It’s difficult to say what John Malkovich is more famous for; his awards-showered career as an actor and director, with approaching 200 Hollywood film credits to his name (Dangerous Liaisons, Con Air, and, of course, Being John Malkovich among them), or the myth that surrounds his name.
He seems to have a magpie’s eye on life, hopping from one exciting project to another with seemingly no continuity; fashion design, wine making, music videos. But his first, and most enduring love, is theatre.
This month he comes to Berlin’s Admiralspalast to perform in Bernard-Marie Koltès In The Solitude of Cotton Fields, a tense duologue about the shifting balance of power between a dealer and their customer, in a world where everything could be up for sale. His co-star, Lithuanian actor Ingeborga Dapkunaite (Mission:Impossible; Seven Years In Tibet; Bodies; Wallander) has become the greatest collaborator of his career since they met more than 30 years ago on the Chicago stage.
You first worked together in 1992 on Slip of the Tongue [directed by Dapkunaite’s second husband, Simon Stokes] and you’ve collaborated since then on many theatre productions across the world – sometimes acting together, sometimes with John directing. What is it that keeps drawing you back together?
Malkovich: Ingeborga is a person I want next to me if I know there is a good chance it could fail. I know she will never relent, sometimes in very difficult circumstances. That’s how I’ve always felt about her for these 30 odd years and how I still feel about her.
Dapkunaite: It’s half of my life I knew John, and I couldn’t imagine it without him because you know, husbands change, countries change [Dapkunaite lived in Russia until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and is now based in London], but John never does. It’s possible to make new friends, but there is no way you can make old friends. It’s just time and experience together, and that’s what’s called love.
You’ve worked on some really intense projects, including this play. What makes you laugh about each other?
Malkovich: I think Inga still looks like a child because there’s still a child alive in there. And that’s something that’s very rare in people in general, but it’s very necessary to be an actor. You have to protect that part of yourself and retain a kind of possibility of belief.
Dapkunaite: Sometimes we share very stupid jokes together, like when John was directing a play called Libra. I was playing a stripper and I had a rather idiosyncratic dance that we just invented in the preview [while on stage] because John had said to me, “oh, just do a little stupid dance”. He saw it and said “yes, great, do it!”. And then when we did the performance, the audience was quiet but there was one person who was laughing his head off. It was John. After the performance, I said “John, we probably should cut [the dance]”.
Malkovich: As a director I’m known for being the only person to laugh at certain things and then insisting, “no, it’s very funny, it’s great”.
In The Solitude Of Cotton Fields was written 40 years ago. What do you think it’ll mean to audiences today? I know you’ve played it at several venues across Europe, including in Hamburg, over the past couple of years.
Malkovich: I think Timo’s [Russian director Timofey Kulyabin’s] production is especially good at a couple of things. One is that it’s a kind of hypermodern production. So everything is filmed in close-up while it’s happening. The second thing is that his concept of the production is that this is a play about what a person does when they have a desire that is unallowed, a desire that can’t be. And I think a decent amount of people, especially young people, have that feeling these days. What do you do with a desire that you can’t communicate, that you can’t have, that is impossible? It was a very, very modern play when it was first done [in 1985], and I think it’s stayed that way, strangely enough.
It’s a French play, and I was interested to read the reviews of when it was first performed in English, in 2001. Michael Billington in The Guardian basically said, “it’s untranslatable…it doesn’t work for British audiences at least, because their theatre tradition is based in realism. They don’t get the symbolism”. But do you think that German audiences will be more receptive to that?
Malkovich: I like Michael Billington and I know his criticism fairly well, but I think he’s wrong. I think, unlike a lot of French things, which can intelligibly be identified as being a little too strategic blah, blah, blah, I don’t think this play has that. It’s a pretty raw play, a bit dreamlike in structure and execution, but I think it has a lot of immediacy and I think it’s quite beautiful in English. We did work on the translations, though, so this is an amalgam of the French original, the English translation, and the translation from Russian to English by the three Russian speakers, two of them native Russian speakers involved. So it’s had a little work done to it.
Dapkunaite: We’ve performed it in Germany – in Thalia, in Hamburg and in Wiesbaden. And I’m going to boast now; apparently in Thalia, we took one of the longest curtain calls ever in that theatre.
You’re going to be performing it in an iconic venue in Berlin that has such a history.
Malkovich: Ummm I don’t even know where we are performing.
So, Admiralspalast is one of the only big venues that survived World War II. Originally it had a skating rink, bowling alley, cinema before it became a theatre. It’s an amazing building.
Malkovich: Well, Ingeborga could do roller skating blading or ice skating. I could not.
Dapkunaite: You can’t skateboard?
Malkovich: No, no. I don’t do any skating activity.
You’ve both worked here over the years [Malkovich also launched his clothing line Technobohemian in Berlin in 2013]. What are some of your fondest memories of Berlin?
Malkovich: I’ve always liked Berlin. The first few times I went, the wall was still up, which was a very odd experience. I could never quite get my head around the whole thing. But I have friends who live there, and one of the things I’ve noticed about Berlin as I’ve visited over the years is that it has a lot of green space, great parks.
Dapkunaite: I came to see the Berlin Wall come down. I was very young, a student, and it was such a big event that we actually got on the train and came to see it. It was a warm day, and I remember people saying, “take a piece of wall, take a piece of wall!”. And I thought, “why would I take a piece of wall you know? It’s a bit of graffiti and cement”. Of course I did, but I lost it somewhere. Another wonderful memory I’ve got is in the early days, I walked from East Berlin, along Unter Den Linden, to the Mercedes sign [at the Europa-Center]. It took me a long while I can tell you, but it gave me the understanding of how big the city had grown during the separation, and then over the years I came back I was watching how those empty spaces filled with life and buildings and people. Germany for me is a very impressive country because I think the Germans overcame fascism and then they overcame the split, and they came out of it as a nation.
You’re performing at three venues in this run [in Berlin, Dusseldorf and Prague]. Do you think the play has life beyond that?
Malkovich: It’s a production that’s meant a lot to me because all my colleagues, as a result of their personal convictions, left their lives in Russia and so it’s important to keep this going [the creative team is made up of Russians and Belarussians who left Russia after the full-scale invasion, some of whom are living in Berlin now, as well as Greeks]. Russia lost a lot when these people and people like them left, and that’s very sad, and that’s not to mention what Ukraine has lost. So I don’t know how long we can keep doing it, but I still very much like working on this piece. We’ve been asked to take it to South Korea in the autumn.
- In The Solitude Of Cotton Fields plays at Admiralspalast from June 9th to 11th
