by Judi Dench
In early 2010 I returned to one of my very favourite parts, which I had last played forty-five years ago – Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and for the same director, Peter Hall. The attraction for me was that it went back to 1962 and my association with Peter. He said, ‘Look, I’m going to be eighty that year, can we do this?’ It was extraordinary, I did remember every single word of the whole play. I was exhausted at the end of the evening, because not only was I saying my part, but I found myself saying everybody else’s parts too.
It was produced at the new Kingston Rose Theatre, where the stage design replicated the one from Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre. Peter’s idea was that I should play Titania as Queen Elizabeth I, with her distinctive red wig and white ruff, because the play was likely to have been performed at her court, and was part of a repertoire of plays she would have seen.
We did a kind of dumb-show at the beginning, and tried it first with Elizabeth on her throne, and Oberon as the Earl of Essex, but I thought it was essential to show just a group of actors getting ready. At first I used to take the scroll with the script from somebody who didn’t play anything in it, as if Elizabeth came on and actually edged somebody aside, but then I realised that tells another story. So we all thought up the eventual opening together.
Because I was still word-perfect in the part, I started rehearsals a week after the rest of the cast. What was so uncanny for me was hearing Rachael Stirling as Helena, the part her mother Diana Rigg had played with the RSC when we did it before. She was different of course, but sometimes she sounded so like Diana. It brought back other memories of that 1962 production – when John Gielgud brought Peggy Ashcroft to see it, and I hadn’t known he was there until he sent me the most huge bouquet of beautiful white flowers, with a note, ‘I felt I could fly away with you.’
This time I played some scenes quite differently. When Bottom was wearing the ass’s head, he laughed with a hee-haw, so I hee-hawed back. That just happened one day in rehearsal. I thought, If she loves him so much she wants to try and speak like him too, why ever not? I thought at the end we ought to have had a very small fairy with an ass’s head run across the stage, I was frightfully keen on that idea, but there was no money to do that, and of course that too would have told another story.
It is only now that I have realised what it is about The Dream which always appeals to people. It is because an audience loves to know something that the cast doesn’t know, just before it happens, and of course in this play Shakespeare sets it all up. He tells you everything, so the audience are always one step ahead, and I am sure that is part of the delight of it.
We did a special children’s matinee at the Rose, and they just loved it. At the Coutts Sponsors’ reception afterwards, somebody said to me, ‘Oh, you all look as if you are having such fun.’ I thought that proved that when we all enjoy each other’s company it transmits itself to an audience. It is not that we are going out there thinking what fun we are all having, but doing it to convey this glorious story. It was a really happy, good company, and it was great being at the Rose too, it is such a lovely theatre, and I just want it to go from strength to strength.
I am always saying that I want each job to be as different from the last one as possible, and in my ideal world I would like to alternate regularly between working on stage and on film, either for television or the cinema. But it rarely seems to work out like that, and in recent years I have spent more time in front of the camera than in the theatre. I am more comfortable with the discipline and routine of live theatre, and am grateful that that is where I learnt my trade.
When I was at Central I had a problem with projection, and one of the teachers, Oliver Reynolds, said to me, ‘Maybe it’s because you’re such a small girl that you have a small voice,’ so that set up a real challenge for me. But first Michael Benthall at the Old Vic, and later Frank Hauser at Oxford, certainly cured me of that vocal shortcoming.
Today a lot of young actors have no intention of going on the stage. What they want to do is make a hit in television, or make a film, and have that kind of life. But I think those of us who have had a theatre training are very lucky, because the biggest projection you have got to do is in the theatre, then comes television, and then comes film. If you want to shrug your shoulders on a film you can just think it, and it would be picked up in your eyes. But actors who have only ever done television or film can get caught out by not projecting enough if then they come to do a play in the theatre.
Some young actors write to me, and others come to see me, and that is lovely, though I can’t ever think what parallel lines they draw with me. I find I learn so much from people who are much younger now. I am always flattered when a young director asks me to work for them, and if young actors want to know things it is rather rewarding, because then I feel I am passing something on. I don’t want to impose it on them, but if they are interested and want to know about verse-speaking or whatever it is, that I can do.
I do think it is a terrible pity that so many of them don’t know who Peggy Ashcroft was, or Ralph Richardson; I feel it is so important that we keep the memories of our predecessors alive, and know about the work of David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Alec Guinness and Sid Field. We should all have a curiosity about the profession, and what we have come from. Those great figures of my early years do seem now of Mount Rushmore proportions, but maybe that’s just to us who learnt at their knees. I love that mystery surrounding certain actors, and of course we don’t have that any more. When you walk on to a stage in the theatre now, and it says clearly in the programme ‘Definitely no photographs’, you are faced with a hundred little red lights, and you know that they are taking your picture on a camcorder or a mobile phone.
On a film you have to sit and answer questions about what you think of the part, why you wanted to play the part, and I think that’s none of the public’s business. Why should you know the ins and outs of everything? You don’t say to a dress designer like Betty Jackson, ‘Why have you made a dress like that? Why did you cut the dress like that?’ Why should the public know everything? The joy of the theatre is not really going and knowing that somebody had terrible difficulty playing this part, or why they did it; it is to go and be told a story, the author’s story, through the best means possible. In any case, I never know why I’ve done something, it’s for lots of reasons. I want to keep a quiet portion inside that is my own business, and not anybody else’s.
To those who are just starting out on their careers, I advise them not to do it at all if there is anything else they want to do. I also advise them that they mustn’t do it if they haven’t got great reserves of energy, because there is no point if you are a tired person. As I have got older I am conscious that I take more care to conserve my energy, and I have a routine when I am in a play that hardly varies.
I get up at about 8.15, almost on the dot, and I pad about in a dressing gown a lot. When you have a performance that day, you are conscious of it from the moment you open your eyes. Then I do all the things I have to do – shop, make lunch, do the washing, though I no longer do the ironing, someone does that for me, which is the greatest luxury. If I am being driven in, I sleep in the car, but I always get there early; Michael used to say that that was because I am so nosy, I have to know about everybody. I like to know that people are all right, and I like to catch up with what has been going on while I am not there. We have to be there by the half, but I get in at about 5.30. I just have to be there, and I have to shed off home, and stop worrying about all the things I haven’t done.
If the play is in repertoire, and we haven’t done it for several days, then we have to do a word-run, which is essential, but can be very tedious. Rehearsing it after we have opened is such agony. We are all so pleased to see each other, but then we have to sit there and go right through the whole play – oh, that is so tedious.
I find that I always have to do the same things before a performance. My dresser makes me a cup of tea
without any milk, but with honey in it, and then I steam my voice, which is something I have always done since A Little Night Music. A steamer is like a teapot, with a spout but no handle, it has a cork and a long tube. You fill it half full of boiling water, put your mouth to the spout and breathe in and out without taking your mouth away. It is just wonderful, and lots of singers do it. Then I take a phial of ginseng and royal jelly, which is just like drinking pure honey. I always have one before each performance, matinee and evening, I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t have that. I do vocal exercises, such as chanting ‘hip-bath, hip-bath’, and I have the tannoy on all the time, unless I am sharing a dressing room with Anna Massey, who can’t bear to hear the audience coming in, and we compromise on just the last five minutes before curtain-up.
I used to be able to go out to tea after a matinee, but I can’t do that any longer. I don’t like to break the continuity of the theatre. I don’t even go to the canteen between two shows unless it is for something very, very special, like the day John Gielgud came to see Amy’s View at the National. Instead, I just have something light in my dressing room: potted shrimps or a bit of chicken – although I was really spoilt when I was playing at Wyndham’s Theatre. Michael and Finty gave me a present of a lobster salad sent in every night from Sheekey’s Restaurant just down the alleyway, I can still remember how delicious that was. I had the same thing when I played next door at the Albery, now the Noël Coward Theatre. After that meal I sleep. My dresser wakes me with the cup of tea and the ginseng phial, and I am off again.
I love the repertoire system, I like to be employed but I don’t like to be working every night. Michael used to give me the occasional little talk about taking it more easily, but I have never wanted to do that, there are not enough hours in the day for me. He also used to say that we should live each day as if it is the last, and I have always shared that view, as long as I can remember.
You do see people who work towards an age, and then at sixty or sixty-five you see them go into a deep decline, and you wonder: Why? What do you retire for? You retire if you are in a job that has just kept you employed, and given you some kind of income, and then you retire to do things that you really want to do. Well, I am doing the things I want to do now, so I don’t want to retire. Actors are really remarkable people to be with. I like the company of other people, but I love the company of actors, and to be in a company. My idea of hell would be a one-woman show, I wouldn’t be able to do that, I wouldn’t know who to get ready for. The whole idea of a group of people coming together and working to one end somehow is very appealing to me. It is the thing I have always wanted to do, and I am lucky enough to be doing it. You don’t need to retire as an actor, there are all those parts you can play lying in bed, or in a wheelchair.
What I want to do now is to be a tad more choosy. I want to do something that is much more unlikely for me, more daring, and if I am going to put my energy into a play, then I will do something I haven’t tackled before. (Although if anyone came up to me and said, ‘Would you do Absolute Hell,’ of course I would do it.)
I have read a couple of new plays recently which I thought were good plays, but not for me. I have never done a Stoppard, never done a modern American play. I quite like not knowing what I will be offered, and being a bit uncertain about it. I would love to go to New York again for a short time, if it was the right thing for me to do. I made some terrific friends, and the whole of that theatre scene is so compact and intense. You all go and eat in the same area, so you meet actors who are in other plays, and you absorb the whole of the theatre scene in New York when you are there.
There is still so much I want to do, and I pray that I will be given the chance, and the time to do it. I treasure all the friends I have made through my work, and I look forward to making new ones in the future.
Photo Insert
Every night at the Old Vic I watched each play in the season from the wings. I learnt so much from watching others.
On holiday in France with my brother Jeffery, my sister-in-law Daphne and my father.
With Paul Daneman as Sir Toby Belch and John Neville as Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night. I played Maria with a Yorkshire accent, which seemed to fit the character well.
Two early TV roles in 1960: Princess of France with Robert Hardy in the BBC series The Age of Kings (above); and a tearaway girl in Z-Cars (below), a character later developed into Terry in John Hopkins’s Talking to a Stranger.
With Franco Zeffirelli rehearsing Romeo and Juliet, 1960. Franco was quite unlike any other director I ever worked for.
With Peggy Ashcroft and Dorothy Tutin in The Cherry Orchard. Peggy said, ‘I have a feeling that you’re going to have a hard time. Michel always picks on someone, just don’t let him see you cry.’
A dance routine for a charity fundraiser with other actresses at the London Palladium. I’m on the far right.
I had a brilliant wig made in Paris out of yak hair for A Midsummer Night’s Dream– it was like the top of a dandelion.
I enjoyed playing Isabella in Measure for Measure though we only had mixed notices for it.
I adored playing St Joan, but I would play her now as a real troublemaker.
In the film of The Dream the costumes kept being cut down, until I ended up just being sprayed in green paint every morning.
Sally Bowles in Cabaret. The thing I learnt from Hal Prince was that the story doesn’t stop for the song, it carries on the story.
Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, with Roger Rees as Florizel.
Viola in Twelfth Night with Donald Sinden, who was quite brilliant as Malvolio.
Our wedding day, 5 February 1971.
Michael rehearsing in my going-away hat.
Trevor Nunn gave us a lovely advance wedding present by casting us as the young lovers in London Assurance.
The Merchant of Venice with Michael as Bassanio. I had this idea of a wig for Portia with lots of curls, and John Neville put his head round my dressing-room door and said, ‘Hello Bubbles.’
That was all he said.
With Finty as a baby.
Michael and Finty on holiday in Cyprus.
Finty in her communion outfit.
Macbeth was the play that Ian McKellen and I most wanted to do, but initially Trevor Nunn was very reluctant.
In Langrishe, Go Down, Jeremy Irons was a German student, and I played the uninhibited object of his affections.
Beatrice in rehearsal for Much Ado About Nothing with Donald Sinden as Benedick. The director, John Barton, set it at the time of the British Raj in India, which worked brilliantly.
I loved the challenge of doing Juno and the Paycock with an all-Irish cast, and it was a great help to have old friends like Norman Rodway there.
With Anna Massey in A Kind of Alaska, as the victim of sleeping sickness awakening after sixteen years.
Michael played my husband in Pack of Lies, though we never talked about work when we came home.
In Mr and Mrs Nobody, which Michael and I mistakenly thought would be an absolute breeze.
Playing Goneril to John Gielgud’s King Lear on BBC Radio 3, with an all-star cast.
With Tim Pigott-Smith(above) and Peter Hall (below) on a research trip for Entertaining Strangers. Tim started our long-running black glove saga; the gloves are now on display in his study.
With Helen Fitzgerald and Miranda Foster in Antony and Cleopatra. Alison Chitty designed the wonderful costumes, with all the Egyptian characters in earth tones of orange, yellow and pink.
Gertrude with Daniel Day-Lewis as Hamlet at the National Theatre, 1989. I thought I would try to play her like his real mother, Jill Balcon, tall and dark, but found I couldn’t do it.
With Michael Pennington as my husband in The Gift of the Gorgon. It was a great success, and I still don’t know why I was the only person not to enjoy that play.
Christine Foskett in Absolute Hell, 1995. Still today if anyone asks me what I want to be doing tonight, my answer is Absolute Hel
l.
Above and below: Preparing to play Esme in David Hare’s Amy’s View, directed by Richard Eyre (left). David (centre) was a huge comfort throughout the rehearsal period.
With Patricia Hodge rehearsing A Little Night Music, which broke all previous box office records at the National.
With Michael at John Mills’s eightieth birthday party. We had been friends with Johnny ever since he and I first worked together in The Good Companions, and he was a man after my own heart.
Enjoying the garden at home.
Michael learning some bad news for England in the sports report.
Finty with a very alert Sammy.