And Furthermore

by Judi Dench

  It became a challenge to return it in the most unexpected places – I had it handed to him onstage in Mary Stuart, it fell out of my parasol when I opened it in A Little Night Music, Tim had it stencilled on the window in my dressing-room loo, I had it made up in the form of a chocolate cake for his birthday, and when I couldn’t go to his wedding anniversary lunch at the Ivy I sent him a white tureen with a lid and a beautiful china ladle, with the glove lying in the bottom. Much later on, he came to see Hay Fever, and arranged with Dan Stevens to give it to me onstage, but I knew he was in, so I came in from the garden wearing one. Tim thought he had caught me out, and sent a message to Dan saying, ‘Well done!’ and Dan had to confess, ‘But I haven’t had a chance to give it to her yet!’

  When Peter Hall asked us both to be in the Gala Opening of the new Rose Theatre at Kingston in 2004, I got the stage manager to summon Tim on the tannoy back to the stage just after he had rehearsed his scene. I hid in the circle, and when he came on, puzzled as to why he’d been called back so quickly, I threw the glove at his feet. Then it dawned on him, and he looked up and grinned at me, ‘Thus it goes on.’ And so it has, to this day. This silly game has become so well known that whenever I am questioned by an audience someone always asks, ‘Where is the glove now?’ Everyone seems to get as much fun out of it as we do, so it seems a shame to stop. At that Gala performance in Kingston Tim brought the house down with a wickedly funny impression of Alan Bennett in his sketch Going Round.

  The last night of Antony and Cleopatra was absolutely wonderful. Peggy Ashcroft came on at the end, and we were all given roses. We had all had a marvellous run, but by then we weren’t sorry to see the end of it, because we had given a hundred performances, and at four hours long it was quite exhausting.

  We played Antony and Cleopatra in repertoire with Entertaining Strangers, a new play by David Edgar, set in the nineteenth century. Tim played the leading part of a vicar, and I was the owner of a brewery. We all went down in a bus to Dorchester, and were shown round the Eldridge Pope brewery. We learnt all about hops and how they brewed the beer.

  I had a scene with a baby at the beginning, and I said it would be wonderful to have a real baby, not a doll. It lasted two nights. I said, ‘I’m not having that baby, it’s joining in.’ It was hopeless, I thought it would be such a good idea, but the baby went back. I loved doing the play, but the part was strangely unsatisfying, I found the jumps in it quite difficult. We had a big scene in a churchyard when it started to snow, and it was hugely effective, except that you could see people in the audience tasting it, and I thought, Oh, come on.

  This was a promenade production in the Lyttelton, and one night I saw the director Howard Davies sitting in the front row, cross-legged, so I wrote a note saying, ‘I suppose a screw is out of the question?’ and as I went by I dropped it into the lap of the man next to him!

  We opened on the night of the Great Storm in 1987. We stayed at Hampstead that night, and the next day Finty and I had to return to the house we had bought in the country not long before. We drove down the lane in a convoy, over power lines that were all down. A huge branch of the oak tree had fallen, and I had a neighbour who worked in wood, so we gave it to him and he carved it into hearts of oak. I gave one to everybody in the cast on the first night of my next play at the National, which was Hamlet. But before I embarked on that production I had to give a lot of thought to the one I had promised to direct for Ken Branagh.

  10

  Directing for the first time

  1985-1993

  I FIRST WORKED WITH KENNETH Branagh in the 1985 BBC Television production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, when I played Mrs Alving and he was my son Oswald. That is a dark play, but Pastor Manders was played by Michael Gambon, who is a terrible joker, so we had one moment of pure farce. The director Elijah Moshinsky asked us to improvise a scene around the dinner table to run under the credits, as the camera panned across our faces. He said that he would dub in a music track later, over our adlibbed murmur of conversation. This was asking for trouble with Michael.

  When Natasha Richardson as the maid offered him some potatoes, and they were very large potatoes, Michael said, ‘Yes please, I’ll have twelve.’ Once the camera had left him he started to corpse, and so did I as soon it passed me, which was too much for Ken, who just collapsed with laughter as the camera reached him. All the attempted retakes were hopeless, so we were sent home in disgrace and had to shoot that scene again the following day. Apart from that hiccup, we all worked very happily together, and it began my long friendship with Ken.

  When he invited me to direct a play for his new Renaissance Company in 1988 he asked me which one it should be. There was only a moment’s pause before we both said together – Much Ado About Nothing. I knew the play well, and had loved playing Beatrice to Donald Sinden’s Benedick. For his Beatrice, Ken suggested Samantha Bond. The three of us met in my dressing room at the National, and the casting was quickly agreed.

  I didn’t ask any of the other actors to do audition speeches, because we were all rather nervous. I was nervous about directing, and I think they were all nervous about me directing them. I thought we would talk, I would put them at their ease, so we would have a cup of tea. I ended up having twenty-five cups of tea or coffee, and doing most of the talking, asking them questions and answering them myself – just to put them at their ease. Some would come in and say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to sit there, I’ll sit on the floor.’ Some would come in a kind of disguise, and I longed to say, ‘Look, I’m an actor, and I understand that fear.’

  My Michael kept asking me about my concept for the play, and I said, ‘I have no concept at all, and I don’t want one. I don’t want to go with a cut-and-dried feeling of what I want.’ I thought I would just let my thoughts wash through a sieve as we worked on it. What I was very sure about was that you could not update it too far, because it concerned and worried me that if you do, say, Romeo and Juliet in modern dress, then why didn’t they just phone Friar Lawrence? So I was always asking questions about the play, and I just wanted to tell the story very clearly. I thought ultimately that it must be set in Messina, it must be in a hot country.

  When our designer Jenny Tiramani came to the National to talk to me about it, I told her that I didn’t want one of those moments where a young man comes on in tights and you don’t actually listen to what he says at first, because you are eyeing him up and down a bit and thinking, Oh, he looks all right in tights. I think there is something very removed about that, which I didn’t want. I wished to make the play more accessible, but not to have it played in jeans. So then I thought of setting it in Italy at the time of Shelley, early Victorian, which is very good for the men, and also very good for the women, especially if you have a very sparky Victorian girl, which is also rather unusual.

  It took me back to the days when I wanted to be a designer, all those years ago. I never knew why I did that training really, but I have always felt that you perhaps do something which is for the best in the end, even if at the time it may not seem so. When it came to directing I realised that I did see a whole series of pictures in my mind, and that helped me enormously with directing a play.

  The other thing I discovered was that the first thing a director has to have is energy. I had always thought that I had a lot of that, but I came home after one long rehearsal in London and sat down in my coat, and the family said, ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ ‘No, I don’t want a cup of tea.’ Then a quarter of an hour later, as they were watching the news, I got up and went straight upstairs to bed, where I slept from a quarter to eight that night until a quarter to eight the next morning. You not only have to have the energy to think up things, but you have to watch everybody minutely, with a kind of all-seeing eye. You need to use that as an actor, but as a director you have to use it to the nth degree. I knew from being an actress that if you did something new or different, you were very irritated if it was not noticed in rehearsal.

  A friend of mine was told by one of
the actors, ‘She goes very, very quickly,’ because I didn’t enjoy blocking the play at all. I am an inveterate list-maker, so I made masses of lists before I started. I did a million drawings about where people should meet, and then of course I didn’t do any of that. The other requirement for me in a director, as you may have gathered by now, is that a sense of humour is essential. We did laugh a great deal in rehearsals, and out of humour come so many things, the malleable quality that humour creates in people is of vital importance when you are working with them.

  It helps when you have to get over things that you think are serious, notes that you have to give, observations that you have to make; you can often do it with humour, whereas in another context it could be taken as cruelty. I can still remember Michael Langham saying to me all those years before at the Old Vic, when he was directing The Dream and I was playing Hermia, ‘You come in, with all that energy, and all you throw over to us is like a rubber ball coming on, bouncing all over the stage.’ I thought, Oh, how cruel. He was absolutely right, but there are kinder ways of putting it.

  The actors’ own creativity, and the response to direction from each of them, was remarkable. Whatever I gave out, I got this huge response back from everybody, and I felt that because I had been through my own learning process, in thirty years with Shakespeare, I could actually pass on something that would help them in this play. I was so anxious not to do to Samantha Bond what Michel Saint-Denis had done to me in The Cherry Orchard, that I was perhaps over-careful not to give her line-readings. When she asked me if hers was right, I used to say, ‘There is another way,’ and let her find her own interpretation for herself. I couldn’t say to Sam, ‘This is how I played it,’ and nor would it have been right for her. When she said, ‘Kill Claudio,’ it got the gasp that it should, where when I played Beatrice it often got the laugh that it shouldn’t. So she did succeed in finding her own way.

  What I did say to the cast, probably every day, was, ‘I want you to go out and tell the story. You must never forget that there is a story here to be told, and that’s what our business is. I don’t want anyone coming on and doing it on their own, coming on and striking thirteen. I’m not interested in that, I’m interested in somebody coming on and re-creating this story as if it were for the first time.’

  We could not afford an arbour for the eavesdropping scene, so Ken used to sit in the middle of four little trees. Patrick Doyle composed the music for ‘Sigh No More, Ladies’, and he would sing one verse, and Ken would start to go out just as Patrick started to sing again. Ken would go, ‘Oh Christ!’ I was outraged and said to him, ‘You absolutely mustn’t say that.’ I had to give him a note: ‘I don’t want to hear “Oh Christ” or “Oh God”, I simply don’t want to hear it right in the middle of Pat’s song.’

  Hugh Cruttwell, the former Head of RADA, was a great friend and adviser to Ken Branagh, and he came to the first run-through. I was terribly nervous about him seeing it, and it was all going so well until they came to the scene where they are all in the tomb singing, when they all started to laugh. I was apoplectic with rage, I was absolutely furious with them.

  Then of course it all turns back on you, because you think, Oh, I have done that, I have been accused of that. When Peter Hall urged me to direct, he said, ‘Go and do it, see how difficult it is.’ I began to see what he meant, because I never realised before how transparent actors can be. They come in and try to do something, and then they say, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I don’t know this, I was working at it all night.’ They are glassily transparent. You know when they have, and you know when they haven’t. Then they all go off to the pub and gang up against you.

  Fortunately I had Rachel Kavanaugh as my assistant. She is my godchild and had just finished university, and she turned out to be the most brilliant assistant. Now of course she has turned out to be a very successful director. So having her was a real bonus.

  I quite understand that lovely story of when John Gielgud directed Twelfth Night at Stratford: before the run-through the actors pleaded, ‘Sir John, please, please could we get through it without you interrupting from the stalls. We need to get through it.’ He agreed, and Orsino came on and started, ‘If music be the food of love—’ and Sir John was up out of his seat straight away saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no, not like that!’ I now know that feeling.

  I couldn’t but interrupt them when I thought they got it wrong, and yet when they got it right I couldn’t but interrupt them again, saying, ‘That’s exactly how I want you to do it. Do it that way, it’s wonderful.’ They said, ‘Would you just shut up and let us get on with it if that’s right.’ So I learnt a lot about my behaviour towards a director by being a director, and I learnt not to say, ‘I have been up all night looking at this,’ unless I really have been.

  The production opened at the Birmingham Rep Studio, which holds 150 people, and I had the kind of nerves that I never want to go through again. I have never been so frightened as on that first night at Birmingham, walking round the theatre with Rachel. I had not expected the moment of handing it over to be so painful, that moment of sitting there with an audience in, when you can no longer say, ‘Can we stop and do that again?’ It was very traumatic indeed.

  It was as if the fifteen actors had disappeared, and somebody had come on with a most enormous mirror. There I saw reflected what happens to me at a first performance, that terrifying thing that, if you are not very careful – and I have only experienced a couple of first nights when this hasn’t happened to me at one point – you simply withdraw behind a kind of barrier in yourself.

  Their nerves made them mis-time some lines, which consequently failed to get the laughs we expected. I was so wound up by this that I couldn’t stop myself going round and exploding, ‘What are you all doing? It’s like watching a multi-car pile-up on the M1!’ They took it very well, and when the rest had gone I said to my leading man, ‘Oh, Kenny, it was like giving birth to a baby that isn’t breathing properly. You watch it trying to walk, and then it falls over and can’t get up, and you can’t do anything, it’s agony.’

  As soon as I got back to my room in Birmingham, because of the way it had gone, I then mistrusted entirely my sense of humour. I doubted my own judgement about the play, and that was completely shattering, because I thought, Well, maybe the things that make me laugh don’t make other people laugh, maybe we haven’t set about telling the story properly, and maybe the decisions that ultimately I had to make were not the right decisions.

  So I had a night of real self-analysis about it, but for a bit of that night I slept soundly, and in that sound bit of sleep I recharged my batteries, having made a lot of lists as well, so I was able to ring Michael next day and say, ‘Don’t come up, I’m all right.’ Then I went in and we did probably one of the best day’s work for all of us. At the second preview everything clicked, and I was so glad that Frank Hauser chose to come that night.

  The day of the press night coincided with my going to Buckingham Palace to receive my DBE. I was the only dame that day, and I was shown into a room with the men who were to be knighted. They have to kneel, but the dames don’t. We rehearsed it, and one man said, ‘May I smoke?’ ‘No, but you may play the piano.’ The orchestra played ‘Half a Sixpence’ when I walked up. The most wonderful moment for me came when the Queen was giving awards to those who had saved lives at the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, and I can see them now – a young sailor in bell-bottoms with bright red hair, that man who made the human bridge, and several nuns. It was all terribly moving, and I was glad to be there that day.

  Then Michael and I caught the train up to Birmingham. The cast made me promise to wear the same clothes I had worn for the investiture, and they wanted to see the insignia. I lent it to Richard Clifford to wear that night as Don Pedro, and it looked very striking, but I told him very firmly that it was for that one night only.

  Before we started rehearsals I said in my innocence, ‘What’s going to be wonderful about directing is going home in the evening
, and doing just what I want.’ In fact it isn’t like that at all. You go home in the evening, and at five minutes to seven you look at the clock and think, This is the half, I wonder are they feeling like it tonight? and then you look again at half-past seven and think, They are going on now, and have they got this right and that right? Oh, I bet that’s getting sloppy. I pored over the show reports, I watched the timing, I looked at all the remarks at the end, and then I went up like a Tartar with my notes and shouted at them. I did let them have a bit of free rein, but the Studio at Birmingham was such a small space that they couldn’t have much physical free rein. They could have mental free rein, as long as they didn’t push the text out of true.

  What I was most concerned about was showing to an audience of tomorrow that reading Shakespeare need not necessarily put you off for life. I had a lot of letters from schoolchildren, and from their teachers who took them to Much Ado, who said, ‘The story is so clear, and it’s helped us enormously, and I really found it both funny and very, very sad.’ I thought that was the greatest compliment, and underlines why I think the theatre is important – to make that audience of tomorrow want to go and see more Shakespeare done.

  The thing I try and tell myself on the nights I don’t feel like performing anything is that the audience has made the effort of going and getting the tickets, they have finished work, have cleaned up somewhere, have come to the theatre; their gesture is the first, and yours must be the second, it is a gift you must return. Of course it isn’t always as easy as that. There was one occasion in The Comedy of Errors when I didn’t feel like it, so I thought, I know what I will do, I will just play the whole thing to somebody. I knew nobody there that night, so I saw a lady in a green coat, and I thought, I’m going to do it entirely for her. So I did it absolutely a hundredfold to her, and told everybody that was who I was doing it for, and when I came back after the interval she had left. So that is where it is dangerous.