Simon Annand Photography Exhibition
Theatre Museum
Last Updated:  November 25, 2006

The Simon Annand exhibition is wonderful. It's on until April 2005 so if
you do get the chance to go see it, do. Judi's photo is in the actual
'dressing room mirror/seat section (all of the exhibits are set out
like bits of backstage at theatres/dressing rooms) and it's lovely. You
can see the photo here

http://www.simonannand.com/actors6.html

and you can also buy the photo as a postcard from the museum shop ;)
What you can't see is that in the exhibition, directly opposite is a
backstage photo taken of Michael Williams. Just as she had a picture
of him on her dressing table, he had a picture of her (from their
wedding I think) on his :)
 

Thanks to Lisa S, UK, for bringing this to my attention

The Photo of Michael Williams is an exclusive with this Website.

Rupert Christiansen on the room where a theatre's real drama unfolds

Telegraph.co.uk Online Article -- February 24, 2005

Before I became a critic and life got serious, I was a terrible old backstage Johnny who could think of no closer approach to heaven than a star's dressing room. Glamorous my hobby wasn't. Behind the scenes, theatres in the West End are suggestive of the horrors of the Lubyanka - bleak staircases, long stony corridors, Arctic temperatures and bare light bulbs.

But once inside the cell, all was good cheer. The star would often be discovered in a state of undress, embarrassing to you, but not to her or him: physical decency ranks low in the pantheon of theatrical virtues. Instantly, you become the courtier and deliver your ecstatic compliment (in his essay "Going Round", Alan Bennett wisely advises one to stick to "marvellous" and offer no praise of anyone else in the cast).

Other guests, including favoured colleagues, drift in, perching wherever they can amid the cramped chaos. Bottles of tepid Asti Spumante are opened, cigarettes may be lit, and, despite the total lack of civilised comfort, an atmosphere of warm conviviality is established. The jokes will be obscene, the gossip uninhibited, the affection overt. The best parties, you conclude, are the impromptu ones.

But this is after the show, when the release of tension is palpable. In "the half" before the curtain rises, the dressing room is a very different and private place - the sanctum where the actor passes through a shamanistic rite of transformation and with the help of make-up, costume and a solitary minute staring into the mirror, turns one personality into another.

It's a strange, spooky process, evocatively captured in the Theatre Museum's stylish new exhibition. Simon Annand's photographs are hung amid reconstructions of dressing rooms, complete with a soundtrack of actorly chatter and the flotsam and jetsam of copies of The Stage, congratulatory postcards, lucky charms, overfilled ashtrays and mugs of cold tea.

Judi Dench, grinning like the Cheshire cat, is clearly bursting to get on with it. Michael Gambon, on the other hand, is all despondency. A bleary-eyed, dressing-gowned Sinéad Cusack looks as though she's suffering from serious illness. Ben Wishaw, last year's Hamlet, has propped up a little pile of books (Camus's The Outsider, photographs by Luc Delahaye) that must have provided him with shots of existential angst. Imogen Stubbs peers out of the loo, where she's finishing a quick ciggie.

Until the Victorian era, dressing rooms used to be communal. These still exist today for use by the spear-carrier class, giving rise to bloody feuds as well as deathless camaraderie. The middle range of actors, however, usually share with one another, setting up the problematic rivalries and intimacies that David Mamet explores in A Life in the Theatre, currently showing at the Apollo.

But even a single room is a sensitive matter, and some theatres refuse to number them, for fear of offending whoever is put into No 2. An interesting case is presented by the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Its No 1 is near the stage, with exclusive access to an original Thomas Crapper lavatory.

No 10 is up a couple of flights of stairs, but has the more beguiling atmosphere - John Gielgud called it his favourite dressing room of all. For The Breath of Life, Maggie Smith took No 1 and Judi Dench No 10; for Acorn Antiques, the alternating Julie Walters and Victoria Wood have decided to share No 10. They must be jolly good friends.

Dressing rooms are rarely elegant, but big stars can get them made over as part of the deal - Ginger Rogers, for example, famously had her suite at Drury Lane done up in pink silk when she came over for Hello Dolly! Small amenities are much prized. At the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, No 1a offers tragedians a soothing view over the Avon and an en suite hip-bath. The Victoria Palace has a dressing-room with a Jacuzzi, rumoured to have been installed for Little and Large.

The only aspect of the phenomenon that Annand's photographs fails to illustrate is the role of the dresser - a dying breed nowadays, as cost-cutting managements try to do without them.

But Ronald Harwood's wonderful play on the subject, The Dresser, is about to return to the West End, reminding us that every theatrical performance begins and ends in the dressing room, with the dresser as the only truth-teller in a profession grounded in fantasy and illusion.

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