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The
making of a great dame |
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The huskiness in Judi Dench's voice makes her sound 16 going on Eartha Kitt. Her sentences lurch forwards rather in the way of a car with kangaroo petrol. She talks with enthusiasm about everything, sometimes getting words wrong or asking what they mean ("humanitarian?"). And she fulfils one expectation by speaking in splendidly actressy superlatives about the other people she works with. The writer and director of Mrs Brown, the film about Queen Victoria she has just made with Billy Connolly, are both "geniuses"; acting with the Big Yin was "heaven"; trying to learn her part in the new David Hare about to open at the National, Amy's View, is "agony" and "torture", but will eventually be "thrilling"; her husband and daughter are "paramount". Halfway through talking to her, I wrote in my notes: "a socking great naive". It was when she was describing her preparedness to fight a corner, which involved a story about her bursting into the office of the then director of the National, who was in a meeting with a prominent Sir. What she was doing was getting him to keep the bar open backstage for an extra half-hour so the cast could have a drink after Antony and Cleopatra. Not exactly Spartacus leading the slaves to victory, but to the great dame, this is evidence that "at the National, everybody can get things done". To the rest of us, the fact that the South Bank's No 1 turn can arrange for the spear- carriers to get a half of lager after curtain-down is completely unsurprising. But after a while, you realise that what seems simply like charming naivety is, in fact, an undefended openness. Add to that practically no vanity, an instinctive sense of people's contradictions and a reluctance to judge, and you begin to work out what makes her an actress of such brilliance and versatility. In the 40 years since she first performed at the Old Vic, as a 23- year-old Ophelia - she will return there at the beginning of next year to join Sir Peter Hall's company - she has defied typecasting. She has played Cleopatra ("Why me? I'm a menopausal dwarf"), the original West End Sally Bowles in Cabaret ("Like me, middle-class and couldn't sing"), Juliet in a production by Zeffirelli ("I got panned"), the spy mistress M in GoldenEye, and a brace of those BBC sitcoms from the bit of middle England where even Waitrose is half- timbered: A Fine Romance, with her husband, Michael Williams, and As Time Goes By with the ever-reliable Geoffrey Palmer, which has just been recommissioned for a seventh series. Even though these tenaciously hug the middle of the road and cause members of the smart set to bury their head in their hands, she is as believable and real in sitcom as she is in Chekhov, Ibsen or Shakespeare. She will tell me nothing about Hare's new play - neither will he, because he never does - except to say that it is about "the awkward turns that love takes, feuding families...And it's a defence of the theatre. You'll just have to come and see it". The National's brochure describes it as "a play about the long-term struggle between a strong mother and her loving daughter, Amy". But again, she does let on that she is having terrible trouble learning it. She says, a little disarmingly: "With this one, I shall actually have to physically look at the script and learn it." Doesn't she always? "No, before I've always done it by osmosis." Not only does she never learn plays, she hardly ever reads them before the first rehearsal. "When we were doing Antony and Cleopatra, I met Tony Hopkins at a dinner party and he said, 'Have you read it?' And I said, 'No.' And he said, 'Thank Christ for that.' And Peter Hall had two bummers at the read-through." But surely she at least reads her own bits in advance? "No, I don't do that, either. I know it's idiosyncratic, but it means that you don't start the process before you're actually with everybody, and then you can listen to them." She doesn't think about it beforehand, then? "I must think inside my head-computer, so to speak." She doesn't intellectualise at all? "No. I only do instinctive," she says, much as a Yorkshire baker would announce that they don't do fancy cakes, they only do sponge. Her character Esme, in Amy's View, is an actress of a different kind from Dench. "I think I'm more adventurous than she is. She's of the old school, when the West End was full of straight plays: 'Enter through french windows with trug'." Does she like her? "I never make that decision. It's immaterial...any more than you approve of yourself. I do make moral judgments about myself, but I don't think you like or dislike a person. I think you just see a jumble of all sorts of things - some good, some bad, some things you like, some you don't, and some you are bewildered about. Show me a part that's black and white." One of the central arguments of the play takes place between her and her daughter Amy's boyfriend. "To him, the theatre is obsolete. When a person walks into a room, you know they're going to walk across...so fast-forward, jump cut." Presumably both she and Esme disagree. "Oh yes, absolutely." What is important about the theatre, then? "Well, it's absolutely vital." Her speech car now has a bad attack of kangaroo petrol. And I remember that she only does instinctive, not intellectual. But then she makes the comparison with a Quaker meeting. She's been a Quaker since she was a teenager. "Quaker Meetings are entirely to do with everybody else...passing things round...communing with other people. Theatre is live communication with other people. You've got to think that every night there is a whole group out there and they need to be told a story." Dench is a living riposte to the argument by those (cf Bryan Appleyard in these pages last week) who praise the individual experience of poetry and the novel over the theatre, betraying a preference for ownership over sharing, for market individuality over democracy, for the privacy of experience over an idea of society. Their intellectualisations abhor the shared and the communal. Dench makes no special pleading for the theatre. "If you're going to say to me, is the theatre as essential as getting people off the streets, I'm going to say to you, it's a different thing. People have got to be got off the streets. But you cannot set one thing against another. It's too ephemeral to say that theatre's a spiritual thing, but that's what it can be. It has something to do with the spirit of the people...with communication. And the audience plays a totally vital part in it. They make it different every night, not us. If that wasn't the case, I'd just stay at home." And phone it in? "No, I wouldn't even bother to do that. I'd just read a book."
Thanks to Lisa S, UK, for sharing this
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