For Redgrave, The Show, and Life, Must Go On

NEW YORK -- On the day his mother died, the celebrated actor Sir Michael Redgrave had a matinee and an evening performance to give as Hamlet. Backstage at the theater, he sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Then he went out front. "And he did two of the greatest Hamlets he ever played."

Lynn Redgrave is speaking about her father, relating this tale as a way of explaining the family's indomitable work ethic. Theater to the Redgraves is what politics is to the Kennedys: family business, family birthright, family shelter. The stage entered the bloodstream of the Redgraves circa 1824 with the birth of Lynn's great-great-grandfather Cornelius Redgrave, who would become a pub owner and theater ticket agent. Like a hereditary virus, it has tenaciously spread through every generation since.

Grasping this genetic predisposition is helpful in understanding why, at this awful moment in Redgrave history, the award-winning actress is going ahead with plans to appear at Folger Theatre this Friday in "Rachel and Juliet," her brand-new one-woman memory play about her actress mother. With the ache still throbbing from the death of her niece Natasha Richardson, no one would have uttered as much as a mild groan if she had canceled the weekend of performances so she could nurse her grief in private.

That, however, is not the Redgrave way. "Natasha would have been appalled if I didn't do this," Redgrave says by phone from her home in Connecticut. "If I could talk to Natasha, she would say, 'What's the matter with you?' "

"I can't speak for others in other professions," she adds, "but very often work is an enormous solace, just keeping to the routine, showing up at work. For those of us in the theater, it's like almost a no-brainer. Because what we do has so much to do with conjuring spirits."

Redgrave and I first met in Manhattan to speak about "Rachel and Juliet" -- named for her mother, Rachel Kempson, and the Shakespeare role that would beguile her all her long life -- on a Saturday in mid-March. Two days after the interview, her niece, the actress daughter of her older sister, Vanessa, would hit her head on a ski slope in Canada. And the family would be convulsed by the multilayered dislocations that come with a sudden, premature death, the clicks of a thousand cameras and the flicker of a trillion page-views around the world.

Three days after Richardson was buried in a private ceremony in Upstate New York -- next to her grandmother Rachel -- we talked again. And while Redgrave was not ready to disclose too much of what was in her heart, she was willing to discuss how the sad event might affect what she brought to the stage.

Because there was no doubt about this: She fully intended to keep her appointment with the stage.

"Rachel and Juliet" is the latest in what has turned into a cycle of solo shows about her acting family. The first, "Shakespeare for My Father," was a poignant and painful account of her relationship with her indifferent father, Sir Michael, a man who had so little time for her as a child that her birth did not even warrant a notation in his diary. In December 1991, that play had gotten its start, in point of fact, at Folger, too, and eventually went to Broadway, where in a flurry of mixed-to-positive reviews it ran for nine months and 266 performances. (She later also wrote a show about her father's mother, "Nightingale.")

"Shakespeare for My Father" was a reaching-out to a parent by a daughter who was never sure whether she meant as much to him as the theater did. (On his deathbed, she recounted in the play, he thought he was onstage and asked her, "How's the house?") Although she'd had a successful film and stage career -- earning an Oscar nomination for her first title role, in "Georgy Girl," and appearing on Broadway, on TV and in movies -- there was a part of her that always wondered what precinct of his consciousness she occupied.

So the production turned out to be both psychotherapy and occupational therapy. Developed in response to an out-of-the-blue inquiry from Folger's Janet Griffin, about whether she'd be interested in coming to Washington and offering theatrical reminiscences, the event was originally called, simply, "An Evening With Lynn Redgrave." It filled a gap in a fallow period of the actress's working life.

"Her career wasn't very active at the time," recalls Griffin, director of Folger's public programs. "She was finding herself in a bit of a lull and she thought, 'Why the heck not?' "