And Furthermore

by Judi Dench

  During this mercifully brief run my agent Julian Belfrage told me that Frank Hauser wanted me to join his company at the Oxford Playhouse to appear in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. I couldn’t believe it, because on our only previous meeting I had thought he was so rude to me, and I was quite rude back. We each thought we had been snubbed by the other, and it was just a silly misunderstanding. I had also been told, quite wrongly, that he had walked out of Romeo and Juliet at the Old Vic. But now I became absolutely devoted to him, he was such a wonderful director. He was very intelligent, witty, funny, and precise. Tall and lean, he worked hard, and had such an insight into everything to do with the theatre. I once said that if Frank asked me to step in front of a bus, I’d do it. I’d know he had some good reason.

  The Oxford Playhouse is a notoriously hard theatre to be heard in, especially under the circle. He used to do that most irritating thing, but of course the best possible thing: when you would say something like ‘Pass me that book’, Frank would shout, ‘Pass me the what? Well, let me hear it then.’

  He had a gift for casting, and that company included Joseph O’Conor, whom I had met in the York Mystery Plays, James Cairncross, with whom I had just worked, John Moffatt, who would also become a great friend, Roger Livesey, Elizabeth Sellars, John Standing and John Turner. Frank also had a keen eye for European plays that had never been seen in this country.

  I had missed out on Three Sisters the year before, when Tyrone Guthrie had asked me to go and play Irina at his brand-new theatre in Minneapolis, but I had just signed the contract for the short-lived A Shot in the Dark, so I could not go. The Oxford production happened to be Frank’s very first Chekhov, and it was a great success. I found John Turner a bit scary during rehearsals, because he used to send out for a quarter-pound of completely raw steak, into which he would mix an egg before eating it. I have to have my meat very well cooked, almost charred, so I found this very frightening. He was also incredibly tall, and in the next play, The Twelfth Hour, I had to kiss him passionately, so Frank had to devise a tree-stump for John to fall over, as there was no other way I could reach him to kiss him at all. This was a modern Russian play, and its author, Aleksei Arbuzov, came over to see us in rehearsal. Two years later he offered Frank his next play, The Promise, which was to prove very important to my career.

  We did The Alchemist next, and Frank suggested that I cut my hair short to play Dol Common, donning a long wig when I was pretending to be the Queen of Faery, which I tore off and stamped on at one point in the plot. My two fellow tricksters, Face and Subtle, were played by John Turner and Alan MacNaughtan.

  It was during the rehearsals in London for The Alchemist that I had my second premonition. I had set off from my flat in Regent’s Park Terrace when I suddenly had the strongest feeling that I should go back and ring Daddy. I talked to him and Mummy for about twenty minutes, and then set off again for the rehearsal, and now I was quite late, when usually I am one of the first to arrive. Daddy died later that day, just after midday. I didn’t know he was going to die, it was the same as in West Africa, I just knew I had to talk to him.

  After my brother Peter broke the news to me, I rang Frank Hauser, and he immediately guessed from my voice that something had happened. He said he would come straight over, and when he arrived he just said, ‘I presume it’s one of the family.’ After the funeral in York he rang and invited me to bring Mummy back to Oxford with me, saying he would find her some work to do in the wardrobe department, he knew how good she was at that, and it was a great help to both of us at such a sad time.

  We ended that Oxford season with two French plays, the first by Anouilh, Romeo and Jeannette, in which the two lovers commit suicide at the end, just like Shakespeare’s pair, but the modern play was much more difficult to get right. I had to have a lot of energy in the part, and I got a note from Frank Hauser one night, saying, ‘When you come in through the door will you refrain from lifting the entire back-set off the floor?’

  The second was Le Chandelier by Alfred de Musset, which had not been seen in England since 1910, and we performed it under the title The Firescreen. It was directed by Minos Volanakis, who was quite a livewire. He told me that I couldn’t possibly go on playing under the name Dench. Minos thought the food we had to eat looked a bit dull, so he sent the stage manager out to get a huge bottle of maraschino cherries, who then tipped it into a tin of Irish stew, which we were suddenly confronted with on the first night. Simon Ward laughed so much he blew into his glass, and the contents went right up in the air; there was red wine dripping all over him, and then we had to play our love scene. The whole evening had got off to a bad start, as I had been out to lunch, come back and made up, gone onstage and climbed into the bed ready for the opening scene. The stage management glanced over to check that I was in bed and brought the curtain up, but by then I had nodded off. Frank Shelley was playing my husband, André, and he came on and said my name, ‘Jacqueline’, and I woke up startled and replied, ‘Frank!’

  I was wondering where to go next when I had the second call from John Neville to join him at the Nottingham Playhouse, but I only said au revoir to Oxford.

  4

  Exciting times at Nottingham and Oxford

  1965-1967

  WHEN JOHN NEVILLE INVITED me back to Nottingham in 1965 he offered me five very different plays over the two seasons. The first was Isabella again in Measure for Measure, but this time in a modern-dress production very unlike the Stratford one. I was dressed in a white shift that was vaguely nun-like, but Edward Woodward played Lucio in a white macintosh and dark glasses. He looked rather like the private investigator he played later in the long-running TV series Callan.

  Lucio has a speech saying:

  ‘Go to Lord Angelo,

  And let him learn to know, when maidens sue,

  Men give like gods; but when they weep and kneel,

  All their petitions are as freely theirs

  As they themselves would owe them.’

  And Teddy Woodward just could not learn that speech, so on the first night he said instead: ‘Go to Lord Angelo, and make him learn to know, that when maidens kneel down they can have anything they want,’ and he handed me a cigarette through the bars. He improvised quite a lot, and missed out words. At the end, just before the disguised Duke reveals himself, Lucio had to say to him: ‘O thou damnable fellow! Did not I pluck thee by the nose for thy speeches.’ Teddy couldn’t remember the word ‘nose’ so just said: ‘Pluck thee about the speeches,’ and I had to move upstage for a bit to recover.

  I had a tricky moment when I had to enter the moated grange, which John Neville had turned into a nightclub. At the first rehearsal I asked him how I was supposed to come into such a club, and he said, ‘The way any f****** nun comes into a nightclub after hours’ – which was not a lot of help.

  John persuaded me to join him in the Playhouse’s poetry and jazz evenings with Johnny Southgate, which he had been doing there for ages, and said, ‘You ought to have a go at them.’ I was frightened at first, but I am very glad I did them. They were done late at night or on a Sunday, and the audience used to bring their drinks in with them. I seem to have done quite a lot of readings and recitals since then, with or without jazz accompaniment.

  By now John was like an old style actor-manager, except that there was nothing old about him. He was terribly disciplined, and he just knew how to run a theatre, and the whole place was full all the time, people used to be absolutely crowding into that theatre. They came not just for the plays but for the restaurant and the exhibitions, or just to look at the photographs. There were so many things going on, and there weren’t many theatres that did that in the Sixties. It isn’t every actor who can become a wonderful director/producer like that, with the foresight to initiate things. He thought the theatre should be a place where people met and exchanged ideas, and had a whole community feeling about it. I don’t remember ever seeing an empty seat at the Playhouse.

  Playing in Noël Coward’s
Private Lives felt like going to a party every night, it was like a wonderful kind of love affair, it was the most tremendous fun. Teddy was playing Elyot, and as Amanda I had a beautiful dark red wig with marcelled waves; the first time I was made up and in costume he walked straight past me, he had no idea who I was. On the first night, my bracelet flew off into the audience, the lid came off the coffee pot and Teddy picked it up and put it in his top pocket. He pushed me into the top of the trolley, I couldn’t get out of it and he refused to help me. It was one of the most riotous first nights I remember. Not surprisingly, the audience didn’t want to let us go. The row scene is quite tricky to play, because it is terribly precise, and really difficult to time it properly, but the director Ronald Magill was a great help in getting that right.

  He also directed The Country Wife, which I did with Harold Innocent as my puritanical and jealous husband, and Michael Craig as the rake trying to seduce me. That was fun to play onstage, whereas most of the fun in Pauline Macaulay’s The Astrakhan Coat was offstage. That was a dreadful play. Michael Craig got very, very drunk, and at one point when I opened the door to go out past a blackamoor figure standing in the corner holding a tray, instead of the blackamoor there was Michael blacked-up with a towel round him. I don’t think anybody in the audience saw him, but I did, and that was a difficult moment.

  Job Stewart and I played a trick of our own on Harold Innocent in St Joan, where he was playing the Inquisitor, and we thought he was over-milking every minute of his hugely long speech in the trial scene. So on the day of the opening we asked John Neville if we could do that scene in full as the warm-up beforehand. As Harold began his speech Job produced a flask from under his habit and poured out cups of tea for all the monks, Ronald Magill as Cauchon took out a long piece of knitting, and all the rest were doing crosswords, playing chess or cards. Harold was so mad at us, he stopped and said, ‘Do you want me to go on with this, John?’ by which time John was laughing so much he had to lie on the floor between the rows of seats.

  My costume for Joan was knitted chain-mail. That was when I was really aware of the absurdity of it all, after we were delayed on Act II. I was standing in the Green Room and I looked out of the window and saw this woman pushing a pram, with two children and a whole lot of bags, and then I turned and looked at all this knitted chain-mail on everyone, and thought, Oh God, what are we doing?

  I adored playing Joan, but I would play her very differently now. I would play her as a real troublemaker, a real pain in the arse, which she must have been. She must have been insufferable, and I am sure that that is the way to play her.

  It was during the run of St Joan that the director Christopher Morahan came up to Nottingham to see it, and to bring me the script of John Hopkins’s TV quartet Talking to a Stranger, to ask me to consider the part of Terry. John was one of the main writers for the pioneering police drama series Z-Cars, and I had played the part of the brittle young girl – Terry in embryo – in an episode of that series, but when I read these scripts I thought, I can’t do this, I really can’t. I said to John that there were so many things I wouldn’t understand; that girl was such a complex character, how would I manage? He said he would sit outside the rehearsal room in the car, so that I could go and ask him.

  Maurice Denham and Margery Mason played my parents, and Michael Bryant was my brother, and each of the four episodes was seen from the perspective of each of us in turn. Terry was a very highly strung character, in a panic about being pregnant and how to tell her family, and the whole thing was emotionally very taxing. It helped that her flatmate Jess was played by Pinkie Johnstone, who became one of my closest friends, but we were still both reduced to tears at some rehearsals. Maurice was not unlike my own father, and the four of us did really become very much like a family over the weeks of rehearsal and recording. My attitude to Maurice and Margery and Michael will never alter; I did feel we all went through something together, though sadly all three of them are now gone.

  One day in the pub Michael said that he was feeling a bit drowsy, and I said flippantly, ‘Well, if I was the director I’d give you the afternoon off.’ Christopher Morahan hit the ceiling, he was under terrible strain at the time, because I think his wife was very ill. Nobody spoke, so then Maurice put his hand on my knee under the table, which made it worse, of course. I got my money out, and I just put it down for my lunch, and got up and left the pub. As I left the pub in Shepherd’s Bush there was the most unbelievable screech of brakes as a car hit a jeep, and John Hopkins came racing out after me. He and I walked around until the end of lunch, and I believe Michael Bryant spoke his mind to Christopher. Then we went back for notes, and I smoked a whole packet of cigarettes – and I don’t smoke.

  Christopher is a marvellous director, and what was so brilliant about John as a writer was that this was the first time on television when people overlapped their lines, and talked across each other like they do in real life. Talking to a Stranger got tremendous notices, and we all received an incredible amount of mail after it went out. It wasn’t totally autobiographical, although John had in fact drawn on real people and incidents in his own family, but one of them rang him afterwards and had not recognised it to be about themselves.

  I won my first BAFTA Best Actress Award for playing Terry; I had really done very little television before this, and certainly nothing so demanding emotionally, so that made it even more special. My busy years in television were still some way off.

  For now I returned to Oxford, because I was devoted to Frank Hauser and hugely admired him as a director. He had such great successes with those rarely performed or unknown European plays. The first one I did this time was Pirandello’s The Rules of the Game, with Leonard Rossiter, directed by James Grout. Leonard and I didn’t quite hit it off to begin with; he worked everything out in advance, whilst I tend to develop a part in the rehearsal room, but then we clicked, and the production had some very good notices. I was given some beautiful Twenties costumes as Silia, which made me look a little like Sophia Loren.

  As soon as we opened in that play, we began rehearsals for the next – The Promise by Aleksei Arbuzov. I have since been told that Frank was convinced that the part of Lika was written specially for me, after Arbuzov saw me in his earlier play The Twelfth Hour, but neither of them told me that at the time. True or not, it was a most rewarding, if exhausting part. The two men in my life were played by Ian McKellen and Ian McShane, and the three of us meet first at the Siege of Leningrad in 1942. Act II is in 1946, when Lika has to choose which of them to marry, and makes the wrong choice. In Act III we meet again in 1959 to try and correct that mistake. It was over three hours long, with a lot of ageing to do, and several costume changes, which kept us all busy. I used to go to sleep all the time during Frank’s notes. There was a big bed I used to lie on, and Frank would say, ‘Is she awake? Is the pussy awake? Because I have a few notes.’

  Trevor Nunn had succeeded Peter Hall at the RSC, and he came to see me before the press night in Oxford, to ask me to go to Stratford the following year to play Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, and he had already cast Michael Williams as Petruchio. I said, ‘Oh, that’s a brilliant idea. But by the way, if The Promise is a success I have to go with it to London.’ This was after the matinee performance and Trevor said, ‘Well, it’s absolutely charming,’ but neither of us thought it would transfer.

  Then we had the most extraordinary first night I can remember. None of us had anybody at it that we knew, not Frank, nor either of the Ians, nor me, because otherwise what followed could not have happened. The four of us decided that afterwards we would all go to a little Italian downstairs restaurant just round the corner from the Randolph Hotel, and only a stone’s throw from the theatre. When we walked in, there was a huge table in the other half of the restaurant, taken up with every single critic. So we rather sheepishly looked at them, and they looked at us, and looked away, and then they all said, ‘Will you come and join us for coffee?’ So we went and sat with them, an
d they were all so extraordinarily complimentary. We didn’t have to avoid talking about the play, because all they wanted to talk about was the play. That was when we thought, We are in here with a winner – which it was. I don’t ever remember such a thing happening before or since.

  We transferred to the tiny Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden, and it was even harder work up all those stairs to the dressing rooms. As we came down from the matinee, we only had about half an hour to transform ourselves back into the wartime teenagers for the evening curtain-up. There was hardly time to put our feet up and have a cup of tea.

  At the opening of the third act, when I entered with Ian McKellen as my husband, we were in fur hats and coats, and there was a very long time while we came in and took the coats off, neither of us spoke for several minutes, we just went in and out not speaking to each other; it said a lot about the marriage. One night we heard this woman remark absolutely clearly, ‘Oh, all them furs, anyone would think they were in Russia.’