Mission: possible - interview with actress Vanessa Redgrave

"Vanessa Redgrave," says her colleague, producer/director Ismail Merchant, "has a remarkable love for acting and for causes. She herself is an extraordinary actress who predicts things." She is also no stranger to controversy. In fact, she's been an unmovable thorn in the side of those who like their actresses to stay far from politics. Indeed Redgrave has taken the heat for what many consider to be the radicalism of her opinions. But love her or hate her, no one can deny that she is a resolute fighter for the causes she believes in, or that her acting - whether in stage classics, classic films, or commercial fare like Mission: Impossible - is untouchable.

On the occasion of Redgrave's recent visit the New York City to direct a stage production of Antony and Cleopatra, actor, playwright, and kindred spirit Wallace Shawn asked her to explore the essence of her beliefs

I first met Vanessa Redgrave in Boston, in 1983, when we were acting in the Merchant-Ivory film The Bostonians, and each time I see her she seems more graceful in the way she glides across room, city, and world, so easily at home wherever she is. All the same, the fluttering candle of her political anger never seems to go out. As actor and observer of society, she is, year after year, the passionate first-year student sitting in the front row of the class with pencil sharpened. And year after year she retains the ability to be shocked and hurt by the sight of human cruelty.

Redgrave was recently in New York City directing Antony and Cleopatra - with herself as Cleopatra and David Harewood as Antony - at the Joseph Papp Public Theater. We talked at a nearby bar one afternoon in February.

WALLACE SHAWN: A few years ago I did a one-person play that I'd written [The Fever]. I performed it in a lot of people's apartments over the course of a year. It was as directly political a play as I could make it. It basically said that the whole way the world is run is completely wrong, and It must be changed on an emergency basis, immediately. But, of course, despite what the play was saying, and despite the fact that it was being done in apartments, it was still a play, it was still theater.

Anyway, I would always speak to people before the performance, and at one of these apartments I met a very nice woman who told me about her work as a pastry chef in an expensive restaurant. She described how much she loved making pastry, and the process of baking cakes and delicious things. Her function was to give these pastries to the few wealthy people who would come at night to that particular restaurant, to give them some pleasure or some relief from their duties - or their crimes, depending on how you want to look at it. It left me with a very vivid impression. I thought, When I do theater, that is me. I am the pastry chef in an expensive restaurant. I provide a certain pleasure for certain individuals who come on those particular occasions. And I enjoy making the pastries. It's incredibly pleasurable to roll about with the text of a play, with the story, with the other actors, just as for that cook it's very pleasant to roll around with a lot of flour and butter. But doing a play doesn't change the world any more than making pastries does. Or does it? If I'm not completely wrong, you also feel there's an emergency and the world has to be changed, and not just in some theoretical way a hundred years from now. It should be totally changed right now, and yet here we are doing plays. What do you feel about this? Do you think it is like making pastry, or is there anything else to it?

VANESSA REDGRAVE: In the first instance, there's an obvious connection, because only a few people can afford expensive pastry, and the cost of theater tickets today prohibits any but a very few people from being able to see plays. For example, the [New York] Public Theater should be able to give out free tickets, not only in Central Park in the summer, but also in its own theaters. The building that is now the Public Theater was once the first free library in New York. It was given a new birth when it became a public theater, but it can't be free, because it hasn't got the funding.

Now, I've actually seen a theater that does have free tickets. You have to book them, but they are free. It's in Sao Paulo [Brazil], and it's funded by industry. I saw one of the most brilliant productions I've ever seen there - it was Shakespeare - and the theater was packed with young people who got thoroughly involved with what they were watching. That's the only way you can have theater that isn't pastry. Or, in other words, it's pastry for everybody. Everywhere else, theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being completely deprived of theater study, of theater workshops, of going to the theater.

WS: But do you actually think that watching a play can have an effect on people?

VR: Yes, I do, I do. I had an experience that made me understand something I couldn't have understood otherwise. I've been to Sarajevo a few times and have gotten to know a lot of people there who put on plays during the siege. I wanted to share in that because I knew it was important to them. The third time I went there, I rehearsed for a week with this company directed by Hahs Pasovic, and we gave two performances. Through that, I began to see something of what was going on there in terms of actually keeping up people's spirit to resist - the resistance that causes change - even in the worst imaginable circumstances. And I realized that it paralleled the same spirit that existed during the Holocaust and in the gulag. Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living. That experience changed me, because I realized that if, as actors or writers or directors or designers, we can keep the will to resist alive in as many people as possible, then that's what we are about, and that's what we can do. It's more and more important because of the terrible things that are happening in our cities and the political and economic agendas that various governments have.