And Furthermore

by Judi Dench

  After the first night of Much Ado I left it for quite a long time, partly because I had the ’flu, and then I went up again to see the production. It had grown in confidence, it had grown alongside an audience, and I saw that the audience and the production had been working together, sometimes to the detriment of the play. I thought that the audience had wooed my company into doing something very, very naughty here. But it is difficult in a comedy, because if you get a huge laugh on something, the next night you want the same laugh or even more, you can’t help it because you are hungry for that. But then you have to ask yourself: What is the story here? Perhaps I shouldn’t have such a big laugh on that line.

  I went back to see my cast at Brighton after they had been touring for three months, and I told them, ‘You’ve all gone very West End, playing it all straight out front.’ But none of them were terribly keen on getting my reactions after all that time on their own. Once, when Ken heard that I was in, by the time I got backstage he had left the theatre in his costume to avoid having to hear any of my notes.

  He must have quickly forgiven me, because immediately afterwards he asked me to play Mistress Quickly in his film of Henry V. So now the roles were reversed, with him directing me. He was also playing the title role, which provoked some very unfair criticisms in the press that he was presuming to challenge Laurence Olivier’s famous wartime version. But I couldn’t resist ribbing him about his first appearance as the King, as two huge doors swung back to reveal him stamping in: ‘I’ve never seen anyone give themselves such an outrageous entrance!’

  The following year Ken asked me to direct him as Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, with his wife Emma Thompson as Alison. This was for his own Renaissance production company, put on for just one week in Belfast, to raise funds for charities in Northern Ireland, plus a single Sunday night performance at the London Coliseum in aid of Friends of the Earth. We only had two weeks’ rehearsal, which was very short. It was then televised, with just a week to rehearse that, but I did have the very great help of David Jones, who was in control of the camera direction. We sat together in the control room, and David always let me decide which take was best from the actors’ point of view.

  The same year I went back to my roots at the Central School to direct the students in Macbeth, another play with fond memories for me. I thought that was the end of it for me as a director, but then in 1991 Ian Talbot invited me to direct something at the Regent’s Park Open-Air Theatre. I had loved playing in The Comedy of Errors at the RSC, and also loved the Rodgers and Hart musical based on it, The Boys from Syracuse, so I chose that. On the opening night we had several showers of rain, which stopped the play three times, but the hardy English audience just sat tight under their umbrellas until we began again.

  I went back there two years later to direct Romeo and Juliet, but that was a much less happy experience. At the same time I was acting every night in Peter Shaffer’s The Gift of the Gorgon, and therefore had to leave rehearsals every day at 4 p.m. to prepare, so I fear that I didn’t really have enough time to spend with my actors, especially the young lovers, Zubin Varla and Rebecca Callard. I had the worst press for anything I directed, and it has proved to be the last. Five productions were enough for me, and I have lost the desire to do any more.

  However, looking back on those experiences now, I would say that the pleasures of directing, and being with each of those groups of people, actually did outweigh the unexpected unpleasantness of suddenly being left on the outside, and the door being shut in my face. In retrospect, I did find it attractive to do, and I learnt a lot about the relationships between actors and directors, so I am glad that I was persuaded by Ken Branagh and Peter Hall to give it a try.

  11

  A run of tragedies

  1989-1992

  I HAD SUCH HAPPY EXPERIENCES at the National Theatre with Peter Hall that when Richard Eyre took over from him as Director in 1989 and asked me to play Gertrude in his opening production of Hamlet I jumped at it. I hoped it might erase the memory of my difficult times as Ophelia thirty years before at the Old Vic, but it was not to be.

  Daniel Day-Lewis was cast as Hamlet, and I thought that I would try and play Gertrude like his real mother, the actress Jill Balcon, tall and dark, but found I couldn’t do it. David Burke was the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, and however hard I tried, I couldn’t believe that he and I could have produced Dan. It was also difficult for me not to try and echo Coral Browne, who had been so magical in the part in 1957. Richard Eyre was simultaneously grappling for the first time with all the administrative demands of running the National, with its three theatres, and both of us had some tricky moments with John Castle who was playing Claudius.

  Dan had his own identity crisis which overwhelmed him a little way into the run. He had suffered the loss of his real father, the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, and one night in the dramatic meeting with the Ghost of Hamlet’s father the two bereavements merged for him, he just seized up and could not carry on. Michael Bryant came to make his first entrance as Polonius, and found Dan crying uncontrollably in the wings. While he took him back to his dressing room I went to find Jeremy Northam, our Laertes but also Hamlet’s understudy. He went as white as a sheet, but he changed costumes and finished that performance. He did several more until Dan recovered enough to return to the part, which he did when we took the production to Dubrovnik, though even that was not without its extra drama. At the moment when he banged his head against the wall he momentarily forgot that at Fort Lovrjenac it was made of stone, not the wooden scenery of the Olivier.

  I had played Ophelia here on the Old Vic European tour, and I was both surprised and touched to find a Yugoslav television crew following me around at the first-night party, so at least someone had remembered that earlier performance. I took some beautiful photographs of a helicopter lowering the gigantic statue of Hamlet’s father into the castle at Dubrovnik.

  Returning to this particular play in a different part had its problems, but curiously I was made a similar offer during the run at the National. Sam Mendes came to see me and asked me if I would play Madame Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard, the part in which Peggy Ashcroft was so wonderful at the RSC when I was Anya. Peggy was always in my mind when I played it for Sam, as she had been when I did it on television for Richard Eyre in 1980.

  Sam was only twenty-three, but he had just had a great success directing Gorky’s Summerfolk at Chichester, and was very sure of himself. I heard much later that he said he was nervous about directing me, but he certainly never showed any of that at the time. I said to him once in rehearsal, ‘I’m not going to do that, I’m going to try something else,’ and he said, ‘Well, you can if you want, but it won’t work,’ and he turned his back and refused to watch.

  It was in one of my favourite London theatres, the Aldwych, where I had first appeared in the play for the RSC, so I was particularly thrilled to get a note wishing me luck from John Gielgud, who had played Gaev in that production: ‘To my favourite actress in my favourite play.’ He was such a dear man, with the most exquisite manners.

  We had a brilliant new translation by Michael Frayn, and a great cast, including Ronald Pickup as Gaev, Nicholas Farrell as Trofimov, and Michael Gough as the ancient retainer, Firs. Michael gave a radio interview one morning, in which he said, ‘I am working with three of the most attractive women in the West End.’ I heard this, so when Michael arrived that evening, I rounded up Miranda Foster, Lesley Manville, Abigail McKern and Kate Duchene, and all five of us stood in front of him. I said, ‘OK, Michael, who are the three?’ He was very cross with us, but that wasn’t the only time he was forgetful.

  One night he couldn’t remember Gaev’s full name, and substituted the only Russian name he could think of, and said, ‘Vladimir Ashkenazy is out without his coat again.’ So I offered a prize to anyone else who could slip other Russian names into their lines, and someone even managed to sneeze making a sound like ‘ShosTAKovich.’ But I was very fond of Michael, and
I wish we had worked together more.

  My next play was also directed by Sam: Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars at the Young Vic. Dearbhla Molloy had played my daughter in Juno and the Paycock, and she talked me into taking the role of Bessie Burgess by saying it was not a very big part, but that all the great Irish actresses had played it, and she had a great death scene. That clinched it for me, but the moment when she is shot is a very difficult scene to get right, and I kept putting off rehearsing it, until about four days before the end of rehearsals, when Sam started to say, ‘Look, Judi…’ Then I said, ‘Fine, I’m ready to do it now.’ The most vivid note he gave me was passed on from a man who had actually been shot. He said it was like being run through with a red-hot poker, and simultaneously being kicked by a horse with a force that knocked him off his feet. Try playing that effect on stage and making it look convincing.

  But I must have got Bessie’s appearance right, as one critic described me as ‘a blotchy-featured boozer’ and another as a ‘tottering, brawling rag bag of twitching rage at her lot’. I was both amused and pleased when I was waiting behind a flat to go on after the interval, and overheard one woman say to her friend, ‘She played Juliet once,’ and got the reply, ‘You are joking!’

  The grief explored in that play was sadly matched in life when I lost one of my dearest friends, Peggy Ashcroft. She had a stroke in May 1991 and was taken to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, where she never regained consciousness. When I went to see her there on 14 June, the Registrar took me into a room and said quietly, ‘She died about twenty minutes ago.’ I was so glad that I heard the news that way. When I announced it at the end of the performance that night, I thought I wouldn’t call for silence, because Peggy wouldn’t have wanted that. So I called for applause, and it just went on and on. We could have stood there for half an hour while everyone clapped. She was much loved by audiences, and even more by those of us who had the joy of working with her, and who treasured her friendship. She was such a model for me, from The Cherry Orchard on, and she worked right up to the end, giving her last performance on BBC Radio 3 just a month before her stroke, as Mrs Swan in Tom Stoppard’s play In the Native State. It has always been my expressed intention to do the same.

  At her Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey, Dorothy Tutin and I shared the reading of the dirge from Cymbeline: ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’, which is read at many actors’ memorials, but it had a special poignancy here, as Peggy had been such a memorable Imogen in that play. Many of us had a lump in our throats as John Gielgud, her great stage partner for half a century, quoted Shakespeare’s epitaph for Cleopatra as ‘a lass unparallel’d’. The service was televised by the BBC, in recognition of her acknowledged leadership in the theatre. I still miss her.

  When The Plough and the Stars ended at the Young Vic I found myself working with the same director for the third time in a row, but this time at the National Theatre, where Sam Mendes had been invited to direct Edward Bond’s new play The Sea. Perhaps Sam asked me to play the monstrous Mrs Rafi because she was described as an East Anglian Lady Bracknell. It was a glorious part to play, and she got more monstrous as the run went on. There was a scene with some amateur theatricals where I was required to over-act outrageously, which I found quite hard to do at first. At the first read-through we couldn’t finish that scene, because everybody just collapsed with laughter.

  There wasn’t so much laughter when we heard that the author was coming to a rehearsal. None of us had met him before, and all the cast were terrified. Edward Bond’s earlier plays, like Saved and his version of Lear, had scenes of great savagery and we didn’t quite know what to expect. We got back after lunch to find that he had arrived without us knowing. When the actors came bowling through the door and suddenly saw Edward Bond, they immediately went over into a corner. I glanced at all of them huddled there, looking down and not at each other, and thought that they were behaving exactly like the sheep in a shedding-ring. But he turned out to be a lovely man, and not at all frightening.

  Soon after, Kenneth Branagh invited me to play his mother again in Coriolanus at Chichester, and I said yes immediately. Volumnia is another rather monstrous character, who is instrumental in destroying her son at the end. The rest of the cast included Iain Glen as Aufidius, Richard Briers as Menenius, and Susannah Harker as Virgilia, with a lot of local amateurs in Chichester recruited to make up the warring armies. One night the major casualty was me.

  I came in for the first scene, and there was Susie Harker sitting sewing, I took one step and went straight over on my ankle. When I tried to get up I couldn’t. Susie carried on sewing, so I thought there was no help coming from that direction. Ken came rushing on to help me off, and they asked if there was a doctor in the house. Luckily there was, and he told me I had sprained my ankle. He strapped it up, and after a quarter of an hour’s delay, I went back on and finished the performance with a stick. But I found it very difficult to walk, so when we all lined up for the curtain call and Susie Harker said, ‘I’ll take you by the arm for your call,’ I said, ‘I wish you would.’

  We were the penultimate call, with Ken coming on after us, but that night he just ran on before us, took his call, and then did an enormous flourish towards us as I came on. I was rather overcome by the ovation which greeted me. Ken must have sensed that, because after we all bowed three times and turned to leave, he hissed at me, ‘Get off the stage, you limping bitch,’ which certainly defused the emotion.

  When the run ended at Chichester, I went back to the RSC for a new play by Peter Shaffer at the Barbican. I was a great admirer of his work, both Five Finger Exercise and Royal Hunt of the Sun had made a great impression on me, and at this time I was doing a radio play of his, Whom Do I Have the Honour of Addressing? But if I had read The Gift of the Gorgon to the end I would never have agreed to do it.

  My part was the widow of a playwright, Edward Damson, who is visited on a Greek island by his illegitimate son Philip, played by Jeremy Northam, who wants to write the biography of the father he never met. Much of the story was told in flashback, and my husband was played by Michael Pennington. Peter Hall was directing, so all the omens were good, but I just couldn’t get to grips with the play. At one rehearsal I was in such despair that I threw the script away and locked myself in the loo. Peter spent a long time persuading me to carry on, which I eventually did reluctantly.

  We did it in the tiny Pit Theatre in the Barbican, a building I hate, and I told the RSC directors Adrian Noble and Michael Attenborough so, when they came round on the last night. I said I would never go back there to do a play, whatever the circumstances. I think it is a monstrous building, and we have no business to be there. You never see the company, because you are all in those awful cells. I had a room which looked out on to the underground car park, full of fumes, with dirty windows. There is no positive way you can run a theatre company there successfully, always going up and down in lifts, with nowhere to meet the other actors.

  Despite all my own misgivings, the play was such a great success with both the press and the public that it transferred to Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End, where it also sold out. I tried hard not to transfer with it, but finally gave in when Peter Hall rang me and said, ‘Look, Judi, are you really prepared to put all these other people out of work?’ So we played for another six months to packed houses, but then I did put my foot down, and refused to extend it any further. After all this time, I still don’t know why I was the only person not to enjoy that play. Finty came to it and was so wiped out at the end of it that she couldn’t bring herself to come round afterwards.

  What helped my equilibrium through this seemingly unending sequence of tragedies on the stage was beginning work on my second television sitcom, which eventually ran from 1991 for more than a decade.

  12

  Working in television

  1978-2002

  TODAY MANY YOUNG ACTORS SEE their careers in terms of TV or the cinema, with the occasional t
ime out for a short run of something in the theatre. In my early years it was the complete opposite – most of my work was in the theatre, but then my generation was lucky enough to have all those flourishing repertory theatres. So I did only the very occasional screen work. We will come to my late entry into films in another chapter, and my television credits before I was offered the sitcoms were also few and far between, apart from Talking to a Stranger. Two of them were recordings of RSC productions anyway – The Comedy of Errors and Macbeth – made by Thames Television for ITV. Three others I remember particularly, for different reasons – Langrishe, Go Down for the BBC, and Love in a Cold Climate and Saigon – Year of the Cat, both for Thames.

  Langrishe, Go Down was based on a novel by Aidan Higgins, adapted by Harold Pinter, and directed by David Jones. Set in Ireland just before the Second World War, it told the story of three sisters; Annette Crosbie was one of the others, and my character had an affair with a German student, played by Jeremy Irons. I was the very uninhibited object of his affections, with several nude scenes to play. David came down to talk these through with both Michael and me, to explain why they were integral to the plot.

  This girl used to take air baths, and I had to run across a meadow with absolutely no clothes on. They said to me, ‘It’s fine, because you can keep your wig and your earrings on.’ ‘Well, thanks a lot, that’s a great, great comfort.’ The camera was right up a tree, and I ran across this meadow, where my dresser Lizzie Scamp was waiting behind a bush. She said, ‘You look like a lovely birthday card,’ so I didn’t mind doing it then. I also had to be nude in a river, and in bed with Jeremy.