Spotlight April 2003

Alan Bates talks about Gabriel Oak
ABC Film Review, October 1967, unidentified interviewer.

NOW THAT YOU have finished your last scene in "Far From the Madding Crowd," what is your analysis of the character of Gabriel Oak?

Now I see him - and I hope he's come out that way - as a very complex character. In the early scenes, as a struggling young sheep farmer who proposes to the rather tomboyish young girl Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie), he is almost too simple, almost too straight down the line. Then when he loses his flock of sheep -- and entire livelihood -- through sheer bad luck and lands up as a shepherd on the farm Bathsheba has inherited, his character changes.
One could call him stoical or good -- all that sort of thing -- but that's not enough. It's what makes him what he finally becomes that is interesting.
I think he's quite an emotional and volatile man who has a very pure kind of ambition and the fact that he has to keep it repressed on the mistress-servant basis makes it stronger.
He can be an angry man, though he says little and has a strength and toughness that can let him survive the most crushing situations.
He is a creative man who can take a destructive situation and turn it to good account. I feel he keeps the story from being melodramatic because he doesn't have Troy's (Terence Stamp) dashing conquests of women, and Boldwood's (Peter Finch) obsessive histrionics.
He keeps the balance through the matter-of-fact way in which he saves the situation on the farm from disaster time after time ... when the sheep are dying of clover poisoning, when the ricks threaten to burn down, when a storm verges on ruining the harvest.
However, these are surface things. It's what goes on in his mind that interested me and I had to convey.

Do you think Gabriel Oak suffered from acute jealousy during Bathsheba's other emotional and physical entanglements with Boldwood and Troy?

Indeed yes. But he's a man who has a tremendous acceptance of fate, like so many of Hardy's characters. What happens and what comes to pass, he is able to accept. That's not to say at all that he doesn't feel it. In fact he feels it very deeply because he does not express it in the way Boldwood might and Troy does ... because he never gets it out of his system and it's always smouldering under the surface.
The one moment when Oak really reveals his extreme jealousy and gets sacked (temporarily) for his outspoken behaviour is when he angrily accuses Bathsheba of trifling with the affection of a serious man like Boldwood. It's then that you begin to see what he's really feeling about his inner feelings towards Bathsheba. But he doesn't express it through himself. He expresses it through her frivolous attitude towards another man. He really means, "This is what you did to me."

Do you think Gabriel Oak always thought he was going to win through in the end?

I think he always hoped that things would turn out the way he thought they should, but if it seemed inevitable that they wouldn't it would just mean that life hadn't worked out that way. Acceptance, in fact.
And that business of telling Bathsheba, after Troy is dead and Boldwood is sentenced to life imprisonment for shooting him, that he has made up his mind to go to California ... that's typical of Oak. He'd always throw a line, but at the same time he means it.
He's really saying "I've tried very hard and quite frankly it's up to you now. I'm really going and if you don't make the next move, we've had it."

Do you think their future life would be shadowed by past events?

Most people are greatly influenced by what has happened in the past. It leaves some kind of scar. Oak could and would overcome it, but in a particular way. It would never be the first flush of love and passion -- this marriage of Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba -- rather a mature love. And this I think is what the film is about -- a search for maturity. Boldwood, a much older man, never had it, and Troy would never have attained it however long he had lived. Oak was striving towards it from youth -- and attained it. |||