Stephen Jennings on his role as Dr Eustice Jakes.
What drew you to Land Of Thirst?When I first auditioned I didn’t know much about the story, but what I liked was the fact that my character, Dr Jakes who runs the sanatorium, sounded to me like someone who had not lived up to his own expectations of himself.
I liked the idea of a flawed person who is not necessarily a bad person. The fact that he is an alcoholic and does not behave responsibly, I saw more as a reflection of a good person who is disappointed - not with the world but with himself.
Then I read the book (Margaret Harding by Percevel Gibbon, which the screenplay is based on) and found out things like it was Dr Jakes’s wife’s money that had got the sanatorium up and going, and that placed increased guilt that didn’t live up to her expectations of him. Essentially Dr Jakes is a good man who is flawed, that drew me to him.
In terms of his relationship with his wife (played by Terry Norton), she’s quite critical of him and his drinking. She feels let down by him, but still seems to love him.
Did you see any parallels between the sanatorium and the issue of TB as a disease of stigma in those days?In this particular situation it seems to be different from situations of today where people are offering palliative care because Dr Jakes thought of making money out of this sanatorium. People come from England and can afford to live in this place in the Karoo. Dr Jakes and his wife need this money - they can’t afford to lose the patients.
That’s part of his problem: that the sanatorium didn’t become what he hoped it would be. Whereas today people provide care to people with HIV/AIDS or any of the respiratory diseases - like TB - that come along with it and they don’t think they are going to make any money out of it. It’s more of a humanitarian impulse. With Dr Jakes, no doubt he feels something for his patients, but it is his way of earning a living.
There is a scene where Dr. Jakes seems quite giving in his counsel to Margaret.Yes, and you often find with some people that they are most able to give advice to others, but not to themselves. They are rather dispirited themselves, but see it in others better. So he can tell Margaret: “You’ve got to believe in yourself.”
Such people can help their best friend, but they can’t help themselves. Perhaps Dr Jakes is hoping that she will have a sense of self-belief that he might have had once but that he no longer has now.
How did you see Land Of Thirst in its historical context?What I found interesting about Dr Jakes is that people think in those days the social pressure to fit in was much greater than it is now and the fact that he tries to hide his alcoholism from others, leads to his demise.
This is an accumulation of a whole series of despairs. But I don’t think that is any less so today. I think that people can get depressed and even commit suicide today for reasons that can be the same: how you look in the eyes of your peers.
That was not necessarily something only from the Victorian era. I don’t think that the human psyche is any different now than it was then - people assume it was, but I don’t think that is the case.
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