The online theater community practically exploded this past weekend when reviews started hitting for the great Glenda Jackson’s return to the stage with a landmark production of King Lear at the Old Vic, her first time in the footlights in twenty-five years. Jackson hasn’t exactly been in hiding in the meantime; she became a member of Parliament since 1992, standing down in 2015 after an outspoken career including several fiery speeches that became worldwide sensations.
I’ve had Jackson on the brain a bit since her return to the stage, and it carries some personal weight since she was the very first actor I saw on the London stage at the wee age of six when my family took me to see a little-remembered production called Rose (which she later brought to Broadway with Jessica Tandy). It wasn’t the most fast-paced production in the world (she mainly sat around talking and smoking, back when you could actually do that in a theater), but she was absolutely magnetic and a real force of nature in the flesh.
Since then I’ve seen almost all of her starring films (yep, even Nasty Habits), but the one that hasn’t been praised nearly enough is 1970’s The Music Lovers, the second film she made with England’s wildest director (and one of my personal favorites), Ken Russell. The teaming made sense as Jackson had won an Oscar for their prior film together, 1969’s Women in Love, which had refined her ability to shift between delicate introspection and unhinged madness as displayed in her big stage-to-screen breakthrough, Marat/Sade (1967). However, nothing could have prepared audiences for what she and Russell had in store.
Based on the life of legendary Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers came as a cold splash in the face to viewers expecting a genteel portrait of the man responsible for such ballet staples as Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, and the “1812 Overture.” Yes, those works all figure here in some form or another, with the last piece (normally associated with fireworks and celebration) accompanying a wild fantasia including most of the film’s actors having their heads blown off by canon fire. Richard Chamberlain delivers a career-best performance as Tchaikovsky, even learning note-perfect imitations of the prerecorded piano pieces he’s seen banging out on camera. His anguished portrayal of a man forced to deny and conceal his sexuality to such an extent that he marries a psychologically unhinged female admirer was the first time many commercial theaters dared to show a film so overt about the destructive effects of suppressing homosexuality, which until recently had actually been illegal in the U.K. Chamberlain’s own coming out decades later adds yet another layer to the film, creating a sort of critical game of parsing how much of his own experience was brought to the role.
However, the meatiest material here definitely goes to Jackson as Nina, whose fan letters became the catalyst to a doomed marriage and a descent into nymphomania that climaxes with a madhouse scene prefiguring Russell’s descent into hell the following year, The Devils. The film itself is a real whirling dervish of energy that threatens to spin off its axis at any moment, and Jackson is its focal point with a performance that seems to be chugging on a dangerous amount of caffeine at all times. She’s always moving, chattering, proclaiming her most theatrical emotions to the heavens, or even flailing nude on a railway car amid splashing champagne in a cinematic wedding night unlike anything else you’ve ever seen. Frankly, if audiences hadn’t been so taken aback by the source material, she should’ve gotten back-to-back Oscars.
For years critics sniffed that Ken Russell never made another film as good as Women in Love, something that’s patently untrue when you watch, well, just about anything else he made in the ‘70s; there isn’t a single stinker in the bunch, and several (including this one) are flat-out masterpieces. He’d already honed his music composer biopic approach to razor sharpness thanks to several astonishing BBC productions when he made this film, his first (but far from last) big screen classical music production that would pave the way for Mahler (1974) and perhaps his most misunderstood film, Lisztomania (1975). However, this may be the most impressive of the bunch, a mixture of big screen opulence (the Panavision camerawork is absolutely incredible) and harrowing drama that truly shows him at the peak of his powers.
Jackson never starred in another film for Russell, though she did have a fantastic unbilled extended cameo in The Boy Friend (1971) and played the mother of her Women in Love character years later in the director’s gentlest later offering, The Rainbow (1989). She famously remarked that she’d had enough of going mad on camera for a while after making this film, and honestly that sentiment makes total sense. Once you’ve spent two hours watching Jackson as a whirling dervish of insanity and raw emotion, where else can you possibly go?
Nathaniel Thompson