Neville Jason

Neville Jason trained at RADA where he was awarded the Diction Prize by Sir John Gielgud. He has worked with the RSC, as well as in films and musicals. In television he has appeared in popular serials such as Maigret and Dr. Who. He is frequently to be heard on radio. His work for Naxos AudioBooks spans an impressive range of genres, from Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (thirty-nine CDs) which he abridged himself to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. His latest triumph is an unabridged recording of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the first part of which is released this October (twenty-five CDs). Volume II (twenty-six CDs) is released in November.

Interview by Rachel Walters

How do you prepare yourself for taking on such marathon tasks as Tolstoy and Proust? How did recording these two giants compare?

The answer is that there is never enough time. The Proust I acquainted myself with over several months, as I was doing the abridgement, but the Tolstoy felt rather more rushed. Perhaps, however, this enabled my performance to retain some freshness!

How do the mentalities of Russian (Tolstoy) verses French (Proust) origins affect your performances?

Having already recorded Proust helped me to understand the passages which are actually in French in War and Peace. The aristocrats in Russia at the time spoke French. Many of the French passages were also translated in the recording, so they can be understood. Infact the national characters of the Russian and French are already in Tolstoy’s text. The shear Russianness of Tolstoy also comes through the text alone – I merely needed to take on sufficient sensitivity to convey that!
As for more mundane issues of pronunciation, Dr Mary Hobson, a Russian Scholar and friend, helped enormously with these. Some of the Russian words, however, cannot be said entirely authentically because English speaking listeners would not understand them!

Do you have very clear ideas about how each character should sound/their accents etc. just from reading? There are hundreds of characters in War and Peace!

Well of course one always has to clearly differentiate characters for the audio book to make sense, so yes a certain amount of pre-planning is necessary. There is, however, also an element of improvisation! With War and Peace, I had already recorded the abridged version for Naxos, so many of the characters crossed over, although that was quite radically abridged so there was a lot of text which I was unfamiliar with.

You completed War and Peace over about a month. Did your voice suffer from this?

We recorded over about five weeks, and had twenty-one days in the studio, so I was able to pace myself. For trained professionals, good technique is essential so the voice wearing out is never an issue. It is comparable to say a singer in one of Wagner’s operas – the soprano may finish exhausted, but never hoarse. Training takes care of this. What is much more relevant is the mental and physical fatigue. Exhaustion affects concentration and this is what suffers, rather than the voice!

How do you approach the very different styles you’ve encountered for titles as different as say Gulliver’s Travels and War and Peace? How do you decide upon the tone of the narrative voice? Is this type of decision-making even a conscious process?

The creative process is always a mystery. There are certain elements to any large-scale artistic achievement which are inexplicable. What I ensure is that I make myself as sensitive and receptive as possible to the material – this way an authentic interpretation is guaranteed. Really, in time, the material then does it for you. It’s all there, as long as you don’t try to impose. Any good actor, like any good musician I suppose, must become like a piece of sensitised photographic paper, must be humble to the material he/she is working with, then let his powers of absorption work and never impose a false style.

Out of all the books you have read for Naxos AudioBooks, who has been your favorite reading character?

This would have to be remarkable but, in Proust’s hands, very vivid Baron de Charlus from A La Recherche du Temps Perdu!