing Hamlet would be advising the players to do.

NIDA: I see, Go ahead....

DEREK: meeee maaaa moi moi moi..Sprechen sie sprach, ich lectern zos..

NIDA: No No No stop....Sir Derek...what are you doing?

DEREK: Authenticity. Process. Research. Something you strines just don't get. Of course Hamlet would be speaking Danish. At first..then I turn around, and it comes out English. I got it from Tom Cruise - a fine actor by the way, belittled and maligned by the Australian owned gutter press.

NIDA: Fine, fine, just leave out the turning around bit and lead us straight into the piece.

DEREK: Indulge me. It's part of my process. Mee maaa...Sprechen sie sprach, ich lectern zos

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you...(pause) line!

NIDA: Oh fuck...'trippingly, on the tongue..'

DEREK: Not that line , you muttering mongoose. The other kind of line.

NIDA: We're not in the habit of giving lines to auditionees, Sir Derek.

DEREK: What kind of establishment do you run here? Oh mediocrity, another triumph!

OH Chaos, another masterpiece!

NIDA: We teach method acting here. Sir Derek, not meth head acting.

DEREK: How dare you! What impudence! It was I who was the first to see Richard the third for what he was. A camp matryr to the enemies of gaydom. It was I who played Sir Francis Bacon as kosher, I was the first to portray Macbeth as Obama. Oh come on just a little toot!

A toot for each player and one for the tote as we used to say.

NIDA: But why, Sir Derek? You are the peer of Alec Guiness, Peter Finch, Patrick Stewart..do you really need it?

DEREK: Oh reason not the need! Our basest beggar is in the poorest thing superfluous. Argue not more than what nature needs, Man's life is cheap as beasts!

NIDA: Is anything wrong, Derek? Do you want to compose yourself for a second?

DEREK: Oh you know don't you? I can tell. Let's hang it out then. All the dirty linen. All right, it's true,

I was in the urinal with a young man but it was not a public lavatory, as the gutter press would claim, it was the MCA building. Secondly, he was not a rent boy, he was an aspiring prompter. On reflection, in my defence, I made a small error in mistaking his penis for my own. It was easy to do!

I was tired after hours of arduous rehearsals for my Lear, for which the reviews were luke warm, as the magistrate observed, he has suffered enough. Ripping chap. Fellow Etonian, blade on the feather... as we row row row...

NIDA: Sir Derek, Sir Derek, please...that is not your problem..

DEREK: What is it then? Is it that incident at Covent garden, utterly distorted by the Murdoch gutter tabloids? People forget it was not I shaving Peter O'toole's front bum, it was Mckellen, it was him, the old poof - why don't they persecute him... is it because he was Gandalph ...? and anyway it was for a bet. All in rollicking good fun. My only role in the entire affair was to lift up his testicles. Supporting O'Toole's old tool you might say. Are you a homophobe Sir? I'm required to ask.

For Gods sake I just want to act!!!

NIDA: Sir Derek?

DEREK: Yes...?

NIDA: We'll let you know.

SVEN THE POET : AN OFFENDERING OF  HAITKU:

The Haitku requirements:

1. Composed whilst drunk (in one's cups) and preferably on FB.

2. Nine lines because that gives one enough rope to hang oneself,yet no time for considered nuanced self - reflexive thought.

3. It must be written out of a deep sense of personal failure...a sense of irrational bad faith should prevail.

4.Rhyme scheme should be tortured ottavo rima...a kind of hurried stumbling visceral clumsy blurting - the kind of thing that happens when emotion masters reason.

5.It must have a specific target. No abstractions here. No compassion or rationality should mar its purity.

6. Carried on a wave of contempt, the previous rules may all be violated leaving proper nouns in lower case for rapid dispersion of  credence as rambling scattered irrational projected self-loathing takes over.

7.Properly written, a Haitku will acutely embarrass on sober reading.

Examples:

Gweneth paltrow shall I compare thee to cate blanchett?

Thou art less lovely, and ya can't act for shit

If votes were dollars why then they rained on you that night you stole the Oscar from our Kate.

Kiera Knightly I abhor you

Your beauty your thiness a testament to vacuity

If only you could Dance like a dervish or be an envoy to united nations

I might loath you less but

You move from film to film always cast as slim alabaster English beauty

But in reality you are an evil brujeria bitch feeding teenage girls with false unreal dreams

Of thiness and beauty and the virtues of self starvation. Your smile.

Your body. Sigils of sinister simpering superiority.

You move thru life as easily as a vinewrap dipped in olive oil down

the gullet of a yemini refugee.

Die Kiera Knightly die.

Les Murray you are fat

You crawled out of the pig trough and gobbled up all the limited poetry funding.

I haven't read much of your stuff except lunch counter lunch

Because at least its a subject you know something about -eating.

Oh death where is thy sting? Oh massive coronary where is thy victim?

Les Murray just gets fatter and his reputation relies on prolific output and jaundiced right wing views and the old boy lit crit crew he feeds looking for the truffles of an apt phrase. They look in vain.

Aw les get a lapbanding ya prick, so my lean verses can get a look in.

Murramar, why didn't you just fuck off to Switzerland like marcos or pinochet when your time came?

We know you were a great pan African humanitarian but the axis powers wanted you out because of the power shift in the middle east and they needed to back another proxy revolution.

Murramar, you vain sausage, we don't believe what they say in the press about you but you should have seen the writing on the wall,

Mene mene tekel uparsin

You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

The best thing about you is that the Israeli psy trance band infected mushroom named a tune after you. Die gaddafi die, whoops you already did....

Denzel Washington you r black But what of that? Good thing the year u won the Oscar was black year.

Chris Wallace Crabbe you are a literary prostitute.

You sell phony lit crits to the vanity press for arts council kickbacks.

I saw you on the east coburg tram one winter,a knitted cravat draped around your wrinkled old neck in conference with a defrocked priest writing his memoirs of a kiddie fiddler.

You and peter steele scuttled to the other end of the tram as I looked at you as if you knew I was a true poet not a self deluded patron of blackpepper publications.

Then I recalled how your son fell off a ladder and lost the power of

Speech and I thought you had perhaps decided that words were borrowed and that judgement was gods so you may as well hire them both out.

Salman rushdie you are ugly, Salmon Rushdie you are ulgy, midnight's children was the best thing you did and that was crap Your agent sent a translation of satanic verses to a crazy imam in Kabul He engineered the fatwah so you could be famous without writing anything because you suck at words but you excel at running away. Salman you don't deserve the Booker or your beauteous companions Far lovelier than any I could pull especially the Punjabi babes. You prick you even went it with white chicks. Sal you look like a well read pugnacious salamander. You r ugly and you r a shit writer. I should have won the Booker that year and I'm better looking than you.

Here is one from my old pal Mel Gibson...

God you r a bastard I did what u asked and made a snuff movie about yr sons passion but still you made me old and ugly fuck i want to kill that bitch okshana an....

SVEN THE POET

The Name is Sven. Noaught many people can say this – oh they can say it, it just won’t be true…but I am Finland's greatest living poet, now that Parvo's gone. He died in a meteorite shower watching the aurora borealis , singing a poem of mine he claimed for himself, tragically. And you may say..you are Finland’s greatest poet – so what, you pimped up Thor Heyadayl, do not get between me and my beer, you queer.

But I can tell you that with my lines I have brought middle aged men to their knees begging their wives and mistresses for forgiveness. With my lines young women have come to know their first full body orgasm, with my lines, I caused Obamba to withdraw troops from Syria. With my lines I have transfigured spider webs into dream catchers and shone the light of my mind into the dark and hidden places of Man and even there and even so redeemed them..with my lines. With my lines I have caused other less exalted poets to weep with shame that they themselves had not uncovered such simple beauties, as I have with my lines.

 "...for what if, my darlings, I could show you that all this while.... you were in fact conducting regal camisoled lives, wandering through tryptamine Palaces, making love to one another in alcoves of pure onyx and sapphire, the throne of God your bedpost…"

SO, hear O Brunswick , now, the lines of Sven the poet. I am required first to warn you that you may be seized with a uncontrollable sobbing which is inevitable when shown the true Majesty of your beings, and what you have been doing all these aeons, how far you’ve fallen and how lost you’ve become in all your doings ….for what if, my darlings, I could show you that all this while, when you thought you were leading shitty lies in shitty rooms, lashed by lust, envy, derision - stumbling from life to life like an out of work supporting actor. listening to shitty poems, that all this time, as I said, you were in fact conducting regal camisoled lives, wandering through Tryptamine Palaces, making love to one another in alcoves of pure onyx and sapphire, the throne of God your bedpost….yes, you know what I’m talking about, But be careful…although Sven the poet he sings your dreams, as easily as he put you there, he can leave you there…forever..heheheh, and sooner or later, you will want your shitty lies back, because Heaven is not enough for you lot. You want Hell as well. You will burn sacrificial fires for my return. But don’t worry, as I vibrate the Old Norse lines … by the time I have finished, you will have relived a 1000 lives over a 100 centuries…you will have been Buddha, Mohammad, Christ and Shakespeare…you will have presided over civilizations and raised monuments to yourselves which in their turn interred to tombs …and by my last word, tired from hunting  the shadows of all your  doings , all you will want is peace, and Sven the poet will give it, he whose songs are sung by all of Asgard . 

 "I look favorably on those who have a PhD in me..."

At first you will hear something like a susurrus or sirocco or wind whispering come with me now do not be afraid, it is the way out of Ragnarok, go towards the light and do not look back. There will be sobbing and weeping and gnashing of teeth but this is normal, it is your old self grieving for itself, for it’s death… sob and weep and pour out your grief as a libation for me, and womenfolk, let them, do not judge, guys – do not hold back. Also,while your men are quietly weeping.. some of you ladies , usually the younger and fairer of you out of gratitude if nothing else, will want to spend the night with Sven the poet. This is unlikely but possible. You can pass up your resumes after the reading…I look favorably on those who have a PhD in me, or failing that, a degree in fellatio from the Sorbonne…. I will start in 3, 2 1…..

THE  CORMORANT FISHERMAN

 

"...Bruce Thomas, the owner of the ravaged face, was facing charges of importation of a controlled substance. But it was complicated because it was under the analogue act, which was also known as the ‘party-pooper’ act – it strove to retrospectively ban anything that could remotely be deemed useful in synthesizing anything that was remotely designed to give anyone the briefest buzz. It was part of the war on consciousness. Bruce was facing life for the attempted importation of alpha PVP, (flacca) an analogue of methcathinone, an analogue of methamphetamine.

“What about you, pal?”

“This is Nguyen. He doesn’t talk about his charges.”

Bruce was a sapper during the Tet offensive. He saw men on fire running out of tunnels. He saw children, flesh hanging off them, writhing – the victims of bomblets that produced thousands of organ-penetrating shards. He saw Vietnamese girls hauled over fences at Thai refugee camps, traded for food. Nguyen was his penance, protecting him from prying questions. I looked at Nguyen and grinned. He grinned back like a schoolboy given an elephant stamp.

“My grandfather was a cormorant fisherman.”

“Really? Cool.”

“On the Mekong. Before the Chinese poisoned it.”

“You used the bird to catch fish?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it just swallow it?’

“Normally. Cormorant is all-devouring. The ancients call it sea-raven. But a ribbon is tied around its neck, so it can swallow small fish but not the bigger ones.”

He mimed all this, somewhat unnecessarily. I let him talk on.

“My grandfather, tho’, - he was not an ordinary cormorant fisherman – he trained his bird without the throat-snare.”

“How did he do that?”

“His cooking. Pork belly sauce, palm sugar lightly roasted and poured on Gahcon – butterfish – delicious. His pet bird, he called Gwen, got a taste for his cooking.

“I see. I didn’t realise birds had taste buds like that.”

“Oh – his birds, he choose from the egg. He loved his birds. If any swallowed a fish tho – he would have to kill it.”

“Why?”

“That bird was wild that remembered it didn’t need the cormorant fisherman. One night, halfway through the seventh moon after the spawn, he took my brother and me out on the river. We had our own birds we had tamed. It was so still – the lanterns alight on long Tonkin bamboo poles swayed to attract the fish. Can you imagine? 15 boats, their lanterns swaying, all afire, over the water on long Tonkin bamboo poles, the birds swooping into the water, bringing the fish to their masters. There are more serene things, and more noble; but not much nobler and not much more serene. My brother’s cormorant still had its throat snare, but mine didn’t – mine was hooked on grandfather’s Gahcon recipe and so she was swifter, much swifter….”

He did the motions and made the sounds.

“My brother was very jealous – his bird must not have liked the way he cooked the butterfish….”

“Yeah – those cormorants are harsh judges. Saw one on MasterChef….”

I chuckled but he went straight on….

“My grandfather was the last true cormorant fisherman on the Mekong. The Chinese dammed up-river and started pouring their poisons into it. The bird’s feathers got oily and they got….cranky. One night, we were fishing with Gwen. As usual, my cormorant spat out more fish than my brother’s did. But then – I think my bird must have seen some cranes against the moon, mating – tapping each other’s beaks, and she…she swallowed a small fish she had in her throat.”

Nguyen’s high voice, almost effeminate, quavered a little and I didn’t think he could continue, but he mimed the swallowing and continued…

“Straight away my brother saw this and he slit open my bird to release the fish. He said…he said – ‘that bird was wild that remembered it didn’t need the cormorant fisherman – isn’t that right, grandfather?” And my grandfather….my grandfather nodded. I’d brought up that bird from when it was a chick – before, even. I hatched it. And my brother killed it….for nothing.”

“That’s pretty sad. But I suppose rules is rules, Nguyen. Did you get another cormorant?”

“No. The Americans bombed us. We had to move to Luang Prabang. I asked my grandfather before he died, why he let my bird be gutted. He told me….

“In each of us a dragon, that makes of man the cormorant.”

I looked at Bruce, unsure of what to say. The whole encounter just deepened the mystery of why this mild, softly spoken poet of a man was here at all. But I remembered my time in Vietnam, and how I thought the Vietnamese the most tenacious breed of little mind-fuckers I’ve ever come across, and how clear it was that the Yankee troops, fighting for corporate America, would never overcome them or crush their spirit.

After a brief pause, Bruce rapped his knuckles on the table to indicate that it was Nguyen’s turn. Nguyen threw down all the cards he held, clasped his hands behind his neck, lent back in his chair and said:

“I took that as judgement on my brother.”

As I paced out the yard with Bruce later, I thought how great it would be to be brought up in that synergy with Nature, like Nguyen. That’s what was missing in the West. Nguyen seemed so centred to me, and it must have been his upbringing on the Mekong.

“Yeah? Ya reckon?”

Brue raised his eyebrows satirically.

“Or – he just might be bat-crazy. Who can tell?”

“Yeah – who can tell?”

“Prison ’ll do that to ya.”

“Renmark’s a prison.”

Back at the remand unit, I told Bruce of my triumph over Brebner. He was so impressed, he

asked me about my sovereignty defence. I told him it was dangerous, as it removed

expression of contrition as it was a head-long rush at the system, but that was replaced

with an expression of lack of confidence in the prevailing system of interlocking hierarchies

structured to exploit, plunder and foster conflict. I told him the document amounted to a

conscious statement of allegiance to the biosphere of Earth, a sentient being, which the

banking system falsely claims to be inert, insentient and infinitely exploitable.

“Ya reckon it can get Nguyen off?”

“No but his statement might mean his punishment could be decided by his peers and their

connection to the land.”

“Sorta like a Vietnamese Nunga court thing?”

“Yes. But I still don’t know what his offence was.”

“Hang on.”

He went off and returned with Nguyen and a sheaf of papers. We sat down.

“This is Nguyen’s record of interview. Now – keep this to yourself, right? No-one else in the

unit can know, ok?”

I agreed and read the record of interview. It started the usual way:

SENIOR: Do you agree the time is now 2:45 am?

ACCUSED: Yes.

SENIOR: Do you agree that you are the brother of the deceased M___?

ACCUSED: Yes

SENIOR: Can you tell me what this object is?

ACCUSED: It looks like my fillet knife.

SENIOR: Can you tell me about the events leading up to the murder?

ACCUSED: I picked him up from the airport. He kept twitching – I knew he was lying.

SENIOR: Lying about what?

ACCUSED: What? What. What. You know what. The miaow miaow.

SENIOR: The miaow miaow? Do you mean MDPU?

ACCUSED: I mean the MIAOW MIAOW. He was supposed to bring in 400 grams.

SENIOR: Smuggled? How?

ACCUSED: Swallowed. He told me he couldn’t do it. We waited for 3 hours and nothing came out but I knew he was lying so I opened him up.

I looked up from the brief of evidence. Nguyen was smiling.

“My grandfather was the last cormorant fisherman on the Mekong” he said softly.

I quickly flicked to the attached photographic exhibits. One showed a man’s bodysplit open

from the pelvis to the throat. I started to tremble. ‘Neh…Peh…void’, ‘Neh…Peh…void’ I kept

whispering to myself. Where am I? In hell or hallowed hall?

Nguyen went on:

“He was. He told me once – in each of us a dragon that makes of man the cormorant.”

Bruce looked at me.

“Whadya reckon? The dragon’s got hold of him. Mekong in his blood. It’s his culture, right?

The Yanks pulverized his family, forced him to make a living only way left him…”

But I had no answer. The blood had drained from my brain. I was passing out. I fled back to

my cell to lie down and process. Think. I was in hell and hallowed hall at the same time.

Where was the switch?

It occurred to me that there was indeed a dragon in each of us and that it escaped detection

because it was chameleon-like, and was able to disguise itself – as us. We had even given it

a name – the ego. This was the final piece of the puzzle for me.

We gaze into the mirror of projected ‘reality’ to discover who we truly are but the answer to

this question cannot be found using the mind lent to us by the Hive. It will never allow us to

move outside the confines it delineates. This enables the creation of a self-contained, self-

legitimized universe in opposition to cosmic order, with Death installed as the Supreme

Power. This physical reality we move around in is a simulacrum, this reflected light we bask

in a lunacy, this explicate order we bend to the eternal winter of a sunless Mind.

As I lay there I was able to find, at last, the switch that moved me from hell to hallowed hall.

I had gone completely and utterly sane."

from  'Je Suis Monis'