Finding the Essence of Lord Byron : Derek Jacobi returns to Los Angeles to portray the wild and doomed poet

Derek Jacobi didn’t become a Broadway star until four years ago when he won a Tony for his work in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Until then, this slight, sandy-haired, chameleon-like actor was best known in the U.S. for a television role--that of the stuttering Roman emperor in the BBC series “I, Claudius.”

By the time Jacobi returned to Broadway last season as the troubled mathematical genius, Alan Turing, in Hugh Whitemore’s “Breaking the Code,” Jacobi was eliciting praise not only from critics but also from American actors such as Bernadette Peters and Frank Langella, who flocked to his performance in admiration of his technique.

Now, Jacobi returns to the States as the 19th-Century English poet George Gordon, a.k.a. Lord Byron, in Jane McCulloch’s “Byron--Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know,” opening Wednesday (previews begin tonight) at the James A. Doolittle Theatre.

It’s been a busy time for the actor. He has just finished a London run and subsequent British tour of two critically praised productions, “Richard II” and “Richard III.” His Dickens film, “Little Dorrit,” is in release. He’s in negotiations about starring in an upcoming London/Broadway production of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”

“Interesting roles are being thrown at me now,” he admits. “It wasn’t always this way, and it probably won’t always be. I guess my attitude is ‘gather ye rosebuds.”’

Part of that rosebud-gathering involves sitting for an interview during the final days of the “Richard II” and “Richard III” tour. It has been a demanding month-long tour on the road. And here in Birmingham--a gray industrial town in the British midlands where Jacobi, as a member of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, was first spotted by Laurence Olivier back in the ‘60s--the cracks have begun to show. The theater is so worn it makes the stage manager wince. There has been a mix-up with the accommodations. It is unseasonably hot. And cast and crew are ready to head home.

But here in the hotel’s lounge, one of Britain’s finest stage actors sits sipping coffee and smiling placidly among the cacophonous burr of whirring vacuum cleaners, droning Muzak and the distinct sound of snoring emanating from a slumbering businessman.

Jacobi, ever the performer, leans forward conspiratorially. “I hope you appreciate this British regionalism,” he says to his questioner. “It has taken us centuries to get it this way.”

In the midst of this wear and tear on his professional life, Jacobi retains more than a measure of infectious boyish charm. If his face with its fine lines mapping his watery blue eyes bears testimony to his 52 years, his lithe frame cloaked in black-white houndstooth jacket and yellow crepe pants belies it.

During the interview Jacobi sits neatly, legs crossed at the knee, waving off your attempt to pay for the coffee with a flash of his lapis and gold signet ring. He insists, yes, of course he loves Byron, loves Los Angeles, and yes--in spite of all this--he still loves to tour.

One senses that Jacobi wears his affability--which is very winning--like a cloak. Only occasionally does a faraway look come to his eyes, and then his fine and slender fingers play pensively at his lips. “I don’t have much of an off-stage personality, I’m afraid,” he says with only a hint of apology. “I do much better when I am heavily disguised.”

Indeed, most of Jacobi’s more acclaimed roles have involved characterization, if not by physical disguise then by virtuosic displays of physical mannerisms. There has been the de rigueur nose for Cyrano, the hump for Richard III. His Claudius was a breathtakingly controlled portrait of a stammering, stuttering ogre. His portrayal of Turing, the emotionally stunted computer-genius hero of “Breaking the Code,” was a tour de force of twitches and tics.

Now comes Byron, one of England’s more rakish Romantic poets, a man who by reputation, beauty and talent achieved something of what we’d now consider a rock star’s status in Regency England before scandal and debt drove him into exile. He was born with a club foot. One wonders what Jacobi makes of this in performance.

“You mean the limping part?” asks Jacobi with a laugh. “Well, I don’t limp very much, actually. This isn’t one of those shows where I impersonate the character. I don’t (attempt to) look like Byron. I don’t darken down my hair or anything. I just try and get under his skin via what he wrote. And most of what he wrote is poetry, some very funny poetry too.”

Indeed, “Byron--Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know” is less a play than a dramatic biography of the poet comprised from his letters and poems--his most famous being the epic “Childe Harold” and the picaresque “Don Juan”--several of which are set to music. The score is by British composer Donald Fraser. The text is by Jane McCulloch, an English dramatist and screenwriter who has given the docu-drama treatment to several historical figures, including George Frederick Handel, Buster Keaton and Picasso.

Originally entitled “The Lover, the Lunatic and the Poet,” and written to be performed for four actors, the piece, which has toured in Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Australia and Hong Kong, is now a two-person drama. That, according to Jacobi, makes it “a kind of chamber evening, not a play as such, although it is dramatic.”

In the current production, the English actress Isla Blair plays the many women in Byron’s life--his mother, his half-sister (with whom Byron had an incestuous affair), his wife and his many mistresses. Jacobi, for whom the role was originally written, plays the poet from his early boyhood days until his death as a freedom fighter in Greece at age 36.

“It all came about when people kept asking me if I was going to do a one-man-show,” says Jacobi. “They were very fashionable awhile back and it’s a nice way for actors to create work for themselves when they’re not doing something else. But I don’t quite have the necessary ego for a one-man show.”

Despite the show’s size, Jacobi approaches the role as he would any other. He refutes his reputation as a technical actor, insisting that he does not find the physical characterizations first.

“No, I tend to work the other way around,” he says. “I try to find the opposites. When I am playing a king, I find the man. When I play a man, I find the king. If there are a lot of black moments, I find the humor. That I do quite deliberately.”

For his role as Byron, Jacobi says he had to ignore “all the many books about Byron. They ain’t no help. History is fine, but it doesn’t help you play Richard III. I have to act with and from the text that we’ve got.”

And in that text, says Jacobi, certain literary liberties have been taken. McCulloch has rearranged the chronology of some of Byron’s life and his poetry to suit her artistic purposes. “But only those who know their Byron back to front will catch on,” Jacobi says.

There is a pause. “I think we might get away with it in Los Angeles.”

After playing so many emotionally--and physically--tortured protagonists, Jacobi is clearly undaunted by Byron’s psychological complexities.

‘Yes, he did have lots of emotional problems but I think his writing was his therapy. And his humor. He was in that sense a modern man--he was into drugs, he was into drink, he was into total sexual freedom. Do I think he was a tragic character? Yes, in that he was dead at 36. He’d adopted that Chekhovian attitude, you know, ‘Now that I am over 30, I’m old and weary of my life.”

It is an attitude that is wholly invalid for Jacobi. After his exceptionally promising career start (he did an acclaimed “Hamlet” at the Edinburgh Festival even before he entered Cambridge University) beginning with the Birmingham Rep and Olivier at the Old Vic, Jacobi experienced something of a fallow period.

Now that he’s well into middle age, the actor is discovering himself to be once again in demand. But “one doesn’t believe it, not for a moment. An actor’s life is always filled with self-doubt. Even when they come up to you afterward and tell you ‘Darling, you were wonderful,’ of course you don’t believe it.”

Jacobi would rather talk about the current renaissance in commercial Shakespeare productions going on in London. “Theater is very healthy at the moment and how wonderful not to have to go to the RSC or the National to see Shakespeare,” he says. “I think producers have seen the potential--that an audience will come to see what an actor does with the classic roles, like (Dustin) Hoffman’s Shylock or my Richard III. That’s the draw.”

Only if pressed does Jacobi evince any unfulfilled acting ambition. “It would be to do a big commercial film, one of those films that come unheralded and change the course of (cultural) history, like ‘The Graduate’ or ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’ I would love to do one of those,” he says almost wistfully.

“But for some reason, I just don’t get many film offers. I’m not sure why. I think one of the reasons is that the ‘classic’ tag and the movie world don’t often go together.”

What is the actor’s barometer for success? “The audience. They tell me,” he says simply. “When they’re switched on to me and having a good time. That’s what I like, the feeling of taking a group of people into myself--as the character--and have them share feelings that I’m feeling. I’m not demonstrating those feelings, I’m not being the talented actor in front of them but we are communicating. That’s what acting is about.”