And Furthermore

by Judi Dench

  As a director he changed his mind a lot during rehearsals. He would always find a very good reason for giving you a note, and it always seemed to hang together, and then he would come in the next day and it was all out of the window. He would say, ‘I don’t think anything I gave you yesterday was any good, we’ll do something else.’ So we had to keep adjusting it, but because we were all completely in awe of him, and wanted so much to work with him, anything he said went, anything was OK by me.

  My favourite story of that play happened outside the stage door. Ours was opposite the stage door of Wyndham’s Theatre, where John Gielgud was appearing with Ralph Richardson in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. As we were going in one door Sir John happened to be going in the other. He called out, ‘Oh, hello, Dan, I hear your play’s coming off. No good? Oh my God, I directed it!’ Just one more of his famous ‘bricks’.

  7

  Golden years at the RSC

  1975-1981

  HAVING BOUGHT THE HOUSE AT Charlecote for all the family, it was a relief when Michael and I were able to move back to Stratford and rejoin the RSC for the rest of the Seventies, even if some of the time it meant that we were commuting back and forth to the Aldwych. My first play was in fact scheduled to run there: Shaw’s Too True To Be Good, which was once again in the skilled hands of Clifford Williams. It is one of Shaw’s strangest, with a Microbe in Act I and a send-up of Lawrence of Arabia in Act II. I was originally asked to play the part that was eventually taken by Anna Calder-Marshall, but then I read it and realised that Sweetie Simpkins has a much better time, and I was absolutely right. She has to pretend to be a French Countess, and I had a wonderful time dressing up as the Countess, and putting on a French accent with Sweetie’s own Cockney twang breaking through it frequently. Ian McKellen was a burglar turned preacher, and we both had a lot of fun.

  There were some challenging Shakespeare plays to come, but we had a very strong company to tackle them – Donald Sinden, Ian McKellen, Michael Pennington, Bob Peck, Robin Ellis, Richard Griffiths, Ian McDiarmid, Griffith Jones, John Woodvine, Greg Hicks, Roger Rees, Nickolas Grace, Mike Gwilym, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Francesca Annis, Marie Kean, and of course my own Michael, who was going to play The Good Soldier Schweik as well as the Shakespeares, and took over the Lawrence part in the Shaw. Somebody later christened that company the ‘Golden Ensemble’, and it certainly felt like that to all of us at the time.

  In Much Ado About Nothing Donald was Benedick to my Beatrice. John Barton, who was directing, had the idea of setting it at the time of the British Raj in India, and John had the view that this was the last summer that they would get anything together at all. It was very nice that they weren’t young sparring partners, that they weren’t quite over the hill, but almost over the hill. Beatrice is a difficult part, because there is this brilliant repartee between them both all the time, and then suddenly she turns and says, ‘Kill Claudio.’ I used to get a laugh on it, and of course the laugh should not have been there, it should be very shocking and make the audience gasp. I had to work really hard not to get that laugh, I tried the line differently every evening, but still it came more often than it should. Strangely enough, much later on when I directed Kenneth Branagh as Benedick, and Samantha Bond as Beatrice, she never got the laugh at all. (But we will come to my brief foray into directing in a later chapter.)

  We all had beautiful and exotic costumes in Much Ado, designed by John Napier, and it was a brilliant idea to have John Woodvine play Dogberry as a Sikh in a turban, which made sense of him getting the language wrong. He was hilarious, but he is a terrible practical joker, worse than me, and his jokes made the actors playing the Watch corpse on many nights.

  The costumes for Macbeth were almost minimal by comparison. It was the play that Ian McKellen and I most wanted to do, but Trevor Nunn was very reluctant. The three of us were having supper in Hampstead, and he said, ‘Oh, I’ve done it so many times I’m not sure I have any new ideas, I think it should be someone else.’ Well, he had a mutiny on his hands. I said to Trevor, ‘Come on, let’s do it, we’ll have a laugh.’ Eventually he agreed to direct it in The Other Place at Stratford, in a simple production to suit that small space. It was an old shed with a corrugated iron roof, which had been adapted into a small studio theatre. We went to look at it, and walking back to the main theatre I said, ‘This is not going to work, is it? It’s just not going to work.’ And at that moment I fell off the pavement. I got up and walked a bit further and said, ‘It really isn’t going to work,’ and then I fell over again. But that didn’t bode ill actually, as it worked like a dream when we got down to it.

  The next day we went back for a rehearsal, and Trevor had got the stage management to block out every chink of light with paper stuffed in all the gaps in the corrugated iron roof. He didn’t put any lights on and said, ‘Ian, go to the top of the stairs. Judi, wait at the bottom. Ian, come down the stairs, knowing there are people asleep all around you, and now play the scene of coming down after the murder.’ That seemed to unlock something within us all. The small auditorium could only seat 150 people, and with very little room backstage we were all in one room getting ready. There was a very small cupboard off it, that usually housed wig-boxes, and that was where the girls dressed. We were all cramped in there, while the chaps were in the slightly larger room. But this induced a wonderful company feeling, and an unbelievable air of levity, with lots of stupid schoolboy and schoolgirl jokes. When we actually came to do the play, straight through without an interval, it was a very concentrated piece. That is what creates a company, and an audience will always register if members of a company have a rapport with each other.

  The play opened with us all sitting on orange boxes in a circle, and there were no understudies. Roger Rees, who was playing Malcolm, had broken an ankle and was in a wheelchair. The management said, ‘Well, you know this is booked out every night.’ Roger said, ‘If it can be explained, I’ll play Malcolm from the wheelchair.’ So he came into the circle in the chair, Griffith Jones as Duncan in a white habit and long white beard was helped forward by two people, and then the Witches came on. Susie Dury put on a limp and dragged her leg, and dribbled out of the side of her mouth a bit, followed by the other two. Marie Kean was playing the First Witch, and as she passed she said to me out of the corner of her mouth, ‘It’s the Lourdes production!’ She looked terrifying, and at one point she had to go through the loos to get back onstage, and found some schoolboys hiding in there. She hissed at them, ‘What are you doing here? Get out, get out.’ She gave them the fright of their lives, and we heard a scuffling in the corner as they came out. I think they regretted skiving off.

  The claustrophobic atmosphere in that confined space helped to evoke such a strong sense of evil that we came to recognise a priest in the front row most nights, holding up a crucifix to protect the actors from it. This was Neville Boundy, and it was flattering that he should get so carried away, but it has to be said that he is a very theatrical priest. The production was such a sellout that we had to transfer it to the main house, because of all the complaints that no one could get tickets. But that was a kind of disaster, because it didn’t work there at all, it lost its intensity. That was recaptured at the Young Vic when we took it there, because we were back in the right-sized theatre for it.

  I never agreed with Edith Evans’s belief that there is a scene with Lady Macbeth missing from the play. Just before he speaks to the murderers Macbeth says:

  ‘We will keep ourself

  Till supper-time alone: while then, God be with you!’

  and she leaves him. After he has seen the murderers, and before the two of them meet again, her soliloquy says it all:

  ‘Naught’s had, all’s spent,

  Where our desire is got without content:

  ’Tis safer to be that which we destroy,

  Than by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy.’

  It charts every bit of the breakdown. Then you see the beginning of the banquet, when she
is trying to make this tremendous effort, and suddenly the whole thing just cracks into thousands of pieces. She can’t go on, she answers in single lines from then on.

  That is why it is so important at the beginning that she is not a woman who could do it on her own. I am always against those Lady Macbeths who are so strong and evil at the beginning. If they can do it on their own, why do they invoke the spirits to help them? When she says: ‘You lack the season of all natures, sleep,’ it tells you absolutely what has been happening to them. He starts to exclude her from everything, and obviously paces around alone at night. So it is right that she disappears from view, and then suddenly you see her with her mind completely gone. I don’t see where there could have been another scene, and what it would say that is not already said in the play. I said to Trevor, ‘We must play it so that any schoolchildren who come to see it and don’t know it will think that they might not do the murder.’

  After we finished the run at the Young Vic we recorded it for Thames Television. It was well received on transmission, but I made the great mistake of watching it, and I was desperately disappointed in what I had done. I had imagined that my performance was better than what I saw on the screen. It stopped me watching anything else. I thought, I am not going to watch myself again, I will just have this fantasy in my mind of what I actually do. So there are quite a lot of my films that I have never seen, except for a few premieres I could not avoid.

  Many of the Macbeth cast were also in The Comedy of Errors, which came next, and when John Napier showed us the set for it everybody just burst into applause. It was centred round a Greek taverna, with balconies and tables outside, and at the beginning we all came on and waved to our friends; that was very exciting. When the audience came in, waiters were brushing up in the street and would talk to them. I have never had so many letters from schoolchildren, because they suddenly saw something that was very unstuffy, and they could not believe that it was so immediate and modern, just like a place they might go on holiday. We were very faithful to the play, but it had music and dancing.

  Gillian Lynne was the choreographer, and she used to put us through an hour’s movement class every morning before we started rehearsing. She even got Trevor Nunn doing it. We all did split leaps across the room, and got very fit, which was necessary as it was a very physical production, running up and down stairs and on to the stage. Gillian was very strict with us, and my Michael got so peeved with her once that he nearly threw a chair at her, but fortunately thought better of it.

  That joker John Woodvine took over from Robin Ellis as Dr Pinch, and on the last night he excelled himself. He had an entrance through the audience, and as he came up he turned and said, ‘Keep my seat, Aphrodite, I’ll be back,’ which nearly brought the house down. I had to say, ‘Good Doctor Pinch…’ and before I could finish the line he interrupted, saying, ‘I’m not a good doctor, I don’t have the patients.’ That brought the whole house to a standstill, including all of us.

  Somebody used to fire a gun up into the flies, and a bird dropped down, but this night the bird dropped down about six lines later, the whole thing was chaos – the audience loved it. This was the first season when the RSC toured to Newcastle, and at the end when we invited people to come up and join the dance onstage, they stayed dancing for so long that we thought we would never get back to our digs at all. We finally had to say that perhaps it was now time they all went home. The whole experience with that play was a very joyous one.

  Which is more than I can say for the next one – King Lear. It was my own fault, because originally it was the only play in that season I was not to be in. When I asked Trevor if I could change my mind, he said, ‘Yes, I’ll put you down to play Regan.’ But then I didn’t enjoy playing it, and I still don’t know why really. I had a wonderful grey fur coat, a grey fur hat and boots, which I thought was frightfully glamorous, until at the dress rehearsal Mike Gwilym and Nick Grace said, ‘For goodness’ sake don’t run in that, or somebody will take a pot-shot at you.’

  Donald was wonderful as Lear, and my Michael was quite brilliant as the Fool, but I didn’t feel wonderful because it didn’t feel right that the three of us playing Lear’s daughters were presented as if we were at the State Opening of Parliament at the beginning, in white dresses with blue sashes and tiaras. Somehow I could not reconcile that world with one where someone would come in and say of the bound Gloucester, ‘Pluck out his eyes.’

  In that scene John Woodvine was not much help as my husband, the Duke of Cornwall. On the first night I just caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye as he took something out of a plastic bag with his back to the audience. Then as he said, ‘Out, vile jelly,’ he threw this eye, which flew across the stage and stuck on the side of the proscenium arch. At that moment I thought it was faintingly frightful, what a wonderful effect. But the next night I came on, and saw the eye from the night before, still stuck on the proscenium arch, and thought this was not promising for the rest of the run. When the production transferred to the Aldwych I asked to be released from that part. I found it just as unpleasant as playing Portia.

  My memories of the next two plays I did at the Aldwych are hazy in the extreme. In Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community I played Lona Hessel to Ian McKellen’s Karsten Bernick, and I only had three short scenes. All I can remember is that I had red boots, whistled, and had a vaguely tartan dress; I can’t recall a single thing about the story. As for Congreve’s The Way of the World, I never understood the plot, either in rehearsal or in performance – and fortunately there were not too many of those. The best thing about it was playing Millamant opposite Michael Pennington as Mirabell. We were to co-star several times in the coming years. The next time was in The Gift of the Gorgon by Peter Shaffer, when we played Mr and Mrs Damson, so after those two plays we always greet each other now as Mr and Mrs Plum.

  I felt that I was in for a run of difficult parts when I went back to Stratford to play Imogen in Cymbeline. I had seen Dame Peggy play it at Stratford in the Fifties, and I thought she was exquisite. So I went to ask her advice, which was not the most comforting: ‘It’s an absolute pig of a part, I never got it right. You’ll hate playing it each night, but on the last night you’ll regret not being able to play it again.’ I agreed with her about the part, but not about the regrets.

  Cymbeline is difficult to make sense of, being a kind of fairy tale, with an evil queen and a heroine, and a great cross-section of characters. My worst memory of it is of the scene where Imogen wakes up beside what she thinks is the body of her husband with his head cut off. Bernard Shaw wrote a whole essay on how unfair it was to put the actress in that position, and I was inclined to agree. I was not helped by the fact that the dummy in my arms had knees that bent in both directions, so it was very tricky to manoeuvre without getting unwanted laughs. David Jones was the director, but he had to leave for America as soon as we opened, so he wasn’t around to help us get it right. In the end I think we got away with it, but it is not a play for which I have any affection.

  So I was much relieved to get to work on Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, which we did at the Aldwych. I loved the challenge of doing an Irish play with an all-Irish cast, and I thought, Now I will see where my roots are, with a mother from Dublin, and a father who spent much of his early life there. It was a great help to have old friends like Marie Kean and Norman Rodway in the cast, and I quickly made new friends of the others, especially Dearbhla Molloy, who was playing my daughter.

  Trevor gave it a very realistic production, and I had to cook a sausage onstage for Norman. There was not actually enough time to cook it properly, so I had to palm it and substitute a cooked one, but I had so many people asking, ‘Is Norman all right, eating that half-cooked sausage?’ The last scene is a highly emotional peak, where Juno has a huge long speech to her husband saying, ‘Why, why have I been accused?’ I was reluctant to commit myself to it for quite a while. There has always been a kind of funny superstition about doing the last sce
ne of a play, and in the past there were actors who would never say the last line of any play in rehearsal.

  But Trevor took me through it just like he did in The Winter’s Tale. One afternoon he said, ‘Come on, we’ll go into the theatre,’ and the two of us did it. It is a wonderful way of working, just doing it really step by step, and doing it privately, so that nobody else had to be around. If you can analyse it and quietly do it with the director, then it doesn’t become a fearful thing. I became mad about the play, and we had a great run in it. One notice said that I was unrecognisable in the part, which was music to my ears, I could not have wished for anything else.

  During those early rehearsals of Juno, when I couldn’t get it right, I said to Trevor, ‘Oh, why can’t I play some mangy old cat in this thing you’re doing?’ This was the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats, based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which Trevor was directing next. So they asked me to play Grizabella and the Gumbie Cat. Gillian Lynne was doing the choreography, and we rehearsed in a funny old gym in Chiswick. Brian Blessed was also in it, and we had to do classes with all the dancers, but quite often Gillie would say to us, ‘Brian and Judi, don’t do this.’ Then one morning, rehearsing the Gumbie Cat with Wayne Sleep, I just heard this huge crack. I knew what it was, because it had happened to Nick Grace during The Comedy of Errors. It is unbelievably painful when it happens, just like an enormous, huge piece of furniture being smashed against the back of your leg. I turned to see who had kicked me. You hear what sounds like a pistol-shot going off, and it is just like a carthorse kicking you in the back of the leg. I knew straight away, and so did everybody else. Wayne Sleep just picked me up and carried me, I don’t know how he did it. I was taken home, and had a bath with difficulty. Then I was driven off to the surgeon Justin Howse, who said, ‘I’m afraid you’ve snapped your Achilles tendon, you must come in tomorrow and have it operated on.’ I asked him, ‘How long is that?’ and he said, ‘Six weeks.’ I thought, Ohhhh!