Performance - Interview with Ben Kingsley

Ben and the Bard's Clown's An Interview by Stan Schwartz

Recently, I spent a delightful hour chatting with Ben Kingsley about past work and his current role as Feste the Clown in Trevor Nunn's new film adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Although he is best known in America for his film work (Ghandi and Schindler's List immediately come to mind), Mr. Kingsley has long been one of England's very top classical stage actors, playing everything from Shakespeare to Pinter (actually, and ironically, he has only played Pinter on film). And any historian of contemporary theater will recall that Mr. Kingsley was in the cast of Peter Brook's legendary 1970 Midsummer Night's Dream. Despite having reached the very top of his profession, Mr. Kingsley looks and comes across as just a regular guy (the intense and hypnotic eyes notwithstanding!). He is utterly unpretentious, totally down-to-Earth, friendly, funny and gracious. And when he talks about his art, Mr. Kingsley immediately reveals himself to be remarkably articulate and well-informed, peppering his conversation with allusions ranging from Shamanism to Kieslowski and Tarkovsky. Here are some excerpts from our conversation.

UD: Tell us about the character of Feste, the clown.
BK: He is an outsider, a wanderer. He's a musician, and he's a very funny man. And like many musicians and funny men, he has his dark side. His powers of observation are very acute. He can probably walk into any room and within seconds know how to play the room because of the various flaws, arrogances, and bits of narcissism that are in that room. Then he'd do his shtick and leave, but the room would be in turmoil because he will have unmasked everyone in that room. You see, "clown" in Shakespeare's language means "brilliant guy who's allowed to say whatever he likes in order to provoke people into thinking about themselves." But that's a rather long title. So Shakespeare just put "clown."
UD: I loved the contrast between Feste's linguistic fireworks and the extraordinarily quiet and intense internalization you brought to them. It's not necessarily the obvious acting choice for that kind of role...
BK: Gosh, I'm delighted that that's your response. I was hoping to inject into Feste something Shamanistic. And I think there is something Shamanistic about Feste, even I don't know what it is. But he seems to have been given by the author more than his fair share of knowledge about what's going on.
UD: Some critics bring up the subject of feminism with regard to Twelfth Night. In terms of the character Viola, do you see Shakespeare as a feminist?
BK: It's been a long time since Will and I talked about this. I think that Shakespeare had his male side and his female side extremely well developed. And this was a great quality of the Elizabethan, all-around Renaissance man. They were not afraid of their male side and their female side co-existing. This somewhere along the line got lost. And then it got misunderstood. But rather than go into "ists" or "isms," I just think that on the bedrock of his creative genius, there resided in Shakespeare a male psyche and a female psyche and that they both dwelled very creatively and energetically inside him.
UD: What if Shakespeare were alive and writing today?
BK: He'd now be the greatest auteur, screenwriter/director in the world, because he would have stayed on top of whatever medium is available. Why he'd be right up there with Spielberg, or Tarkovsky, or Kieslowski, or Tarrantino. His violent tragedies are Tarrantino. And I don't think that his scripts would be that different, because what we have in Shakespeare is a very, very early form of device which today in screenplay is the BCU -- big close up. All the great soliloquies -- To be or not to be..., Now is the winter of our discontent... -- all these great soliloquies are the characters standing on stage saying, "Do you want to know what it's like to be me? Right now? I'll tell you." But the close up in any great film is also telling the audience exactly where that character is. So you see it's very cinematographic stuff. Shakespeare lends itself so beautifully to film.