And Furthermore

by Judi Dench

  Another night I had a letter in the second interval from a friend of ours in York, a charming elderly lady called Mrs Bytheway. I said to Ian McKellen, ‘She says in this letter that she is a huge fan of yours, and is coming round to see me, so please come round to my dressing room to meet her.’ Ian asked, ‘What’s her name?’ ‘Mrs Bytheway.’ ‘What a strange name.’ We went on for the third act, and what we hadn’t realised was that the very first line of the third act began, ‘By the way…’ We were speechless for a moment.

  We heard that Richard Chamberlain was coming one night. He was still playing Dr Kildare on TV at that time, and Ian McKellen became very excited. I used to have the first dressing room, and his was on the floor above, so he said, ‘If he comes round, you’ve got to tap on that water pipe in the corner, and then I’ll come down and just drop in as I’m passing.’ So I said, ‘OK, if he does come round,’ and after the performance there was indeed a knock on the door, and Richard Chamberlain came in. I said, ‘How absolutely wonderful to see you, do come in, please.’ The dressing rooms were tiny, and the only place he could possibly stand was in the corner against the pipe that I was meant to be tapping for Ian McKellen. I thought, How do I edge up to him? Can I put my arm around him in order to tap on it with something like a penny, or a stick of make-up or something in my hand? How on earth can I do that? So I couldn’t, of course, and then Ian eventually dropped in anyway, about twenty minutes after the curtain came down, and said, ‘Oh, do you have any cotton wool? Oh, good gracious, look who’s here – Richard Chamberlain.’

  An even more important visitor, from my point of view, was Hal Prince, who came to see it, and rang my agent the next day to say he wanted to see me about playing Sally Bowles in his forthcoming production of Cabaret. I thought it was a joke, but Julian said he was quite serious. He took me out to lunch first, before I went to the audition, and I had a glass of wine, because I was absolutely petrified when I went into the theatre and had to sing for Hal. I said, ‘If you don’t mind, I think I’ll sing it from the wings.’ It was my first musical, and I was amazed to get the part, but I learnt an awful lot from doing it, especially from Hal, who must be one of the best directors of musicals ever.

  5

  Cabaret and return to the RSC

  1968-1970

  I AM A GREAT BELIEVER IN SEEING whatever is playing at the theatre you are about to act in, because then you get the measure of everything; I know that is why I got into the Old Vic. So when I was given the part of Sally Bowles in Cabaret, James Cairncross said, ‘Right, we’ll go to see The Desert Song at the Palace.’ All I remember of the actual show is that there was one man in the chorus who was very under-made-up; all the Arabs were a dark brown colour except him; James and I laughed and laughed.

  I was very apprehensive about the songs, because I am not a singer. But Hal Prince told me to go and read Christopher Isherwood’s original novel, Goodbye to Berlin. ‘Just read about her, and you will read that Sally was an English girl, Cheltenham-bred, and she can’t sing, but there was something about her that meant Cliff simply couldn’t stop watching her. She would never make it as a singer, couldn’t possibly be a success, but there was something charismatic about her.’

  So I read about that, and then when the musical director was going back to New York during the rehearsals he asked me, ‘Is there anything you want me to bring you?’ I said, ‘I want you to bring me the last note of Cabaret please.’ Hal overheard that, and he said, ‘If you can’t get it, act that you can’t get it.’ It was such a wonderful director’s note. I know that people who do musicals know that note, but I didn’t. The other thing I learnt from Hal was that the story doesn’t stop for the song; it is just carrying on part of the story, and if it doesn’t it shouldn’t be in there anyway. There should be no discernible line between the speaking, going into the song, and then coming out of it. That was such a wonderful piece of advice, and thank goodness he had just great faith in the fact that I would be able to do it.

  He had produced many successful musicals, and when we rehearsed the Sailors’ Dance there was a moment when I jumped and they all caught me, but Hal said, ‘Oh no, cut that musical crap, everybody does that, don’t do that.’ He had very fresh ideas about everything, and he was great fun. Towards the end of rehearsals, he said, ‘Just break out of it now, break out and do what you feel you want to do.’

  It was a very happy company, and I used to leave my door open all the time for everybody to drop in and give me notes and tips. The girls used to make those glorious eyelashes out of black paper, very thin and marvellously cut, and they used to give me theirs. Sally Bowles had to wear green nail varnish, and you couldn’t get it here then, so it had to be sent over from America.

  I had a bit of a problem with Lila Kedrova who was playing Fraulein Schneider to begin with, because she had the dressing room next to mine and I think she got a bit unnerved by all these people coming into my room all of the time. She seemed to think that we were all ganging up against her, so I just walked into her room and said, ‘Lila, what is this?’ She pretended that she didn’t know what I meant, but after that we were quite friends, though not friends like I was with Thelma Ruby, who followed her in the part, and helped me find things for my new house.

  That was the idea of my friend Theo Cowan, the publicist, who rang up and said, ‘I’ve seen a house you should buy.’ ‘Theo! Buy a house?’ I had no intention of buying a house, but he insisted, ‘Yes, of course you can do it.’ It was in Prospect Place, overlooking the churchyard of Hampstead Parish Church, and the price was £14,400. That seemed a huge amount of money to me, but I was so glad that I bought it, which proved to be a brilliant move, and I owed it all to Theo. We went up to see it with Marty Feldman, the comedian. I cannot imagine what the owner thought watching us arrive – great big tall Theo, Marty with his bulging eyes, and this dwarf beside them. After I bought it, Thelma and I used to go down to Brighton, have breakfast on the Brighton Belle, and go looking for furniture.

  My dressing room at the Palace was in the basement, so I could hear the comments of people passing by. There were three that I still treasure:

  ‘Judi Dench in Cabaret! No one will go to see that, dear – no one!’

  ‘Arthur, you told me it was all about nuns and children!’

  ‘Well, where was Frankie Vaughan? I was waiting for Frankie to come on and sing “Come to the cabaret”!’

  I was more concerned about the scenery sticking during the show. It was a complicated set, with a lot of sliders that came in, and they often got stuck. I seem to have had a lifetime of scenery getting stuck. Sometimes we used to just come on and play the scene without it and improvise on a bare stage. That was wildly exciting, just making it up as we went along, though it could be tricky, especially in the last scene, where Sally had to tell Cliff that she has had the abortion. Peter Sallis was the Jewish greengrocer, and he was brilliant at just going on and chatting to the audience whilst the stage crew wrestled with the scenery.

  The show had a mixed reception from the critics, but the audiences loved it, and it looked set for a long run. I said I would only do it for nine months, and Elizabeth Seal was going to take over my part. She was a huge star after Irma la Douce, and there was no sign of bookings falling off, but then Emile Littler, who owned the Palace Theatre, did the dirty on us. They had arranged a last-night party for me, which turned out to be the last-night party for everyone, because Emile wanted to bring in other shows. He brought in three of them in rapid succession, including the comedy Mr and Mrs with John Neville and Honor Blackman, and they all folded. I thought, Serve him right, that will teach him to laugh in church.

  Towards the end of the run of Cabaret Trevor Nunn came to see me, and asked me for the second time if I would go back to Stratford and do The Winter’s Tale and other plays during the season. I had long wanted to work with Trevor, but now he asked me to play Hermione, the mother of Perdita, and I was rather shocked that it was to be a maternal part. I wrote him
a card, saying, ‘Is it mothers’ parts already?’ Then a few weeks later he asked me if I would consider doubling the parts of Hermione and Perdita, which had not been done since Mary Anderson did it at the Lyceum with Forbes Robertson back in 1887. (By a curious coincidence, she had been married in the same church as I was, but I am getting slightly ahead of myself.)

  I thought that to play such a double would be fantastically exciting, and so it was, in a most beautiful production, set in a great white box. Barrie Ingham played my husband Leontes, and Richard Pasco was Polixenes. To begin with, I was not totally convinced that the doubling would work onstage, but Trevor was so sure about it that I trusted his judgement, and the statue of Hermione coming alive at the end brought gasps of surprise and disbelief every night.

  We played it in modern dress, and at an early rehearsal Trevor devised a marvellous exercise in setting up the King’s jealousy. Barrie, Richard and I were lying on a beach with me between the two of them, and of course if you are lying on your front on a beach your head naturally goes to one side when you are sunbathing. So this was all set up, and then Barrie got up and did a kind of swim right round the outside of the room. We just laughed a huge amount, that is the thing that keeps you sane; it does for me at any rate, I can’t speak for everyone. Unless you can afford to make terrible jokes at your own expense, and laugh at yourself, I just don’t think you can begin. I think you have got to be prepared to make such ghastly mistakes; sometimes you make them onstage at the expense of the audience, you don’t mean to but you just think, Oh, I’ll try this and give it a whirl.

  The next play was Women Beware Women, directed by Terry Hands. He was a wonderful director, and later took over the running of the RSC; now he runs Theatr Clwyd in Wales. I liked working with Terry, and it was a marvellous production, but I don’t feel I have ever been able to serve Terry up with the right performance. Middleton’s text was fiendishly difficult to learn, and the final technical run went on until three in the morning. After it Brewster Mason, who was playing the Duke of Florence, produced a bottle of champagne, the only drink I really like, and we went off to drink it in the moonlight. We were certainly ready for it by then.

  The food for the banquet was brought in from a place called Pargeter’s in Bridge Street in Stratford. I remember there was a lot of chicken in breadcrumbs. At this stage I had been seduced by the Duke, I had no lines to say, and I could behave quite badly. I used to think to myself, Am I going out to dinner tonight? No, nobody’s here that I know. So sometimes when Elizabeth Spriggs as Livia was speaking I would get up and lean right across, take her chicken leg off her plate and eat it. I had the most incredible time, just tucking into everything.

  That play was nowhere near as popular with audiences as Twelfth Night, which followed it. This was my second time as Viola, whom I first played on the West African tour. John Barton, the director, was rather like a teddy bear with a big beard, and he had some disconcerting habits. He would perch on the back of a chair and chew razor blades, and used to drink pints of milk out of a beer-tankard. The whole stage was wood-slatted, with great candles on both sides, and on the very first night he got up to give notes to Lisa Harrow and to me, tripped on the top step and threw a whole pint of milk all over the stage. This was actually one of the few occasions when he gave me any notes; he hardly gave me any normally, and I was very unhappy about that.

  Donald Sinden was quite brilliant as Malvolio, and he invented a wonderful moment on one entrance. He was just about to speak his first line when he looked at the sundial, looked up at the sun, then he took out his watch, looked at his watch, looked back at the sundial, put his watch back, and then moved the sundial round. It used to bring the house down.

  Roger Rees played Curio, and he is another great joker. He found a pack of cards with animal pictures that the children used to play with in the Green Room, and he invented this really terrible game, where you had to have a card about your costume which you flashed in the last scene without the audience seeing. He called it ‘Rabbit in the ruff’ but it also became known as ‘Badger in the boot’ or ‘Ferret in the foot’. It was very exciting, and it didn’t half get you through that interminable last scene. I am afraid that at one performance I was unable to resist the temptation to reword Viola’s line to Olivia about her virginity: ‘Nor never none shall be mistress of it’ to ‘Nor Trevor Nunn shall be mistress of it’. I don’t think he has ever quite forgiven me for that Shakespearean sacrilege.

  At the end of 1969 Twelfth Night was one of the plays the RSC took on tour to Japan and Australia. We were given an advance warning: ‘Now you won’t get any laughs in Japan,’ which is quite a burdensome thing to carry on with you when you are about to do that play. I was glad somebody warned us, because it was very difficult to gauge how it was going. If you have had an enormous laugh on a particular line for ages, then suddenly you say the line and there is no laugh at all, that makes you completely lose it, because you leave the pause, and there is nothing to fill it. But then at the end they just went mad with applause.

  We may have communicated to the audience, but it was a different matter with the stage crew, very few of whom understood any English. This became apparent during rehearsals for The Winter’s Tale on Hermione’s first walk across the stage. Our stage manager asked the Japanese interpreter to instruct the follow-spot operator at the back of the gallery, ‘Tell him that when Miss Dench appears he has to follow her.’ When I entered, the spotlight came on, but when I moved it failed to move with me. We kept redoing the walk, with a lot of accompanying shouting in Japanese, but the follow-spot never moved. Finally it was explained that ‘a denchi’ is Japanese for a torch battery, and he was waiting for a torch battery to come on.

  I was not in the third play we took, The Merry Wives of Windsor, so I took the opportunity to go and see the Noh plays and the Kabuki theatre. We were taken into the Kabuki and allowed to watch them making up, but nobody spoke at all. All the actors sat on the floor, with a little marked area around them, making up very quietly with a mirror. Then suddenly, as we stood there, a young man came along and knelt down and said something in Japanese, so we were riveted to this man making up, who was very short and stout and wearing glasses. All this went on for a very long time, and when we went out into the corridor we asked what the young man had been saying. We were told, ‘That is a young actor in the cast, coming up and kneeling to say to the star, “I am not worthy to act with you.”’ A sentiment quite unheard of at the RSC!

  Then we went into the theatre for the performance, and saw the hana-michi, the Seven Great Steps to Heaven from the stage, that long platform that goes all the way to the back of the auditorium. We were sitting right next to it when suddenly this exquisite figure walked along it very slowly dressed in white, and we realised that this was not a woman but the little plump man with the glasses we had watched making up backstage. It was a total transformation of a person, and absolutely breathtaking.

  After Japan we took Twelfth Night to Australia, where the audiences were a bit noisier during the performances, not just at the end. This was the scene of a major change in my personal life, which might have happened earlier if I had gone back to the RSC in 1967 instead of 1969, and played Kate to Michael Williams’s Petruchio then. We had actually known each other since 1961, when I was playing Juliet at the Old Vic and he was in David Storey’s play Celebration at the Duchess Theatre. One night I was going to a play with Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, the theatre historians, who took me under their wing and took me to see everything that was on in the theatre. When I was at Central we used to go to the theatre all the time, we all used to be in the gallery slips, and you could get into the Old Vic for sixpence. But when Ray and Joe took me we would sit in proper seats. They knew about everybody in the theatre, and were fantastically good friends to me.

  This particular night we went for a drink in the pub Sweet Nell of Old Drury, close to the Duchess, and Michael was in the bar, and that was how we met. I thought, What a
wonderful looking boy – which he was. We had a hugely good laugh, and that was it. I used to see him occasionally; I remember us once having tea in Covent Garden, when we sat rather vacantly, looking past each other. He came to the first night of The Promise, popped his head round the door and just said, ‘Hello, terrific, terrific,’ and was then off up the stairs to see the others. I knew him for nine years before we were married.

  He was now in the other half of the company, playing Troilus in Troilus and Cressida at the Aldwych, and I was at Stratford. He damaged his kneecap playing football for the RSC, and had to have a cartilage operation which meant he was on crutches and couldn’t go on for several weeks. In order to recuperate he came up to Stratford, where he had kept on his cottage at Armscote. One night during his convalescence Michael came to see Twelfth Night at Stratford, and joined us all for a drink at the Dirty Duck afterwards. We started to see each other quite often, but then we all went off to the Far East, and he went back for the last weeks of the run of Troilus. When that ended he decided, on the spur of the moment he always said, to fly out to Australia and surprise me. He certainly succeeded in that.

  He knew many people in the company, and he had heard that we were all in a bad way because the actor playing Orsino in Twelfth Night, Charles Thomas, had died suddenly. Michael supposedly flew out just for one week, at the end of which we all said goodbye to him, and off he went to the airport. When we came back there he was in the bar again. Don Henderson walked in, saw Michael and went back out to look up at the sign, came back in and said, ‘I thought it was The Duck we were in!’ This happened every week for about six weeks.

  Then Michael proposed, on a very beautiful day in Adelaide, but I said, ‘This is absolutely no good at all. We had better wait for a rainy day in Battersea.’ Because this was in Australia, we were on tour with the company, with glorious weather and swimming, and being fêted by people all the time. So the conditions were too wonderful to say yes – better to wait. Then he did propose again, back in England, not quite in Battersea, as it was in his flat in Kensington, but it was raining; and I hadn’t seriously said no the first time.