MARTIN CHALLIS talks with 
                                                   Jonathan Hardy
                                                   Actor - Director

Jonathan Hardy, known most prominently to the international television audience as the voice of Rygel in the TV series Farscape has had an extraordinary career as an actor, director and writer spanning five decades.

You have an incredible drive and passion for your work and you clearly have high expectations for yourself and for others. Many would say you have become a master craftsman. What can you say about the process of self mastery in your craft, the levels you have achieved, particularly your recent achievements and the things you still strive for in your artistry?

No I do not think of it in those terms. The craft if you will is one of service, it is for me a conduit to the audience of the author and not about the actor although the actor is used by the communication.

I can see that a lot of teaching is loosening the actor and from what I hear some of my ex-teachers have fallen for the trap of believing that the freeing of the actor, as they call it, is about egoism and offering the audience an 18th century ticket to a madhouse or public execution.  

This results for me in the worst lowest common denominator.  The actor is finally there in this scenario to flaunt their wares and therefore the prettiest must succeed. It results in simple soft porn where there is a need to create more and more variation because the audience is reduced to shallow roueism. That is the fault of the actor who does not know their calling or it's purpose and responsibility.

The final point of honing the talent of actor is about the actor disappearing in the art that disguises art. Otherwise you are dealing with different performance values. Clowning etc, now intellectualised as part of the same thing.

I know from my experience that reliance on technique, personal emotional exposition, et al, must be integrated in the actor to the point where they are free to respond and that is about the same virtues that you might find in the master swordsman in Seven Samurai.

My fear is that acting becomes about individuals showing off and this is the market created by the funding bodies and the decadence of the audience. If the actor is working properly, the audience may weep or laugh or whatever but this is proportionate to the actor not doing those things. The fatuous things, I hear from the drama schools, are things like the actor must be enjoying and the audience is coming to a party.

I think this is bullshit. The actor is leading the audience with great sensitivity to them and the nuance of their reaction to the text is helping them find their way through an experience, which does not let them off the hook. Criticism, to me, that avoids this issue is either ignorant of or frightened of emotional experience.

Recently I have found that I no longer want to go to a theatre, which is artifice, self-labelled or pandering to idiot politicians or bureaucrats. I find I am free to a much more humble way. To set my self aside that the * "duende" might do battle with me as Lorca says. I have to admire Francis of Assisi who hid the fact of his stigmata.

Voice for example is free and focussed to respond to stimuli from the situation, the other actor, or the imagination.

Rarely do I see what I aspire to and therefore it is not that I am more demanding of others and myself. I am asking for something different. Not necessarily more difficult at least in principle.

For me the play is tracked rather than performed  

That difference I saw recently in Greg Stone in Stephen Sewell's play in Melbourne. Dakin Matthews performing Casca in San Diego. And a good deal of Steppenwolf. Simon Chilvers as the ghost who spurred Hamlet because of his dignity and perfection as an Elizabethan "true knight".

I will not work, at the moment, for some companies because I fear to do bad work. Much I find is justifiable in every known principle ethos, cultural policy or whatever. However in performance take out the pretence and you have what I would call, 'technically" fuck all. Unless I find a director who is seeking this well spoken of but rare reality I would rather starve than commit myself to the pain of weeks of knowing I cannot get to it or get lost in being clever. I would starve rather than miss what I experienced with the great (Greta) Scaachi in Sympatico.

The only thing I have mastered is the knowledge that it is about setting oneself aside and that I have to practice.

If the actor eats the cake then they deny it to the audience.

My attempted and occasional success of self-mastery is somewhat erratic. If I considered it, I would say I am merely fighting self-indulgence with all the rigour I can master. 

This decadence is a spoke on by Mikael Chechov.

If then I think I have done this of course I have added self-congratulations.  The classic "poisons" of the martial arts are applicable here.

The actor can only take satisfaction in cleanliness of utterance. "Utterance" is a very different term from "speaking". Robert Rankin and I spoke long of this as I did with Robert Graves.

The very word utter is onomatopoeic for what I am trying to say. It is not that few can do this but it needs the teaching to be much more rigorous than I have seen. It has to go way beyond clever as in le Coq or those methods that are comforting and closed.

I guess when you break up in a relationship there is a hideous blast of reality that comes though the door though which you must go. It is both bracing and humiliating and requires courage and is like the eye of the needle. You have to give away literally everything as in "Living your Dying."

Therefore for me, at best, my way is not the joy of showing off or appeasing.  

The joy is that as I allow the demands of the part to strip away my "onion" being that more is revealed of my capability and experience and insight, even if these are denied me in my private world. That is a chaos, which coalesces in performance. The alternative is the kind of safety the rabbits who accept the wires accept in Watership Down.

I cannot tailor my work to fit the acceptable any more than I can make myself write soap or Mills and Boone. Believe I long to do just that. Just for a moment to have money. But....

I must be like this if I am not to predict outcomes, if I am to fight more than a cowed or tamed bull as I saw In Dom Angel Peralta or Dom Pedro Domecq. In Callas, in Christoff, in Apspassia Papathanassiou. Jack Magowran in Beckett

The Duende lecture is real to me.

My drama school LAMDA used to say that to be an actor you have the duty to be original and the only thing you have which is original is yourself. Therefore acting as a study, as a path is about allowing yourself to be more and more, i.e., under the lights and with needs of the character. It is not about being different but is so because of this continuous revelation to you of what this mad creative self can reveal.

In my best work it is cold experience that allows all to pass and not get stuck with me. Then I remember not triumphs or failures except where I noticed it to got stuck and I robbed the audience.

When an actor or student says to me "it is going badly', I reply, "it is going, neither well not badly be sensitive to where it is tracking like a needle in groove of an old record".

That is the ebb and flow of performance. After all the audience also contributes to the event.

It is the event critique that we lack because it is a critique of a synthesis

The growth of an acting talent is the growth of soul where greatness is measured in the greatness of the experience, of the audience where things are un-tuned, and re-found where true catharsis renews all and refreshes through the art that disguises itself in entertainment, and to the consumer is just a wonderful journey. Alas, since consumers in the form of bureaucrats, politicians or whatever do not see this, and neither do many directors and teachers or performers who are happy to have the form but do not dare the art beneath.  

Therefore they need to formalise and make simple a thing that, consequently, they cannot achieve and start praising mirror imagery of it. Thank god they do not follow the same tenets in surgery. Mind you they can maim brilliance there too.

Well I guess that is what I feel. Hang on and drown or accept the ocean and learn that it will bear you. If we are to mean anything in our service to our audience then we have no choice but to follow this. If we do not then we are merely creating diversions on the way to the grave.

Mankind entrapped in it's own imagery and politics is about reordering the power structure within the trap. The arts are about creating new imagery but can be used for reinforcing the status quo and this normally means money. Hence the word, "sell out".

If you are prepared to go then you are facing at least the fate of Galileo or Lorca or Reich or as Reich called the murder of Christ.

You mentioned "...I would starve rather than miss what I experienced with the great Scaachi (Greta) in Sympatico." Could you describe that experience – was it akin to the selflessness you speak about in service to the audience and the author?

I guess it was exactly that. Greta and I could work as a team in an interplay which was not about showing off and therefore the consciousness of being an actor was not there so much as the game of the relationship played with intensity and real involvement and the game shared with the audience who experienced all kinds of emotion. David Berthold was the brave director who allowed that.  The result is the same as the two Elisha's I have done recently in particular the Tree Falling in Melbourne: the audience and the critics know when they are on to a good thing. Again a brave director who manages to work on the idea that a concept is something arrived at through rehearsal not one person driving their narrow idea ruthlessly though the play.

In this case the director as with Einstein was David Letch

The fact is that theatre is organic, dangerous and alive. The audience is in a hypnotic position in that they are focussed on the actor and through them the play.

You are then responsible for their welfare by duty. That does not only mean the play but the very posture and tuning of the actor. You can present them with many things and since you are dealing with a subjective experience you can really do good or ill. There is a morality in the presence of the actor and this is important in teaching and demanding discipline in the teaching of actors and I do not hear that from some. I hear how to "cut throat" and get to the top. Top of a dung heap is not success to me.

Literally I mean the difference between an involvement with another person as (a way to) share with an audience that allows for infinite variation in nuance and use of the words, as you re-find the play in each performance as a journey of discovery for the audience - as the actor leads them through the process.

That does not mean indulgence, but the actor's focus, which is focus with which the audience experiences the work. Some well held actors actually speak of tricks to get the audience to focus on them.  This rather like a surgeon coming in to an operating theatre and doing and acting like a tepanyaki chef with his scalpels. What makes a great surgeon is the ability to do his job with concentration and efficiency. This then creates an atmosphere where an actor can compress their energy and focus it because there is respect for what an actor is doing and the pathways they are travelling.

By this I mean the generation of energy and the channelling of it so it comes with enormous force. The difference between a static lake, which can be lovely, and the force in a race of the same water that creates electricity.

If there is a "decadence" of the audience and a motivation of marketing for the theatre – how would you change this? What ideals might you establish or what might you recommend to those who are in positions of influence – is the theatre in a state of 'deadliness?  What part do the Australian State Theatres have to play? What is it about Steppenwolf for example that is alive – what makes their work different?

If it is agreed the actor as a focussed animal must respond to all stimuli then the discipline of stage management and other actors have to go through irrelevancies so that the actor has to waste energy in not reacting to it. The Melbourne Arts Centre was very bad at this and would be discussing all kinds of things loudly in the wings and when asked to stop they said the audience could not hear them. This assumes that the actor is doing a turn.

Here in lies the decadence. The actor is going through a process, which involves the audience. If the audience has been sold a bill of goods of stars and all that stuff or the director's concept limits the play because it predicts the outcome, or you have a director who thinks that their applied invention is better that what comes out of the intent and behaviour of the actor, then you have an audience whose interest is in bread and games and therefore have been fed something which is akin to pandering.

I remember one well held director instructing the cast to "camp up' a play which was coming into Sydney having been successful elsewhere because that is what they wanted in Sydney. Similar problem of Australians trying to appeal in film to Americans.

Americans do what they do very well. If you are to get something going they need you to come from your own base. If not go work there.  Look at Once Were Warriors or Whale Rider. I doubt that things of that ilk could get made in Australia.

Decadence in the funding bodies has occurred because they are no longer what they set out to be.  You have almost fascistic control worthy of the struggle between Stalin and Shostakovich and the other Russian artists. The compliant second raters got in because that is how they got funding. The others wrote for the hope of something to come, which is sad. Same with Lorca or Camilla Jose Cela.

The dead are very active in this field and fake democracy protects them. Note Meyrinck in "The Green face" Look at the Immortalist by Heathcote Williams.

Well as far as ideals are concerned, I think you cannot intellectually influence the present crop. Remember that for all the largesse there are perhaps only four or five people running theatres (in Australia).

I fought this one once with treasury in New Zealand where some crap bureaucrat tried to tell us what we could do by their standard in other words how to kowtow for the money. I suggested we put them through some rigorous training for six months to see if they could expand their outlook on life because they were crushed narrow people, who, in any terms I know, looked incredibly unhealthy. NB the Alexander critique of posture.

An actor is embattled enough in their own worlds and if they are of no benefit except as ornaments what is the point.

The decadence also arises when I am being fed something very akin to the emperor's new clothes.

Our world appears dominated by nudists.

For example the repute of some people, which seems based like politics on the deviousness of spin doctoring. There has been an obsession with some about European actors particularly east European and god knows there are a few about. I saw one highly vaunted individual who was doing a Beckett and noted a presence and that glottal voice rumbling typical of Slavs and was impressed until I found myself wandering because the quality of the actor personality is something, but they must be able to image language or it becomes a meaningless monotone that does not pin me to the play. I am then concerned with watching self-evident art instead of partaking in an experience. Another version of diverting an audience and letting them off the hook of a theatrical experience.

It is exactly the same thing one found in England and here (Australia) where Scotsmen who are pissed and aggressive are therefore thought to be talented.

In Sydney for a while it seemed to be believed that some gays were talented and therefore you have to be talented to be gay. I had to go onstage with some galoot (fool) who was not suited to the part culturally or intellectually and we all suffered. The casting director claimed the guy was a great fuck and tripodic.

In this case it was a period piece where the there was not indication of the size of his dick and none of us had slept with him and the audience had none of that experience either, so what was the point?

The issue was first canvassed in England when one of the critics said of a Hamlet of one famous company: "For years we have watched actors trying to reach the heights of this play, now we see the play reduced to the size of the actor."

The same critic wrote an article called beware the creeping camp. This where the disciplines of performance have subordinated themselves to such cases as I have mentioned and where the thing is a series of diversions to a jaded appetite.

I am wondering if there is now a place for State Theatre Companies (which are really managements). They seem to provide little either to the art or the profession or indeed the audience. This seems to please the funding bodies and the idiot boards who like politicians are in it for the photo opportunity. Maybe that concept needs to be rethought. I do not think I am a radical here, I think the idea may have passed its used-by-date and we need another model.

It is rather like the deal that had to sell the politicians whereby you must have an Australian distributor to get funding for a feature. This of course limits film making to the opinions of very few people. The rationale is that is that it guarantees that Australians will view there own product. The fact is that if a film does not draw an audience then nobody will show it and if it does, the distributors will pick it up. I think we are now effectively funding commercial theatre.  

Finally the usual happens and the porno decadents say they are doing it for the younger generation.  Whatever and whoever that amorphous group is. This seems to me to once again admit failure and to push what should be done now into the future.

If you do something meaningfully and look to some depth then you may well attract all kinds of audience. It is a long time since I have heard about great standards emerging from any state theatre company. Something about god and mammon. Something about rigorous clinging to simplicity of purpose and aim and self-examination because we do wander off.

Steppenwolf are clearly about the work of the author.  I saw Homebody and Kabul. But the answer lies in vigilance. For we can fall asleep and be wooed into silliness. We can end up imitating ourselves. In the case of Steenwold I believe I actually saw the play

That is what it appeared to me therefore the actor shines in bringing that to life and not as something that has an independent life and is flag waving like a berserker semaphore as was once, as I remember, said of Vincent Price.

Perhaps I am an iconoclast but I have yet to see the incredible abilities of some of our highly vaunted directors. I guess I believe in an ensemble, which has disciplines, respect and aims in common. I think we have no theatre companies only managements and therefore actors are selected to do a number rather that investigate a play. The directors become pimps who are merely producing fresh meat for the audience and I think some soaps do that better and with lest pretension. I should add that opera being a bigger thing with bigger forces has hugely magnified the same problems.

Over the years your work has no doubt affected audiences profoundly both in theatre and film. What might you share with us that lives at the core of the roles you create: what are your loves, your passions, your joys – what for example might leave you weeping for it's simple beauty? What are your fears?  And in sharing yourself with an audience and also with a readership do you see your role as a shaman, a leader, an experiencer of the human condition illuminating and pointing the way?

I do not see myself as anything like that but am trying more and more to do what I think or aspire to as good work in the kind of critique that I have outlined to you. The moment I see myself as anything but a servant and conduit of the work I establish a position, which any actor knows, is at best pro-temp. I think death lies in seeing yourself as these things. All I owe the audience is as good a performance as I can give and cannot do less or more than that. It is treading wire which as I get older I can take further off the ground.

What moves me is pretty simple from a great Hamlet to the end of Karate Kid. All I am asking is to be allowed to suspend my disbelief and get though a clean story where all art is invisible and all subservient to the experience of the film which I find sometimes or more times in Lord of the Rings, for instance, or not at all in the new Star Wars or the second Matrix, which I find to be mocking me as an audience. I fall easily for well-disguised stuff like the ending of Love Story in the sixties, which I went to with my singing teacher and was flattened by it; she thought it a good weep and that was it. Billy Budd did this and I was horrified by companions who could intellectualise instead of processing the experience.

I simply howled all day at my father's grave and I mean howled like an animal. I was in Assisi and was immune to the great art but when I saw Francis' Cloak I sat there weeping and could only cry out "help". I thought nothing of the exhibitions of the great European painters. Admiration of course though Titian seems to have some of the "duende". Goya and El Greco are touching. They touch me. On the other hand an exhibition of McCahon the NZ painter just surrounded me with things that got through. As Ruth Harley said a painter that charts the inner landscape. It is that inner landscape that I stand for and I succeed a bit more now when I do not expect understanding but get more.

I am always overwhelmed by people with real force and although I understand this I never confront because I think most great lies are based on a truth. Huxley said, "...who knows at the bottom of which malodorous well truth may be found."

There is no such thing to me as international art in a 747 somewhere. There are only locals whose work can be read elsewhere but primarily in there own village. Some practitioner might well find that a 747 that sticks it's nose up it's own Pratt and Whitney's merely goes around in circles.

If you say Shaman and Guru or whatever, one assumes stasis. I found more in Shankaranda when he said if I help you it is a matter of me on my path passing something back.  Easy and acceptable as Roy Campbell argues with Yeats accepting bardship and Lorca killed for not accepting it.

There is only the now, the moment, in which an actor lives and hopefully leads to another moment and the observer sees the pattern on which they create opinion. That is not my job.

I sometime think that acting is like a mountain which we create and tunnel through in rehearsal. In performance we trust that we have done this and then commit ourself blind in that unlit tunnel trusting if we go step by step we will lead the audience though the tunnel and into the light.  Each step is then always different always find the logic in relation to that work at that time with that audience. This is where invention relies on the need to stay on the wire. The need to keep the line taught lest we deny the audience the experience. Much the same concept in music which is about the effortless tension of individual moments.

Once Neil Thompson took me to Russian Pianist's concert in a Brisbane. He played Pictures At An Exhibition. It was something I knew but the guy re-found it for me and it saved my head after a particularly nasty bout with the ungodly.

I was very proud of a production I did recently in New Zealand of Die Fledermaus. It was fascinating as people who got into it like Patricia Routledge and Jonathan Elsom, Beverly Dunn. Opera people were dubious because it works in the fact of the audience being there and not about being nice.  Academics were of course dismissive because few of them are better than the fake diviners of Rome poring over the chicken they have disembowelled. Nearly always wrong and unable to put the chicken together. Great for spouting nonsense but not too good for the poor chook. People who collect the dung after the horse has passed to put on their strawberries. I think we prefer cream on ours.

Naturally there are exceptions but, degree'd and tenured academics can become as much joke characters as any other profession. They should read Shakespeare on pedants. I think their pseudo religious hierarchies are not proof of competence or worth. But they do retreat into their own bitchy monasteries and somehow we allow them to confuse the terms of scholarship and academicism. In our world they are inevitably amateurs teaching a profession of which they have nothing but a consumerist attitude. Alas the degrees and pomposity about 'educative mission" are meaningless unless there is something proved in practice. Again as in Kendo it is no use protesting a black belt when a beginner is cutting you to pieces. Good comparison there as in that martial art a beginner hits by mistake or luck a master commanding the "mind of no mind" lives in the world of such mistakes.

I miss the old rituals of magic that caused a real spiritual soaring. I found nothing at St Peters but big rocks. But in the humble mission of Francesco Celano in Sonoma I found something real in human and perhaps spiritual endeavour. As A child I never recovered form my mother reading the song of Hiawatha to me when I was five in the long twilight of Otago in New Zealand. I wet the floor in terror at a film of Laurel and Hardy in the haunted house because I believed it and not the did not realize it was funny. I still remember Judith Anderson in the film of MacBeth with Maurice Evans.

Devils Playground to the nth degree nearly killed me. I was in such a place for three or four years. (played Brother Arnold in Fred Schepsi's The Devils Playground) I believed in Madame Butterfly as real and my opera productions have tried to bring that to life. Alas opera for the most part is impossible because it has become a plaything of the rich who want to experience the event not the content. Wow! is that decadence seeking variation on a limited repertoire and therefore undoing the thing itself. I once set up Bergonzi in Chenier in London. The Opera audience said he could sing but couldn't act. My friends in the RSC said he was a great actor because in uttering the text in the line of music he was completely compelling. Takes all sorts I guess. I used to spend hours at the library torn between opera on 78's and the infinite punishment meted out by a Catholic god to those who even thought of sex. I guess it is a lonely path and I have had to find a way between loneliness and being alone as a virtue. I tire but try to go on. I tend to fail with bureaucrats and fakes because they seem to know me at a distance. Maybe they are right maybe I am a simple isolated, malcontent madman.  I cannot judge I can only go as I hear within me the voice, which says "go on".

I am the man who John Donne's Valediction Forbidding Mourning a totally moving work. Perhaps Richard Packer's Elegy of Bluff hill is very close to me. I thrive on Ahab's last speech before the whale returns. The Mapple sermon, "Woe unto him who seeks to put oil on troubled waters when the Lord has brewed them into a gale. He seeks to please rather than to appal and whose good name is more to him than goodness." Could be Francis of Assisi.  Lorca's works especially the Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Meijas. Shakespeare's Phoenix and the Turtle.  I cannot read the song of Hiawatha, as I am afraid of the pain. Wifred Owen and perhaps alone, with John Sumner and Bille Brown, Mathew Arnold's Sorhab and Rustum. I grieve for the pain my funny aims have caused but when I see something Like Stephen Sewell's Myth's I have no choice but support that greatness because it is rare and precious.

Federico Garcia Lorca gave a famous lecture on La Teoria y Juego del Duende – The Theory and Function of Duende. Lorca says:

"All through Andalusia . . . people speak constantly of duende, and recognize it with unfailing instinct when it appears. The wonderful flamenco singer El Lebrijano said: 'When I sing with duende, no one can equal me.' . . . Manuel Torres, a man with more culture in his veins than anybody I have known, when listening to Falla play his own 'Nocturno del Genaralife,' made his splendid pronouncement: 'All that has dark sounds has duende.' And there is no greater truth.

"These dark sounds are the mystery, the roots thrusting into the fertile loam known to all of us, ignored by all of us, but from which we get what is real in art. . . .

"Thus duende is a power and not a behaviour, it is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old master guitarist say: 'Duende is not in the throat; duende surges up from the soles of the feet.' Which means it is not a matter of ability, but of real live form; of blood; of ancient culture; of creative action."

©2004 Martin Challis

Martin Challis is an actor and director in Australia,
and a contributing writer to Scene4.
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