I’m more accustomed to seeing Kevin Spacey’s figure whirling across a cinema screen than standing nervously beside a lectern, but I gradually get used to this odd displacement of film star in an antiquated Oxford setting. Well, not that antiquated; his lecture took place in St Catz.
Spacey has taken the position of Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre, a role previously played by thesps such as Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Thelma Holt. It’s a professorship which is associated with the innovation and excellence which Oxford drama, and indeed Oxford University, prizes itself. A lot rests on his performance this year. Indeed, a lot rests on his entrance.
As I take my seat, the dulcet tones of three nasal American girls drift into my ears. They are trying to track the professor’s progress up to the lectern. The clamouring whine rises in pitch as their goggle-eyed expressions fix enviously on a group of students who have occupied the centre column of seating. They resemble over-eager meerkats – with digital cameras.
The audience is a diverse bunch. Walking through St Catz on the way in, you could be forgiven for thinking there was a high-profile charity event on, so large are the hordes of suited and booted city sorts piling towards the theatre.
An elderly gentleman examining his paper is seated next to an elegantly dressed young woman, while, in the row behind, a collection of dons hold a quiet discussion. There’s a horde of photographers seated in front of me, and an eager-looking chap murmuring something into a dictaphone across the aisle.
Spacey is clearly in demand. He is introduced by the Master of St. Catherine’s as a ‘towering figure, a Goliath in the world of drama’. It is hyperbole of the grandest sort, which, despite appealing to my poetic imagination, is superfluous.
Spacey is uncomfortable. He half-listens to his own credentials, turns and smiles at the Catz students seated to his right. Later he tells us, ‘I would so prefer to have been out of the room while he did all that’, and requests to be called not ‘Professor’, but ‘plain Kevin’.
His credentials imply that he is far from just ‘plain Kevin’. Having pursued an illustrious career in theatre and film for over 20 years, he took the post of Artistic Director at the Old Vic in 2003. Since then he has pioneered a series of projects including the Old Vic New Voices scheme, which aims to encourage theatrical involvement amongst young people.
He is humble. Stressing how ‘I hope that by the end of my tenure here, I will be worthy of the title of professor’, he repeatedly stresses the primacy of the students’ views and ideas, deflecting questions about his own intentions with the response that they will discuss it and work out exactly what it is that they want out of the programme.
To the cynical in the audience, this may seem like a lack of conviction, a lack of direction. To me, it seems like the thoughts of a man who is not here for the fame or publicity, but for the young people his role is designed to aid: ‘It’s not about me anymore’. His lecture is interesting and amusing.
Focused primarily upon development of his own career and what it has taught him, he praises ‘people who took a chance on me’, such as Jack Lemon and Joseph Pap, and emphasises his desire to give the same back, to honour and preserve a ‘cultural landscape’ which seems increasingly threatened by the current economic climate. There are the odd few clichés. I particularly enjoyed the ‘endless mystery of the Mona Lisa’s smile’. It’s clearly a speech from prompt notes.
A little reticent, he shuffles. But, with the accidental destruction of the microphone, laughter, and the unprompted, ‘Note to self: don’t lean on the lectern’, he warms up. In the question time at the end, he is exuberant, when, without script or prompts, he is free to express his delight in the ‘great, humanising force’ of drama, and the ‘new work of today which will become the classics of tomorrow’.
I originally intended to rail against the fame complex with which the appointment to this position seems to be associated. Why Stewart and Spacey? Why not any one of the equally qualified thesps without the famous name? But Spacey, with his remarkable gentleness, the honesty of his manner, and his clear love for what he does, will, I have no doubt, prove to be a wonderful professor.
Personally, I liked him best for dressing down the Master of St. Catz. Getting the name of his first Shakespearean play wrong (it was Henry IV, and not Henry VI), the Master was caught out by Spacey’s quip that ‘You can’t trust everything you find on the Internet’. He’ll be a fresh force in Oxford, to be sure.
