by Judi Dench
Michael was away in France, playing the assistant to Derek Jacobi’s KGB chief in the spy film Enigma, so I said to Bonnie, our nanny, ‘If Mike phones, don’t tell him till it’s done.’ I was in hospital for two weeks at the Fitzroy Nuffield Clinic in Bryanston Square. Trevor and Andrew came to see me and said, ‘We’ll delay the opening, you obviously can’t now play the Gumbie Cat, but you can play Grizabella, because she’s meant to be clapped-out, it doesn’t matter.’ So I went back to rehearsals, which had now moved into the New London Theatre. I went to see Trevor the day before, to brush up on the song. The next day we were going to do the beginning, and I walked up those platforms on to the stage and fell off. I couldn’t manoeuvre them. So I went to my dressing room, called a taxi, and went home to Hampstead. Michael was home, but he was going back that day to Strasbourg. I rang Trevor and said, ‘Trevor, we have to be practical, there is no way I can do this.’ So they recast it, and Elaine Paige took over as Grizabella.
Michael’s film director, Jeannot Szwarc, said to him, ‘I think we ought to get Judi out of England for the opening of Cats, I don’t think she should be around for all that razzamatazz,’ as the word was that it was going to be very special. So he invited Finty and me to Paris, and we went, but by then I had to dress my leg each day. We came back from Paris, and I will always remember this: at the airport that morning as we were leaving, all the moving walkways had stopped, and we had to walk. There was a very nice man who took my case for me, I don’t know who he was. Then I went to see Justin Howse and he said, ‘Oh Christ, this is no good.’
We were going to dinner with Mary and John Mills at his club, and Justin said, ‘No, no, something terrible’s happening, you’ll have to come back in again, I’ll have to re-operate on it.’ So the four of us had a rather tearful dinner. The next day I went into the Nightingale Clinic in Lisson Grove, and I was going to have the operation the day after, but when he looked at it then it had completely burst and drained. He said, ‘In actual fact, I’m not going to have to do that at all, something quite extraordinary has happened to it. What you will have to do, though, is just to lie there.’
I lay there for a month and a day, and watched television. I never was interested in Wimbledon before, and I have always loved it ever since, because it really was a lifesaver. I used to read, and I had lots of visitors coming to see me. It was then that I realised how tiring it is to lie in bed. John Stride and April and their little daughter Nell came to see me, and Nell took all her clothes off in a wonderful kind of cabaret.
One of the nicest calls I received in hospital was from Hal Prince, who heard about what had happened and rang me from America to say, ‘I’ll tell you exactly what you’re going to do after you come out of there. You and Finty and Mike are going to come to our house in Majorca. We’re going to be there for the summer – come and have a holiday.’ So that is what we did; we had never had a summer holiday before that, and that was where we met Stephen Sondheim for the first time. He was swimming in the pool, and Hal just said, ‘This is Steve,’ and we didn’t know who he was until he was playing the piano later, and Michael said to me, ‘Hello, you know who Steve is, don’t you?’ We had a lovely holiday there, it was very kind of Hal and Judy, and ever after that we made sure we had a summer holiday, because we realised that it is absolutely essential to get the batteries going again.
When we got back from Majorca, Cats had become a smash-hit, and we finally went to see it on 9 September 1981 – I can always remember that date. Although I suppose I cried a little bit, I saw how wonderful Elaine Paige was in it, and I had no regrets about it. I thought I would find it really painful, but I didn’t at all.
8
From Lady Bracknell to Mother Courage
1982-1985
IN 1982 I WENT TO the National Theatre for the first time, at Peter Hall’s invitation. There had always been a kind of rivalry between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, you were seen as either an RSC actor or a National Theatre actor. Now, I can’t imagine why, but there was then this division between us all. I was glad to be asked by Peter, as I wanted to go to the National very much, and I didn’t feel that I was somehow betraying the RSC. After all, Peter had moved from one to the other, and he was the bridge between them.
He was going to direct The Importance of Being Earnest, and wanted me to play Lady Bracknell. Several people warned me off the part, and Peggy Ashcroft came round to my house in Hampstead with George Rylands and said, ‘This is a part you mustn’t play, you mustn’t play this part. You really mustn’t.’ She never told me why, and I was too frightened to ask, because I was committed to play it by then. So I didn’t want to find out why. I knew that Peggy had played Cecily to Edith Evans’s famous dragon of a Lady Bracknell in 1939, and I think she thought, like many people, that invidious comparisons would be drawn.
Zoë Wanamaker was playing Gwendolen in this production, and we already knew that we were both going to be together again in Mother Courage for the RSC, so I used to stand in the wings with her and say, ‘We must make the best of this, because we could be pulling that cart round the stage. We must get on and make the best of it.’
But I found it quite difficult at the beginning to find the character of Lady Bracknell. I said to Peter, ‘I feel too young to play this,’ and he said, ‘You can say that once more, and then you’re not to say that again.’ That was very good for me. Then I had a couple of weeks off while they set Act II, which I wasn’t in, and Michael and I drove up to Scotland for a holiday. We stopped at Inveraray for lunch, and I looked at the Castle, which gave me an inspiration. I suddenly thought, I know exactly how to play her: like Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, with that very pale face, dark hair, and red mouth. I had never met her, but had read all those stories in the newspapers about her love affairs. I thought that there was a similar quality in Lady Bracknell of being quite predatory. She is so awful about Lord Bracknell, and I thought that she was always dying to get round to Half Moon Street, to have her hand on Algy’s knee. Nigel Havers was playing Algy, and Martin Jarvis was Jack Worthing.
I gave Martin a terrible fright on Boxing Night. The shower in my dressing room suddenly went on the blink, boiling water absolutely poured out, and I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t get anyone to fix it, and then I was called to go onstage. Martin was leading up to his line, ‘I was found, Lady Bracknell,’ when I skipped half a page and cut his first reference to the handbag. It gave him quite a turn – I saw the whites of his eyes. Of course it had to be the most famous line I cut: ‘A Handbag!?’ Everybody remembered Edith Evans’s swooping delivery of it, so it was the great hurdle for me, that was why the dam burst at the weakest point.
We worried for the rest of the evening that the cut would make nonsense of the unravelling of the plot at the end, but it seemed as if few people in the audience noticed. However, one lady did, and wrote to me to say, ‘You have ruined my entire Christmas.’ Well, it ruined mine too, so I wrote back to tell her what happened in my dressing room that made me skip that vital bit of the plot. Apart from that particular night, we had a great success with The Importance.
Once it had opened, we started rehearsing for the Harold Pinter triple-bill Other Places with the same group of actors. I was only in A Kind of Alaska, as the girl with sleeping sickness who doesn’t wake up for sixteen years. I read up about the disease and its treatment with the drug L-Dopa; when we did it, sixteen sleeping-sickness patients still remained at Enfield Highlands hospital. I also knew that Ralph Richardson’s first wife had died of it. All I remember of the first night was that moment of getting out of bed and walking towards Paul Rogers as the doctor, and having an absolutely clear flash of thinking that was why I snapped my Achilles tendon in Cats, so that I would know the whole process of learning to walk again. You have to be told to put your heel down, because you are so frightened when you start to walk again. That experience stood me in incredibly good stead. The production was later televised, but the TV director flatly refused
to use any of the original cast, and I was very upset about that.
Only being in the last of the three plays meant that Anna Massey and I had time to build an elaborate joke on Nigel and Martin. We let it be known to them that Peter was directing us in another play, entitled The Crew, written by a man called Nicholas Harrad, and they got frightfully beady about it. They kept asking us what it was about, and we told them it was about two female lorry drivers. Peter Hall and the stage manager Diana Boddington went along with the act, putting notices and rehearsal schedules up on the notice boards, so Martin and Nigel got more and more jumpy the longer it went on, muttering, ‘Why are they being employed and we’re not?’ I had a photograph taken with me leaning out of a lorry wearing a cap, with a fag hanging out of my mouth, talking to David Hare in a sweater emblazoned Anna Massey and Judi Dench ‘The Crew’ by Nicholas Harrad. I don’t know how long it fooled Martin and Nigel, but it was wonderful fun while it lasted.
I also don’t know whether that kind of hoax is catching, but the boys were as bad as the girls at setting them up. When we went on tour with The Importance, Martin played a dreadful trick on Nigel in Glasgow. Between the matinee and the evening performance Martin changed all the clocks, and he had taped the sound of the audience arriving at the beginning of the show. Nigel was sitting in his dressing room with curlers in his hair, thinking he had got plenty of time to get ready, and Martin played the tape of the curtain going up. Nigel knew he had to get down the stairs, under the stage and up the other side, and he was screaming and throwing the curlers off. Any other man would have had a heart attack. He ran on to the stage, and we were all standing there waiting for him, with the safety curtain down. He was completely shattered. Nigel told me later that it was because he used to pull a trick on Martin, who had said, ‘I’ll get back at you for this.’
After Wilde and Pinter, my next playwright was Hugh Whitemore, in Pack of Lies, which was based on the real-life story of the Portland spy ring run by the Krogers and Gordon Lonsdale, and its effects on their unsuspecting neighbours, played by Michael and me. Apparently the script had been turned down by several other actresses before it was sent to me. Michael read it and said, ‘Just read these two lines in Act II.’ So I read the two lines and said, ‘Oh yes, I would do that.’ Since I am notorious for not reading scripts I always relied on his judgement, and he was never wrong. This time he was very enthusiastic, and went off to Ruislip to find the house where Mr and Mrs Search, the real-life couple we were playing, had lived. He had terrible difficulty finding the house, and the rooms were tiny.
Ralph Koltai had designed the set to exactly the same proportions, and we could never think how you could get more than three or four seats in that little front room. When Michael came back he told me there were thirteen chairs in that room. Bill Search still lived there on his own, and he told Michael how his wife had died in the kitchen sitting in a chair, and that scene was put in the play. The Searches were renamed the Jacksons in the script, and my character, the wife Barbara, was a very shy person. Projecting that quality to the circle and upper circle of the Lyric Theatre was really difficult, a very good kind of lesson to do every night. It was a fantastically exciting play, but I did find my part draining. I used to say that I longed to come down the stairs and say, ‘My Lord of Warwick…’ or something like that, because Barbara’s horizons were quite contained.
My great friend since the Old Vic days, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, was playing the spy Helen who betrays their friendship. Richard Vernon played the MI5 man who comes to tell the Jacksons who their friends really are, and to ask their help in catching them out. He had to come in at one point and say, ‘We’re looking for a car, a Vauxhall, with the registration number ABY 129; have you any knowledge of that?’ One day he came in and said, ‘We’re looking for a car, a Vauxhall with the registration number RU 12.’ (That is less funny on the page than it sounded on the stage: ‘Are you one too?’) Well, I had to go off and stand in the hall for a few moments to recover myself.
It was an enormous help that Michael was playing my husband, although we never talked about the theatre or work when we came home; perhaps a little bit in the car, but very little even then. I don’t like to talk about a part outside rehearsal whilst I am still working on it. It takes the edge off the spontaneity for me.
While we were both playing in Pack of Lies, our first TV sitcom A Fine Romance was being transmitted by London Weekend Television. At Christmas we had a row about the sink blocking up at our house in Hampstead. We were being driven to the theatre in a cab, and we were not speaking at all. Going down Shaftesbury Avenue before we turned into the Lyric the cab stopped at some lights, and when a lady passing suddenly caught sight of us she came right up to the window and started to sing ‘A fine romance, with no kisses’, which ended our row of course.
When Michael and I were first approached to do that television series, Trevor Nunn said, ‘Oh no, don’t do a situation comedy, that doesn’t get bums on seats.’ Well, I think he wouldn’t say that now. I think it is our business to do as many things as we can, and my goodness it teaches you something. People should not demean situation comedy, it is the most difficult thing in the world.
We played Mike and Laura, a middle-aged couple who are both very shy and fall in love. Bob Larbey had written the scripts, and I was so nervous about it that I asked if the director could be James Cellan-Jones, as I knew how good he was at directing comedy. Michael read it and said, ‘You know, this would be hugely good fun.’ The other couple were Susan Penhaligon as my young married sister, and Richard Warwick as her husband. We all got on so well that we used to arrange day-trips to France for the cast and crew just as an outing, and everyone else thought we were filming. ‘Oh no, we’re just here for pleasure.’
What I quickly learnt was why situation comedy is much more difficult than anything else. You have just five days to rehearse it before the recording, and then you have to come out and talk to this big studio audience before you start. I never got used to that; Michael took to it absolutely without a hitch, but I was all over the shop. Every performance that we did, I stood there saying, ‘How have I got myself into this?’ I love people coming, but it is just so unlike me to have to go and say a few lines as myself and meet the audience, I loathe it. It is like my worst nightmare, like walking into a roomful of people at a party that I don’t know. I dread it, and people just think you are affected if you say that. Making a speech, oh crikey! But why should it be anything like acting? Acting is the antithesis of making a speech, because what you are doing is being another person, saying lines that somebody else has told you to.
You have to come out and say, ‘Hello, so nice to see you here, do clap, do enjoy your evening,’ and then you have to suddenly think about what you are doing in this scene. There is always the risk of things going wrong, and Michael was a very steadying influence. You have to stop, and say to the audience, ‘Sorry, we’re going to have to go back on this,’ and you go back on it and get it right, and the audience go absolutely mad because you have got it right at last, and then you have to say, ‘Don’t do that, because we can’t have that kind of reaction suddenly in the middle of a scene for no reason.’
In the second episode of A Fine Romance I had to pick up some glasses of beer and take them over to a table. In rehearsal I took two in each hand, but when it came to the take I tried to lift all four in one hand. Why would I do that? Fright, it is fright that makes you do it.
We rehearsed in a church hall near Waterloo Bridge. I was walking to the loo and back, singing, and I met the vicar, who said, ‘Don’t sing in church.’ I thought that was a rather rum thing for a vicar to say. We were there on our wedding anniversary, 5 February, and Michael, unbeknownst to me, went over to the man who used to sell flowers underneath the bridge, Buster Edwards, who was one of the Great Train Robbers, and said, ‘Could I have a dozen roses, please?’ Buster said, ‘A dozen roses, mate!! Do you know what time of year this is? Pull yourself together.’ Michael w
as really told off.
The programme was very popular, and for years afterwards people would ask, ‘Why don’t you do it again?’ After four series we decided to call it a day, and the Head of London Weekend Television, John Birt, tried to change our minds. He took us out and asked us why didn’t we want to do more. We said we wouldn’t do more on television, but why didn’t we make a film of it? But nobody seemed at all interested in pursuing that idea.
A Fine Romance appealed to an audience that had never seen us in the theatre, and those who then came to see us in Pack of Lies hoped that they were going to see those two dotty people. We had a group of American college students who came to one of the TV recordings, and one of them asked, ‘Miss Dench, do you ever get a chance to do any classical theatre?’ What could I say but, ‘Oh yes, once or twice.’
One famous modern classical role I regretted accepting was Mother Courage for the RSC at the Barbican. Howard Davies had come to tell me the story, but as I had not read the script what I didn’t know – and Howard had omitted to tell me – was that she is never off the stage. I was so cross when I found this out on the first day of rehearsal that I said, ‘Well, who translated this? I can’t make head nor tail of it.’ Howard said, ‘Hanif Kureishi, this is him here.’ Hanif has never spoken to me since.
I thought that I should really not have said yes to this, that this was a big mistake. But then of course we started to work on it, when the anger or fright is turned into adrenalin, and gradually ideas form. People often ask, ‘Don’t you have difficulty learning the lines?’ Sometimes I do have a lot of difficulty learning the lines, but the real difficulty is working out why the character says the line, and what is going on between the lines, which is often more important than the line itself.