Stage People -- 1989

Printer Friendlier Version of Chapter Five

The parts that only pertain to Judi Dench and Michael Williams

Chapter Five

Love's Old Sweet Song:
Judi Dench and Michael Williams

( pages 239 - 276 )

This first part does not include anything about Judi Dench and Michael Williams. I've marked the part where the author does
begin to write about them.

The Diary of a Nobody, written in 1892, is extraordinary; it presages the
world depicted in Ulysses - James Joyce's is the greatest comic writing in
the language - by twelve years. Pooter is a proto-Leopold Bloom. Both
men are stoical fathers, modestly ingenious, infinitely kind; they are
capable of infinite humiliation, and infinite resignation. George and
Weedon Grossmith, James Joyce: their characters are to be found
expounded at the end of Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger: 'The bliss of the
commonplace ... the source of all warmth, goodness, and humour ... I
see into a whirl of shadows of human figures who beckon to me to weave
spells to redeem them: tragic and laughable figures and some that are both
together- and to these I am drawn.' Bloom and Pooter are such intertex-
tures of seriousness and levity. Trifles to them are tragedies; and so they
are to us all. Pooter is importuned by frayed sash-cords and a recalcitrant
bootscraper; Bloom wonders when he'll mend the bedstead's loose brass
quoits ('Must get those settled really'); both are vexed by local tradesper-
sons. Bloom is saddened to be omitted from the newspaper list of
mourners at Paddy Dignam's funeral; Pooter is similarly slighted. Bloom
has to be content with Boom, Pooter with Porter. Misprinted, they are
misrepresented. The reader alone is privy to their inner refinement.

Joyce rendered daily details epic. Ulysses is a diary of June 16, 1904; a
journal of wanderings and interlacing events in Dublin. Underswelling
the book are allusions to Homer, to Shakespeare, to Wagner: ironic
mythical counterpoints, ensuring that even the humble are to be seen as
heroic. Joyce brings the literary past into conjunction with the Irish
present, as if aligning stars or the trails of comets for astrological divaga-
tion. Bloom is the Ithacan king, meandering the streets instead of the
Mediterranean; he's a portly Hamlet, haunted by the apparition of his
father and tribal responsibility; he's Leontes, haunted by the memory of
his dead son; he's Falstaffto the Hal of Stephen Dedalus; he's the wronged
Commendatore, mocked by the neighbourhood Don Giovanni, Blazes
Boylan - and he wonders about manifesting himself before the adulterers
like the Stone Guest; he's expectant Leopold Mozart before cocky Wolf-
gang Amadeus (Stephen Dedalus, again); he's the sad Wotan of Siegfried,
lamenting his sterility and lost child, asking gentle riddles: a wanderer .
Eccles Street is his Elsinore, Valhalla, Temple - Bloom is a Freemason,
offering patronage to the fallen son of a friend; Sarastro with Tamino
under the heaventree of stars.

Eccles Street is also The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, N.
Bloom and Pooter are kin. Was Diary of a Nobody in Joyce's mind? I found a first edition in the late Richard Ellmann's room at Wolf son College - Ellmann was a world expert on Joyce, so let's allow the coincidence to
stand.

Pooter, like Bloom, is ridiculed by his companions; they are objects of
mild contempt and exercisers of abasement. But what will survive of
them is love. Pooter, on July 11, records the gift of a freehold and his son
Lupin's engagement to be married: 'On arriving home I found Carrie
crying with joy.' Diary of a Nobody concludes with family concord; the
kingdom intact. Bloom, at the end of his day, is Odysseus regaining
Penelope's bed; the wanderer returned. That is why Ulysses is a divine
comedy. Love, says Stephen Dedalus, and he's echoed in the attitude of
Bloom, is the word known to all men; 'Love,' says Bloom, 'I mean the
opposite of hatred.'

A focus of adoration is Marion Tweedy, or Mrs. Molly Bloom. She
rises from her bed like Aphrodite from the foam; a singer, a soliloquist, a
bit of a shrew: the embodiment of love's bitter mystery and love's old
sweet song. A Dublin Cleopatra (Joyce called her Cliopatrick), with the
Liffey for the Nile. The gropes and leers and buckings of Boylan notwith-
standing, in her own way she remains intimate with her husband; theirs is
the passion of a sixteen-year marriage. They've hardened into banter, but
she recalls their affiancement on Howth Head (where the rhododendron
bush was, in actuality, guarded by a sign saying PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE BLOOMS), with fondness: 'after that long kiss I near lost my breath
yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes. ..that was why I liked him
because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could
always get round him and gave him all the pleasure I could ...'

Molly is a cousin of Carrie Pooter. She is off-stage, elsewhere, during
the bulk of the novel; a mentioned presence. Then Joyce gives her a vast
unpunctuated monologue, in which June 16, 1904 is rewritten from her
perspective. Events happening to, and opinions formed by, Poldy (as she
calls Leopold Bloom) are re-envisioned. Carrie Pooter, off-stage, else-
where, in the Grossmith chronicle, has had to wait until Keith Water-
house gave her voice, in Mrs. Pooter's Diary (1983); her husband's diary,
day for day, is reinterpreted, opened out. The book is rather more than a
pastiche: Waterhouse seems to be in ectoplasmic contact with the spirit of
the original. He's fully absorbed the period; and as his essays in Waterhouse
At Large demonstrate, he adores the Victorian and Edwardian bric-a-brac
and brand names - which remained current in his Leeds childhood, and
which were coined in his parents' childhood. For Waterhouse, the
Pooters are from the last age of innocence; their aspirations are charged
with nostalgia.

The clutter of The Laurels, Carrie's urgent domesticity: it is a Wendy
house, and the Grossmiths wrote in the era that made Peter Pan. Ulysses,
set in 1904, belongs to the actual year of the premiere of Peter Pan ( the
novel, like the play, contains a hawklike man: Stephen is a Daedalus). But
if this was the entire attraction of the Pooters - a sentimental longing for
an eternal 1900 - Waterhouse's fanaticism (he's lately composed The
Collected Letters of a Nobody; then there must be Lupin Pooter's Diary;
relations stop nowhere) would quickly grow sickly; the comedy would
pall.

Of course, this is not all. Waterhouse has" recognized and released the
indwelling Joycean comedy of the original. His Carrie Pooter is Molly
Bloom dressed for the day. The Grossmiths hinted at Carrie's indepen-
dence ('Don't be theatrical,' she snaps at her husband, 'it has no effect on
me') and she keeps house earnestly. Molly, free-associating with insom-
nia, does not only think of sex; she is also revealed to be a prudent
housekeeper: her monologue is peppered with commodities - she's fluent
in the profit and loss: '...and the oysters 2/6 per doz ...'; '...four paltry
handkerchiefs about 6/- in all ...'; '...cakes 71/2d a lb or the other ones
with the cherries in them ...' . She follows, as best she can, fashion: she'd
like red Turkish slippers, 'I badly want' a new dressing gown - resem-
bling the garment of savoured memory, 'like the one long ago in Wal-
poles only 8/6 or 18/6'. She mentions port and potted meat, suede gloves,
hairpins, hallmarked silver forks and fish slices, and Epps's cocoa. During
the day, whilst we have been in the company of Poldy, she's cleared out of
the house piles of old newspapers and magazines; she's also sorted the old
coats from the hall. Recently, she's had trouble with the maid, and so she
chars for herself.

Molly, in other words, has been prudent and busy. Her mind coils back
to the romantic haze of being proposed to, when she doodled her conjugal
signature: 'I used to write it in print to see how it looked on a visiting card
or practising for the butcher. ..'. The doodling dream-days, before the
girl had to become a woman; her noctuary (it's night-time: her chapter
can't be a diary), in fact, is an anthem for her doomed youth. Blazes
Boylan is a last girlish fling; she eyes Stephen Dedalus as the Marschallin
does Octavian. 'I suppose,' says Molly, reflecting on femininity, 'its all
the troubles we have makes us so snappy.' And though she enjoys men,
she will not succumb to them - 'they're not going to be chaining me up no
damn fear. ..'.

Mrs. Pooter's Diary finds Carrie a similar insurgent, more slyly self-
willed than Charles may ever suspect. Though she does not form an
assignation with any Blazes Boylan, and nor does she indulge in illicit
teatime copulation, Waterhouse does discover for her a pang of longing.
At the calamitous ball, Mr. Darwitts helps her to her feet after a clumsy
tumble. She meets him a few days later. ' A tall, very straight-backed
gentleman, standing by the stationery counter ... He was hoping to
interest the Fancy Bazaar in a line of correspondence cards in delicate
colours, with rounded edges ...' By the following January, however, Mr
Darwitts fails to place his enquirer: 'Mr. Darwitts came out, every bit as
tall and straight-backed as I remember him. He returned my bow, but
looked mystified ... Unaccountably, I was seized by what Lupin would
call "a fit of the blues" on the bus home ...'

Ulysses catalogues Dublin streets and shops; Diary of a Nobody bustles
with references to gadgets and devices; Mrs. Pooter's Diary is the apothesis
of nineteenth-century appliances and advertisements: Carrie is enthralled
by Teale's (late Moxon) painters' sundrymen, fashion plates in Daintry's
Illustrated Boudoir, Swan and Edgar's, Basnett et Cie, Jay's Mourning
House (for black combs), a fan from Shoolbreds 'costing 7/6 (told him 3/
6)', Prout's Elastic Glue, Neave's Varnish Stain Remover, buffalo-meat
dog biscuits, Cigar de Ozone Bronchial Cigarillos, Dr Sibson's Lakgoh
Debility Pills, Throstle & Epps' Linen Bank, Oldham, Pot Pourri: A
Weekly Miscellany For Ladies and Ackthorpe, Hollyman & Moxon's
Jamboree Ales Brewery. Carrie's breviary is Lady Cartmell's Vade Mecum
For The Bijou Household, a codex of etiquette; a choreography of social
movement. She is assiduous in her study of propriety, and is proud of her
reprimand to the cleaner who wishes reinstatement: 'I said, "Very well,
Mrs. Birrell, ... you are to understand this. I am the Mistress of this
house, and I will not have you using paper indiscriminately. In future,
back copies of The Globe, Jepson's Sunday Newspaper and the Exchange and Mart will be left for your use by the pantry ...", Carrie is also tart with
Charles. They squabble about dreams, diaries, their staff, keeping rabbits
('On the day twelve rabbits enter this house, Charles, I shall leave it') -
but, as much as she punctures with ease her husband's efforts at pompo-
sity, she does not jeer: 'Evidently feeling contrite at the succession of
quarrels and arguments we have been having lately, Charlie bought me a
pretty silver bangle, and left it on my dressing table with an affectionate
little note. He is a dear old thing at heart, and I shall make an effort to be
nicer to him.'

The author finally begins to write about Judi Dench and Michael Williams ...

Caroline and Charles Pooter, first serialized in Punch in 1891; Ulysses,
written between 1914 and 1921, Molly and Poldy Bloom accompanying
Joyce from Trieste to Paris to Zurich; then Keith Waterhouse's book,
nearly a century on*: all aspects came together in the autumn of 1986. Mr
and Mrs Nobody opened at the Garrick Theatre, with Judi Dench and
Michael Williams as the eponyms - an actress and an actor of sufficient
sympathy and deftness to discern in the material a poignant portrait of a
marriage. Which they did.

Judi Dench and Michael Williams have been famously paired in the
television series A Fine Romance, where they played a courting couple of
early middle age- who'd prevaricated about wedlock and had become
ingrained as singles. Gentle comedy, graced with acting beyond its
station, A Fine Romance had an extra frisson for the simplest of reasons:
Judi Dench and Michael Williams are married in real life.

If A Fine Romance was ennobled by their presence, The Diary of a
Nobody would yield up its immanent rich resources. Keith Waterhouse
devised a script by making a lattice of the Grossmith original and his own
sequel; thus, for the first time, a full chronicle of life at the Laurels was
promulgated; it was as though The Iliad had been joined by The Odyssey. I
was invited to attend a rehearsal, and made my way to a church hall in
Chelsea. The building was crammed with Victorian furniture: elaborate
screens, tables wilting beneath brocade, an upright piano with shaded
brass candelabra, oil lamps, pipe racks like gunnels, heavy chairs with
upholstered seats, two desks, antimacassars, the head of a moose.
Amongst the gimcrack and gewgaws the stars paced. Various girls
fiddled making coffee or annotating scripts. Judi Dench, diminutive but
erect, looking fierce behind large grey spectacles, shot to meet me. Instant
warmth.

'Roger, you've come to see us. How kind. Michael - it's Roger from
Oxford.'

Michael Williams, crumpled and concentrating, turned in greeting, and
saw me installed at the edge of the set - for the alarming clutter, like a period
lumber room, was the arranged set; these were the props for the run.
'We've been so lucky,' said Judi, 'we've had all these real things from
the very first day. It helps enormously to get to know the objects, their
feel and size.'

Indeed. Mr and Mrs Nobody is a fond celebration of tackle and chattels; a
hosannah for the nineteenth-century fixture-fidgets.

'Julia Trevelyan Oman has been collecting it. You know,' said Judi, as
if unmasking a secret identity. 'You know she's Lady Strong?'

'Yes. Did she borrow any of this from the V& A?'

* Pooter scholarship continues apace. Waterhouse, going back to the Punch original, has discovered that Charlie had a first wife - the real mother of Lupin. Carrie is spouse number two - and this fact was suppressed in the revision for book publication. So another trail is revealed. Pooter a Bluebeard?

'I don't think she did; most of it is hired. But this was bought.'

We were looking at a large wooden oven, like a timber Aga, with
knobs and dials on the door. It was lined with lead, or it may have been
zinc, and was the size of a maisonnette. The Wenham Lake Ice Safe.
'But I've no idea how we are going to move it. Weighs a ton, or several
tons.'

The Wenham Lake Ice Safe, a pioneer refrigerator, acquires a dispro-
portion in Carrie's life. Its arrival at the Laurels becomes her considerable
ambition. As important to Mrs Pooter as the three sisters getting to
Moscow; as Hannay knowing the secret of the thirty-nine steps; as
Dorothy getting her red shoes back.

While Michael muttered his lines to himself, checking in a ring-folder
kept on one of the desks, my brisk tour continued.

'These are the foods for the Mayor's Ball at the Mansion House. ,
Chickens, hams, cakes, glazed pates: looking good enough to eat, and
made of plaster -displayed on salvers, upon a tiered table which would
wheel on and off.

'The whole of the room will be on a truck, and we'll shunt towards the
audience.'

It was nearly time to begin. Michael remained in his ruffled red shirt,
jeans, sneakers and jerkin; Judi began to wrap a quilt around her middle,
in semblance of a long skirt.

'I did Keith's Mrs Pooter's Diary on Woman's Hour,' she said. 'I told him
that I'd love to do it as a play, with Mike. Then the script arrived. It would
have lasted five hours. We've managed to get Act One to an hour, Act
Two to fifty minutes, and it must be shorter.'

Today was to be their first run-through without scripts, without
costumes, with props. The director arrived, carrying a Gladstone bag. A
big man, with cropped hair, a blue shirt and a determined stride; he
looked like a confident vet about to spend a morning inoculating an entire
herd of Friesians against brucellosis. It was Ned Sherrin, the cue-card
joker, without whom no award show is entire. He sat at a trestle table
and, while we awaited the tardy pianist, told stories: whether Eric
Portman was alive or dead; what Peter O'Toole felt about playing an
Arabian eunuch; seeing a ghost in the Russian Tea Room, New York;
what Faye Dunaway was up to in a silly play called Circe and Bravo. Ned
communicates in anecdotes; elaborate tales, like Matthew Arnold's epic
similes - apparent digressions, conversational decor. In fact, the decor is
the point, which you take away to ponder the meaning of.

'Roger,' he said finally, 'come and see this. It's a Wenham Lake Ice
Safe.' I marvelled anew at the apparatus, and unsuspected trapdoors
opened and closed.

A black-haired lady tottered in. Judi dived to greet her. It was Annie
Hoey, Judi's dresser.

'I've been with Judi thirteen years. She's a lovely lady. None nicer. She
does so many charity shows for free. Mr and Mrs Nobody has twelve
changes, all of them elaborate and quick.'

Annie was sitting next to me. Rather a frail person, I thought, her pale
skin the paler owing to her jet mop - like a porcelain doll. Judi was
watchful, as of an ill relative. 'As for charity shows and readings, I went to
the Cheltenham Poetry Festival with Michael Hordern. We had to
endure, before we went on, incessant Bartok. Bangs and clonks and
boings. Eventually, Michael Hordern let out one of his long exasperated
groans - Ahhhnnnnnmmmmnn aghhh eogheenmmnnn ... And we
giggled and giggled.'

The pianist still delayed, Annie was taken to see the Wenham Lake Ice
safe. Ned Sherrin tried on a negro mask from his Gladstone bag; a brown
plastic face, with white bone through the nose, and a curly frizz.

'Convincing?'

'Not,' came a Lady Bracknell voice, 'at all!'

'I hate masks, ' muttered Michael, 'I hate masks, perturbed.

A taxi was throbbing, waiting. It was the pianist. He'd detoured to the
Wyndham's Theatre, where his briefcase was mislaid the night before. A
tall gangling youth in a teeshirt, called Michael Haslam, he was taken to
admire the Wenham Lake Ice Safe.

'It's been bought,' said Ned, out of his mask, 'so we've got to use it.
The trouble is, it's too heavy to move.'

Michael Haslam tried on the negro mask. Apparently, there'd been a
fleeting idea that the two musicians - pianist and violinist -would be
attired as minstrels.

'I hate masks, I hate masks.'

'We'd better not finish early today, Ned,' said Judi.

'She went to Cecil Gee's yesterday,' cut in Mike, 'and bought three
pairs of trousers, a dress and a jumper.'

'Fatal, fatal,' sang Judi, delighted, patrolling the set fast. 'You know,'
she continued, 'doing this play, you do tend to slot people you meet into
the characters. I meet Mr Darwitts, Mr Perkupp, Annie Fullers (now Mrs
James, of Sutton), Mr Oswald Tipper or Daisy Mutlar every day,
somewhere or other ...'

They were ready, at last. The piano began to bang, out of tune,
Victorian parlour songs and Gilbert and Sullivan melodies.

'Two minutes of music to get yourselves opened up, ' said the director,
back at his trestle. Mike, now Mr Pooter, sucked his pipe and looked
pensive. A tinny cassette made the voice-over:

'Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of
people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see - because I do not
happen to be a "Somebody" - why my diary should not be
interesting ...'

Midway through this, Judi, now Mrs Pooter, stirred to her desk, and
another, overlapping, voice-over:

'If he may entertain hopes of publishing a diary, then so may I - after all,
it is not as if my dear Charlie were a "Somebody" whose thoughts and
impressions are any more profound or worthwhile than the next
person's.'

Actor and actress then sat at flanking bureaux and read out their journal
entries in unison:

'My dear wife Carrie and I have just been a week in our new house ...'

'I hate it ...' states the lady, a withering fraction later. Instantly, a
merry war between them is promised. Mr and Mrs Pooter were to
address the audience directly - in this case, a bust of a Chelsea worthy, on
a plinth, the eye level above Ned's, Annie's, mine. The collusion, the
winks, the wry smiles, the tiny cocks of the head and pregnant pauses: all
these were aimed at the bust. Both actor and actress scrupulously avoided
living eyes.

Gradually, the actor's and actress's speeches to the audience became
conversation with each other - but the script, being but the parallel text of
diary entries, was not inherently dramatic. It was set in the past tense, for
a start. Yet the transubstantiation of acting was taking place. Judi Dench
and Michael Williams had been replaced by the characters they were
playing: they were the living voices for the text, giving the subtlest of
nuances to small moments - so that those sash cords and that bootscraper
took on the significance of crowns and orbs in a history play.

What actor and actress were doing was instinctively - was it instinctive,
or was it technique deployed with the steam up? - to search for the reality,
the touching ordinariness, in the Pooters. There was no teasing, no
superior detachment - so that when they battled over the butcher's bill, it
was an authentic marital difficulty, not a silly fuss over nothing. King
Lear's division of the kingdom is a fuss over nothing ('Nothing will come
of nothing'); mistaken double orders of mutton and the quality of eggs
portend dissension in the family, the breakdown of peace in the home.
And when Mrs Pooter, recounting her husband's partiality for Lochenbar
whisky and Jackson Freres champagne, confided that "I sometimes think
my husband is a secret drinker' - beneath the joke, the overstatement,
lingered sincere concern.

The worries and vexations of the Pooters were being performed as
genuine; as genuine as Bloom's attentiveness to Mina Purefoy, or his
preparation of Molly's breakfast tray, or his dropping by at the National
Library of Ireland to investigate the fundaments of statuary. True
humour comes from recognizing streaks of truth; even farce can only be
successful if its madcap antics are deployed with utter credibility; it must
be internally coherent and consistent. From Congreve to Wilde, from Sir
William Schwenck Gilbert to Noel Coward, from Preston Sturges to the
Goons: comedy, even the most fantastic and apparently surreal, has to
recognize the law of reality ('The sum total of reality is the world,' said
Ludwig Wittgenstein) before it can ascend on the wings of its own wit.
Satire (Jonathan Swift to graphic artists such as Gerald Scarfe and Spitting
Image) moves in the contrary direction: it dives from lofty bizarrerie to
hit the real, like an arrow hitting an artery. Mr and Mrs Nobody, which in
less delicate hands could have been a satire on tribal pretension - the
Pooters have a desperate desire socially to improve themselves - was
instead being performed as a comedy of manners. The furniture, the fans,
the clothes, the deckle-edge notelets: the Holloway inhabitants wish to be
as worldly as the burghers in Peckham, which to Carrie is the Promised
Land. And the earnest desire to gentrify London boroughs, to read
personalities into postal districts: social betterment is the eternal English
fantasy.

The Pooters are busy self-improvers. Judi Dench and Michael Williams
were hinting, in their acting, at the strain this tends to put on ordinary life;
its ability to invite humiliation. The Pooters have servants, but Carrie
works in the kitchen alongside them. She constantly refers to Sarah ('my
maid'), as though the skivvy is a lady-in-waiting. Sarah ('my maid') was
played as a mute panto of gormlessness by Penny Ryder - who loped and
gagged. They seem, the Pooters, to be socially equivalent to the owners
of shops and small businesses; the lower middle-class, dreaming to be
mistaken for middle-class. The occasional genteel open vowel was used
by Judi to indicate that the East End was not too many generations
distant.

All this: the discrimination with which Mrs Pooter and Mr Pooter were
being drawn, the extent of their self-knowledge and knowledge about
each other, their urgent interest in etiquette, made ready for the receipt of
an invitation to attend the Mansion House Ball. Hitherto, actor and
actress had addressed auditorium, occasionally each other. Now, Judi and
Michael each split up to indicate other guests, swirling in dances, and
sometimes adopting different voices. We were in a church hall in Chelsea:
an actor and an actress were rehearsing; yet I swear I saw a crowd in dicky
and boa.

Arrival at the ball, and its edging into mortification, was preceded by a
small scene of sudden emotion. As written, it is stiff and sentimental.
Waterhouse leaves his predecessors alone at this point. The invitation
arrives:

'Carrie darling, I was a proud man when I led you down the aisle of the
church on our wedding day; that pride will be equalled, if not surpassed,
when I lead my dear, pretty wife up to the Lord and Lady Mayoress at the
Mansion House.'

'Charlie dear, it is I who have to be proud of you. And I am very, very
proud of you. You have called me pretty; and as long as I am pretty in
your eyes, I am happy. You, dear old Charlie, are not handsome, but you
are good, which is far more noble.'

Judi Dench and Michael Williams made this exchange tender and fond;
Carrie, indeed, could barely speak the last half-dozen words; they came
out, choked with emotion.

We were in a church hall in Chelsea: an actor and an actress were
rehearsing; yet I saw real tears bulge.

Real tears ? Or a representation of tears ? Acting is the real thing in
contact with the make-believe; a happy deception. Judi and Mike were
giving me new eyes: I thought I was seeing what I was not seeing. Henry
James, in The Real Thing, published within a year of Diary of a Nobody,
wrote about a painter who preferred artifice to actuality: 'I liked things
that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they were or not was a
subordinate and almost always a profitless question.'

Whether Carrie's tears were Judi's it is neither subordinate nor profit-
less to ask. For they were an alchemy of the two. And quick as a flash Judi
banished Carrie. They'd become too close. 'Sorry, I'm terribly off beam,
aren't I?'

'I was like that yesterday, ' said her husband soothingly.

Then back into character they went, Charlie having a frightening
explosion of anger when the precious invitation card is accidentally
smeared with port wine. His eyes flashed with inarticulate fury and
frustration: it was no panto tantrum.

For the Mansion House Ball, the plaster food was slid into place. Judi
mimed eating a big meal; chewing discreetly, whilst watching Charlie
Pooter drink himself silly. Then, the wild tarantella, ending with the
embarrassing skid on the parquet. Now it was Carrie's turn to be
mettlesome, the grand excursion having miscarried. The morning after
crackled with feelings of shame and recrimination. Sarah ('my maid')
crept about the parlour, a cartoon of politic stealthiness; Charlie had a
murderous hangover; Carrie, however, was prepared for battle: 'I left
him in no doubt as to what I thought of his conduct of the night before ...
his deficiencies as a husband and as a gentleman - with particular reference
to his leaving it to Mr Darwitts to assume responsibility for me in my
distress ...'

It is the most major cloud on their marriage; the after-effects of the ball
linger for days. The hurts accumulate. The Blackfriars Bi-weekly News
publishes its string of misprints. The neighbours pester. 'We cannot go
on like this. It will be better for both of us that I should go and stay in
Sutton with Annie Fullers (now Mrs James) for a spell.'

A way she careens. Charlie is dejected. He polices the house, fiddling
and fussing; crushed and lonely and sad. The pianist tinkled a lamen-
tation. Then, after clocks chiming to mark the passage of days, the music
broke into a gallop:

'Carrie back. Hoorah!'

'Home sweet home again!'

The queen was back in her counting house, making a lightning tour of
inspection, disposing of dead flowers and slicking dust. Carrie waved a
box at the audience, containing, presumably, an electroplated kettle.
She'd been to an exhibition of kitchenware with Annie Fullers (now Mrs
James).

It was lunchtime. We strolled to a pub, Mike and Judi eager to talk of
family life, when they knew my wife and I were soon expecting a baby.
They have a daughter, Finty.

'We're very close, the three of us,' said Michael.

'I was thirty-six, Mike was thirty-seven when we had her. The doctors
at the hospital called me the Aged Ape.'

'Will you be there when Anna gives birth?'

'I don't much fancy it,' I confessed, 'but it is mandatory, I believe, these
days, for the father to have an opportunity to die in childbirth.'

'I was there,' said Mike, 'and it was the most wonderful of experiences.
I'd not have missed it for the world.'

'I didn't have a great deal of choice,' remarked Judi.

'Will Finty be an actress?' I asked.

'She's unavoidably been brought up amongst artistic and theatre peo-
ple. She came with her mother to watch us filming Blunt, and she got on
well with Ian Richardson. How they roared together.'

Michael plays Goronwy Rees in the espionage film.

'A strange man, Goronwy. Nobody could make him out. He was all
things to all men - which is perfect for a spy. At Aberystwyth, the
Establishment didn't like him - he went drinking with the students; that
sort of thing. So when he did those articles on Burgess and Maclean for a
newspaper, for £l,000 - he was always hard up - he was ostracized for his
part in things, and never really recovered. They all died broken men,
those defectors.'

Morgan Goronwy Rees, the littlest-known of the trio in Blunt, was
born in 1909 and died about a decade ago. He combined a Fellowship at
All Souls with the higher hackery: assistant editor at the Spectator, leader
writer for the Manchester Guardian; and he translated Buichner's Danton's
Death with Stephen Spender and wrote a history of Marks and Spencer
called St Michael. Between 1953 and 1957 he was the Principal of the
University College of North Wales. ..But was he a double-agent? He
always claimed to have deserted the Communist cause after the 1939
Nazi-Soviet pact, but Guy Liddell and Dick White of M15 disbelieved
him when he allowed himself to be interrogated about Burgess and
Maclean in 1952; and though he told them about Blunt, Blunt was not
interrogated for another fourteen years. His newspaper pieces about his
suspicions (coinciding with the first public acknowledgement of the
defectors' residence in Moscow) precipitated a social ruin.

The film Blunt saw Rees as shy and impressionable - bullied by the
swot-mastermind of Blunt himself, and by the jolly tuck-shop Bunter of
Burgess. Williams's was a touching portrayal of a man whose youthful
idealism and allegiances came back to haunt with a vengeance; elements
from a boyhood arcady pursue him, changed to hellions: 'You are one of
us,' Burgess snarls. Worried, wretched, to whom should he be loyal?
'Guy is my oldest friend, , he tries to tell his wife - and gradually the
spectre of an ancient illicit love affair clanks its chains. Williams's eyes and
withdrawn stare signalled that embers of affection were quite likely to be
rekindled - the little boy with the crush on the captain. Burgess makes
him vow never to expose Anthony, nor to warn him that he, Burgess,
will not be returning after babysitting Donald to safety.

What intolerable secrets! National Security and personal allegiance
('the sacred trust between friends a la Forster') are impacted, and Rees is
easily made to confess by his wife, Margaret Ewing Morris. 'What's the
promise Guy asked you to keep?' she demands - knowing there's demo-
nology in the air. 'You've no cause to be jealous of Guy,' Rees responds.
'He's my friend [fatal pause], in the best sense.'

Williams, with tense understatement, was a picture of longing, sinking
into a neurotic and hopeless torpor, by way of perplexity and degrees of
puzzlement, as Margie dared her questions: 'Guy means more to you than
I do, or the children ...What has Guy done?' Answers remain political:
Guy tried to enroll him in the KGB ('We were all idealists then. I
stopped.') - but the meaning of lingering loyalty is sexual: 'Friendship is
another matter.' The wife's world collapses about her; Rosie Kerslake
was eloquent in her acting of a woman confused, frightened and suddenly
resentful. Guy is godfather to her baby; the evil fairy admitted by a
husband who is still lying about real feelings, real deeds. Who were his
absent friends she never met? What were the parties she was never invited
to in Mayfair? Rees's defence is plaintive. He describes himself as an
artless Mr. Pooter: 'I did warn you when we met that I had not a sense of
self. Mr Nobody.' Rees impugns the Grossmiths's hero to exculpate his
own dishonour, and in his insistence on ordinariness he's like a guilt-
ridden Barbara Jackson in Pack of Lies deciding what to do: 'I'm not going
to think about it. We've got to live a normal life. Let them do what they
want. I'm not going to think about it.'

'Old Fin was once in her school nativity play - she was the innkeeper's
wife,' said Mike. ' "What is the play about?" she was asked. "Well," she
replied, as if stating the obvious, "it is about an innkeeper's wife."'

Judi started to giggle about my address.

Stratton Audley! What a name for an actor, like Beerbohm Tree. Your
baby might act, Roger.'

'I was once the squire in a nativity play, ' I said, thinking back.

Ned had arrived with a tray of food. Chicken in mostly green slop with
raw onion rings. Beyond him, making egress from the jakes, and her-
alded by the sound of gushing water, Annie Hoey, the dresser.

'Is Annie Irish, Judi?'

'Irish? She's as Irish as Kerry Ring, as my mother would say.'

'What did she mean by that? Your mother?'

'My mother always said things like that, like "If I go as brown as I'm
red I'll be black. " She's had a hard life.'

'Who, your ma?'

'No, Annie. She makes trousers for the Royal Family.'

'She doesn't?'

'She does. She makes Prince Philip's trousers. She gets up at half-past
six and goes to Conduit Street, where she makes trousers for the Royal
family. Then she becomes my dresser every evening. The theatre is the
passion of her life.'

Annie and Ned were upon us.

'Tonight, , said Ned, 'I shall see I'm Not Rappaport with Paul Scofield;
then I shall go to Groucho's for two starters.'

'You,' said Judi with her hint of Lady Bracknell, 'have the heaviest
social diary of anyone I've ever met.'

'Before that, ' he stated, 'I have to interview John Houseman at Broad-
casting House.'

Ned had broadcasted his day.

'Tell us, do tell us, ' Judi began, and Mike, chuckled, 'the "Chuck, get
back to the Planet of the Apes" story.'

'Well, Houseman produced in 1953,' began Ned, pausing only a
smidgen for the computer cue-cards to flicker into position in his brain,
'Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. John Gielgud was Cassius. There was
another film in 1970, Richard Johnson was Cassius, Robert Vaughn was
Casca, Jason Robards was Brutus. Charlton Heston was Mark Antony
and this time John Gielgud was Caesar. I bought the set for £900 for Up
Pompeii, and Gielgud's bust appeared in the baths scene with Frankie
Howerd and Michael Hordern. Anyway, Heston kept drying on the
speech, "O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth. " Time after time
they tried. "O, pardon me, thou. .." "O, for God's sake, Chuck, " said
Gielgud.'

Judi and Mike joined in the punchline:

'"WHY DON'T YOU GET BACK TO THE PLANET OF THE APES!"'

'That's an apocryphal story, by the way,' said Ned, with a cautionary
nod in my direction.

'American classical actors have their quirks,' said Judi. 'I remember
opening on Broadway in Henry V, on Christmas Eve, with Laurence
Harvey, and he kept his eye level three inches above mine; as though he
was cross I didn't come up to his height. It was like this ...'

Judi was up on her seat, acting a tall man squinting to find a short lady.

Ned started to tell a story about yet another famous American actor,
this one long deceased, who spent a season at Stratford.

'He was found molesting a spear-carrier. He considered all young
actors available crumpet.'

'It was a gloomy day,' replied Judi, 'when the lavatories at The Dirty
Duck, the Stratford pub, were treated with snowy grit. It meant the end
of graffiti, and those lav walls were our noticeboards. A friend of ours
was once in the Gents, when he noticed a message on a tiny knob of
plaster. It said "Fred and me".'

We started to return to the church hall. Judi and Mike let the others go
on ahead.

'Is it working? The play. Can you follow the story? Is it clear, what's
going on? All the diary readings?'

It was no idle pleasantry, or fishing for compliments. They honestly
wanted to know if the Pooters were coming to life.

'Carrie and Charles have a delightful dignity. And the two of you fill
the stage with all the other characters.'

'Roger, you have said the right things.'

In the hall was a large lady, with bright eyes, grey curls and rubicund
cheeks; dressed in tweeds and stout brogues, she looked like a dog show
judge, or the local rector's wife.

'I've come to see, ' said Julia Trevelyan Oman, Lady Strong, 'The
Wenham Lake Ice Safe.'

We convened about the object, as if nearing a font or a kennel. More
hidden compartments were revealed, and we all murmured appreciation.
On with the show.

A wax phonograph roll, or some recording device, began to plonk
'Pretty Mocking Bird' whilst Carrie sat at the piano. She sang, with gusto
anyway, a parlour piece. Judi has a smoky, cabaret husk of a voice; she
screeched it towards a ropy operatic soprano. It was very funny. Michael
took up position as Cummings or Gowing, and acted their response and
appreciations. He also played Lupin, by being a louche version of Charlie.

'When we first started rehearsing, Ned would stand where Lupin was
meant to be, so we gradually came to believe the other characters were
alongside us. And do you know, ' Judi exclaimed, 'I can see all those
people. I don't know if it gives that impression.'

Having coped with the Mansion House Ball, the Pooters now have to
receive news of Lupin's engagement, to a trollop called Daisy Mutlar.
Carrie swiftly, efficiently reconnoitres her prospective daughter-in-law's
family. Pleased with her sleuthing, she tells her agog spouse, whilst
taking off long gloves, hat, unbuttoning a coat (all mimed): 'Miss Daisy
Mutlar resides in Upper Holloway, at Avoncrest, No.17 Atha Grove,
with her parents and brother. They have two servants living in - cook -
general and maid. I chanced to pass along Atha Grove on my afternoon
walk yesterday, and could not help but notice the house; it is a double-
fronted residence with a porch, and claret glass surrounds to the bay
windows, with engraved corner sunbursts.'

The details go on and on.

'That is the sum of our knowledge of Miss Mutlar for the present.'

A party is organized in the lady's honour. The event, its planning and
inquest, dominates many days. The occasion itself occasioned virtuosity:
actor and actress packed the room with a bustling throng; party games
took place; energetic dances abounded; lavish food appeared. But the
party games, dance partners and feast did not actually appear. Our
thinking made them so. From the excess and abandon, the mood
switched instantly when Mr Perkupp entered. Charlie's boss, it was an
honour to receive him at The Laurels. A frost fell on the gaiety. And even
though Mr Perkupp's censorious tread could be followed, there was no
Mr Perkupp. A concentration of acting filled in and filled out the cast.
The play ended almost abruptly. There being a paucity of story,
though a plenitude of incident, a conclusion could come at any time.
Sufficient unto a day is the diary thereof. Suddenly, Lupin's wedding day
was upon them; Mr Perkupp thawed and promoted Charlie; Carrie was
delivered of a Wenham Lake Ice Safe, her pride and joy, her grail.
While Judi and Mike performed amongst the tables and chairs, there had
been activity on the margins. A stage manager and her deputy had been
loading Sarah ('my maid') with her trays. Instead of a single tray, with a
variety of meals and bottles standing by, there were a dozen identical
trays, each with objects for a requisite scene already on board. Plus,
arrayed like the impossible kitchens of television cooks, ranks of
implements for Carrie: her custard bowl and whisk, apron, spoons, menu
cards.

Sound effects were provided by Ned, who especially enjoyed being the
trains chuffing past the windows; he also whistled and hooted for bells
and clocks; for the fireworks he nearly shot his teeth out. If ever actor or
actress mangled words or looked lost, Ned would chant the prompt. Few
phrases, in fact, were muffed or mumbled. When a mistake was made,
however, Judi grimaced as if gripped with a seizure; when offstage, Mike
frantically leafed through his script. Julia Trevelyan Oman roamed the
hall, adjusting and scrutinizing, her eye alert for anachronism, presuma-
bly, or a prize whippet. Gary Fairhall, who was to make two fleeting
appearances as a factotum, spent most of the day boiling water in an urn.
We who were watching chain-drank coffee. 'What do you think of Gary's
appearing?' I'd been asked. 'It's very sensitive. We think it spoils the
illusion of our acting to other invisible people.'

During the later afternoon, an emissary from Michael Redington, the
producer, licked and counted out wads of twenties; these were distributed
in buff envelopes. I alone went home empty-handed. Also during the late
afternoon: the director's notes: 'During the dreadful pun about the sash-
cords, Mike, when do you think Mr Pooter would realize he's made a
joke? How about if he is blank for a moment, then his wit dawns?'

Michael tried this, and it released the humour over and above the trite
word-play of 'I'm afraid they're frayed.' (Pooter's tearful wheezing at his
own aphorisms was to grow.)

'Those silk programmes from the Tank Theatre, you've got them,
Judi?'

'I've got them. I'll flash them. ' A dirty chuckle.

Discussion next turned to Pooter's topper, how to bring it on and off,
before the ball.

'The hat hasn't been used at this point,' said Mike, indicating the toilet
for the ball.

'On the stage,' said Ned, 'it is going to look like an extra special
occasion when you reveal it specially for the Mansion House. Bring it out
with ceremony.'

'Flash it, Mike.'

'Perhaps he would find it under the table?'

Michael produced the headgear and, in character, spoke the lines
covering the moment when Pooter paints the hat black.

'Let him paint it absentmindedly; painting unlikely objects is his hobby
(the bath, books, sticks, flower pots - all crimson); he could be deeply
absorbed, almost like a sleepwalker, and he'd simultaneously neatly put
down a newspaper. Pooter is a neat, fussy, man. Then he'd do a double-
take, looking at the hat, all glossy.'

That was me speaking. I listened with incredulity to myself, like a
drunk mesmerized by his own rebellious limbs. I've never directed a play
in my life; here I was directing Michael Williams and Judi Dench. Instead
of giving me a cold stare, or throwing me out for presumption, Ned and
his actors made out they were delighted to give my suggestion a try. With
some modifications, the sequence was included.

Next they had to make fluid Carrie's departure for Sutton. 'What I
must remember,' said Judi, 'is to put my diary away carefully. Could I
have a ribbon to mark the page? When I return, and when I'm inspecting
the house, I'll check that my diary is untouched.'

She muttered this to herself whilst pacing out the movements. They
then worked on attitudes to Lupin, and his change of name from Willie.
'I keep drying on "No sign of Willie", have you noticed that? My
favourite line, and I can't get it correct.'

'One hundred miles from London, and no sign of Dick, , said Ned.

'Come, come, sweet pussy,' added Mike. A ribald triolet.

Judi started to giggle when she attempted the lines again, and said
Loopy instead of Lupin.

Carrie begins her recital of illustrious forbears: 'It is a proud and
distinguished name, and one that goes back into the myths of history.
The Berkshire Lupins (as my branch is) have graves in Reading and
district ...' How could this be enlivened? It was in danger of being dull.
Motives came easily.

'You see,' said Mike, 'I'm not too keen that he's changed his name.'

'And I'm very excited about it.'

They ran it again, Carrie tensing with relish, Charlie simulating falling
into glumness - falling, in fact, asleep so that Carrie has to prompt him
with "August 6th " and he jolts awake for his cue. A longueur had been
made winning.

'There'll be lighting changes to mark more clearly the altering days,'
explained Ned.

We gathered for a final time before the Wenham Lake Ice Safe, to
experiment with fake champagne cork bangs. This seemed to be the
pianist's skill. Gas was pumped in the empty bottle. After much adjust-
ing, the cork popped with the tiniest sneeze. 'Well,' said Mike, philoso-
phic, 'if it goes off, we'll yell whoosh!; if it doesn't, we'll get a laugh for
flatulence.'

Tea was taken at the Pooters' trestle.

'Our house in Hampstead has been completely rebuilt. The builders
were putting up wallpaper on the ceiling, and it fell in. The carpets were
completely ruined. The builders have been making good since May 1985,
and they are still not finished.'

'Fin's school, , said Michael, 'is opposite where Lillie Langtry lived.'

'Michael recently bought himself a motor tractor.'

'It broke down.'

'Do you know, he had a face like a wet weekend.'

'I must be off to Broadcasting House now,' said Ned, undecided, as I
was, as to the extent Carrie and Charlie had started to usurp Judi and
Mike's conversation.

'Can we share a taxi? We need to go to Sloane Square?'

'You know what that means,' said Michael, with forbearance, 'shop-
ping, shopping.'

Why is Judi Dench the finest actress in England? Consider the compe-
tition. Glenda Jackson, despite her fame for A Touch of Class and for her
being an occasional co-star with the lugubrious Matthau (House Calls,
Hopscotch), rushing in as a female Jack Lemmon, has little sense of
comedy. She appears dour and serious; a martinet Elizabeth R, a self-
lacerating Gudrun Brangwen. Glenda Jackson's laugh is sardonic; she's
independent and beetle-browed, having an overmatter of bile in roles not
quite demanding extensive rancour. A tragedian miscast in drollery, with
Morecambe and Wise she looked like a headmistress in the end-of-year
romp with a pair of naughty boys. She's an actress of much power - but
she's disdainfully holding back, as though acting isn't entirely earnest.

Then there's Maggie Smith. She's been content to add her talent to
poor comedies and international Agatha Christie murder mysteries. She
presents us with caricatures of the diaphanous, dithery, willowy English
eccentric: The Missionary, A Private Function, California Suite, A Room with
a View. And her audience does not want her to stop playing the imposs-
ible nanny goat. Her screen people are what some men like women to be -
fussy, flighty, stately, a hint of androgyny, comportment for clothes and
cosmetics.

What, therefore, makes Judi Dench different? She is free of the self-
intentness of Glenda Jackson and of the high camp of Maggie Smith's
acting. She bumbles like a diligent mother-rabbit (which she once played)
and if there is a key to her acting, it may be her magnanimity. Her
compassion is not scowling and political, like Glenda Jackson; her disin-
terest is not capricious, like Maggie Smith. Instead, in her performances
she is alert to the moods and needs of those in whose company she finds
herself. She likes to gauge and adapt to gatherings -and thus hates big,
empty-hearted parties, preferring cosy cabals, where she can be humor-
ous and assertive. Her ideal unit is the family. The actress's temperament
is to appraise immediate company and snuggle to fit in; she imagines the
sensitivity of a role and invests fictional character with psychological
grain- so that Judi Dench's Carrie Pooter is alert to environment, as Judi
Dench would be herself, in similar circumstances. And because the play
in which Carrie appears, and Judi acts, constitutes these similar circum-
stances, act and actress merge.

This is what people mean when they talk of Judi Dench's humanity: it's
her ability to close the gap between self and part. Thus, Mother Courage
and Her Children was an interesting experiment. The selfish, profiteering,
cunning old vixen would seem alien to the actress's nature. She was
attired in an orange fright wig and a capacious great coat - a raddled she-
cat, vigilant in her defence of her children -and this is how Judi Dench
salvaged the part: Courage came to exist as a proud matriarch, ennobled
as her family's exterminated; managing to be feminine against the odds,
and in spite of herself (like her mute daughter Katrin - a rag-doll
performance from Zoe Wanamaker - who drums as stubbornly as her
mother pushes the cart). The cart was an elaborate caravan locked on rails
and pivots, set up in a revolving clockwork stage -like an eternal
machine. A baroque bassinet! A crazily over-burdened perambulator!
Judi Dench's Mother Courage was an Earth Mother for the iron-age
future.

Design was by John Napier, the designer of Cats. Photographs exist of
Judi Dench in make-up and costume as Grizabella the Glamour Cat - the
gin-sipper tart, who becomes the Jellicle candidate for ailurophilic ascen-
sion. She sings the sleazy 'Memory', the words derived by Trevor Nunn
and Andrew Lloyd Webber from Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night'.

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth. ..

Grizabella, sad and slummy, was not included in the original Old Possum
collection; Eliot thought her too melancholic for a nursery audience. The
fragments containing her were kindly exhibited to the lyricists by the
poet's widow, Valerie. Grizabella, in fact, is Eliot's Beatrice, Rose la
Touche, Alice, Dulcinea del Toboso, Molly Bloom; his White Goddess
and Muse. In The Cocktail Party she's Celia Coplestone, who is martyred
in Kinkanja; in Cats, Grizabella is borne aloft from the Jellicle Ball {'Up,
up, up to the Heaviside Layer, up, up, past the Russell Hotel'), to a
nirvana of auto-tyres.

The Waste Land contains Grizabella in many manifestations: Marie the
foreign aristo, reading at night, going south in the winter; the wet-haired
hyacinth girl; Isolde; Madame Sosostris; Cleopatra; Philomel; the ner-
vous lady; the East Enders, Lil, Lou and May; the hermaphroditic
Tiresias; the secretary, seeing off her hopeless lover, putting a record on
the gramophone; Elizabeth Ion the Thames; the Rhinemaidens; Kundry.
Unfortunately, Judi Dench injured her leg in a dance rehearsal soon
before the opening; Grizabella had to be played by Elaine Paige, who
made off with the show. Imagine what the actress originally cast
would've done with it. A mood like Deborah's in Pinter's A Kind of
Alaska - a girl who fell into a three-decade coma, and who awakes as a
sixteen-year-old inside an old body; a young, haunted voice in an aged
carcass. Or Sally Bowles in Cabaret, the flapper past her prime.

Elaine Paige's cat was mournful, but shrill (Evita raised from the dead);
Judi Dench's would have been mournful, but knowing. The photograph
shows the Dench face peering through a tangle of mangy fur, coils of curl
and drooping whiskers - like an extravagant rococco hairdo several years
beyond its best and full of vermin; a ruined-castle plumage, flanked by big
black bows. The mouth is slightly pursed, with a smudge of palest gloss;
the nose, gently snub; and the eyes: Judi Dench has eyes of a cat most
times, here they are twin comets coming into a symmetrical land; the
eyebrows, attendant trails. Beneath, the mascara has smeared into watery
puddles, as if formed by tears. A cat: daring and resilient, fissile and
enigmatic, steel inside softness - Judi Dench is one of our most prankish,
feline of actresses. To switch the gender of My Cat Jeoffry by Christopher
Smart -

For she is a mixture of gravity and waggery ...
For there is nothing sweeter than her peace when at rest
For there is nothing brisker than her life when in motion.

In Saigon, Year of the Cat Judi Dench was an erotic missy, watching the
world end. She played Barbara Dean, an English employee at a Vietna-
mese bank. She witnesses the twilight of the gods: the ignominious
American retreat. Parrying the attention of would-be suitors (one, a
young Scot, played by Roger Rees), Barbara is willingly bedded by a
dashing US Embassy official, Bob Chesneau (Frederic Forrest) - who
dislikes too much closeness ('Why do you behave as if I'm your wife').
They fiddle whilst Saigon burns. The actress was sensual and sexy: the
spinster attracted to the exoticism of the East, only to see it disintegrate,
and half-enjoying the literal decadence - whilst masterminding exit visas
and tickets for her native friends. In Vietnam, she's vital and accom-
plished; lifting-off in the helicopters, during the panic of the final days,
however, she visibly settles into middle age; Bournemouth ('You feel
watched, disapproved of all the time') is already casting its long shadow.
Barbara is destined for premature retirement, indolent fat-cattery. Judi
Dench's Mother Courage, by contrast, was always the cheroot-chewing
tom, a cat scavenging on a rubbish dump, living off the detritus of
battlefields. With that cart of hers, packed with gypsy junk, she's a
carrion cat hard-hearted and terse. She'd enter Saigon as the Americans
are fleeing it. Judi Dench's performance was the more moving for not
giving way to the sentimental (which underpins all Brecht like a foun-
dation of marshmallow); the performance was the more moving for
presenting an apparently unmotherly mother raucous-voiced and foul-
mouthed. As her children are picked off, instead of making mute appeals
to the audience, this Mother Courage turned away from us, hunched,
sagging into her coat, slouching back to her caravan -pinioned on a giant
dial. The woman was crushed by the inevitability of fate, yet determined
to outface it. 'Sometimes I see myself pulling my cart through hell, selling
brimstone. Or through heaven handing out food to the hungry. If I could
find a place where there's no shooting, I'd like a couple of quiet years with
the children. What's left of them.'

Thwarted maternalism has provoked many Judi Dench performances,
right back to her comely, bosomy Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream,
opposite Ian Richardson's Oberon, wanting to mother the little Indian
boy; or the vehement nurse on the cancer ward in Going Gently, whose
professionalism was a means of keeping a hopeless sympathy for the
hopeless patients at bay. Like Mother Courage, Sister Scarli implied deep
feeling by suppressing feelings: they flowed into the slouch in Brecht; in
the Stephen Frears television film, they flowed into her thorough bed-
making, the emphatic nipping and tucking of sheets. And her Lady
Macbeth, hair bound by a black turban, was likewise unexpectedly
perfervid. Passionate, and boxed in with herself at Cawdor, a husband's
ambition has taken the place of raising a child in her life. She was a
Mistress Page or Ford for whom any milk of human kindness has soured
into evil; a dynamic provincial hausfrau, with Fife for Windsor .
Best of all, regarding mothers and children, there's a film from 1965,
He Who Rides a Tiger, directed by Charles Crichton. Shot in a watery
black and white, within the pale and moody London vistas, set to period
maraca plonks by Alexander Farris, and punctuated with police cars with
bells for sirens, Judi Dench, headscarfed and busy, plays a teacher at a Dr
Barnado's Home. Into her modest and selfless life comes a charming cat
burglar (Tom Bell), who finds her goodness a refuge from his violent life.
They meet when Tom Bell tries to save a fox from an iron trap -and in
Judi Dench he's found the cunning little vixen. Foxes and cats are the
theme: the clambering and the thievery; also, on the walls of Judi Dench's
flat there are pictures of cats. When Tom Bell's attention gets too lavish,
she snaps, 'What do you think I am? Another vixen caught in a trap,
waiting to be rescued?' She's a single parent, with an illegitimate child,
and 'It's more important for me to find a father for Dan, than a lover for
myself. 'In her independence Tom Bell quite meets his match; they are
both bright survivors, whom by now new experiences will not much
change. Tom Bell, despite flooding the orphanage with gifts and toys,
keeps going back to a night of crime; and Judi Dench is tied to her own
destiny: giving herself to dozens of dependants. Hence the title, he (and
she) who rides a tiger 'can never dismount'.

What's so good about Joanne in He Who Rides a Tiger is the character's
avoidance of sentimentality. The part could've been a Julie Andrews
clone - and The Sound of Music came out the same year. But Judi Dench
was convincingly careworn, and Mrs Boyle, in Juno and the Paycock, was
an older careworn matriarch ('I killin meself workin', an' he sthruttin'
about from mornin' till night like a paycock!'), apportioning time and
affection between a live daughter and a dead son. Lady Bracknell, in The
Importance of Being Earnest, was presented much younger than the dow-
ager of tradition. Judi Dench's termagant actually flirted with John
Worthing; she was still in the sexual game. Auden once called the play a
verbal opera: 'The greatest composer on earth could have nothing to add
to it. ' As directed by Peter Hall, it was a Da Ponte libretto, a Mozart
chamber piece, with Judi Dench the coloratura Queen of the Night - the
wronged mother - whose aphorisms were her protection ('You can
hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our
daughter ... to marry into a cloakroom, and form an alliance with a
parcel'), like the barbs of Beatrice, who was played at Stratford opposite
Donald Sinden's Benedick in 1976 as a lonesome, penurious cousin;
Beatrice survived as Laura in A Fine Romance.

A fine romance was the subject of Michael Frayn's Make and Break, in
which Judi Dench played Mrs Rogers, an unregarded secretary-bird,
topping up drinks and scrubbing ashtrays for delegates at a trade fair for
fire-resistant softwood laminates. Talked about in the third person by
facetious businessmen, she becomes girlishly animated when suddenly
noticed by the galvanic Mr Garrard - Robert Hardy, stomping and
snapping like Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Siegfried Farnon.
'He's lost. He's like a lost little child,' croons Mrs Rogers, her hopes
springing maternal.

And having been pulled from the edge of the drama to its centre, she
was given speeches extolling a sweet philosophy of goodness and mind-
less solace - typing, washing-up, waiting. Monotony, repetition, is her
gate to happiness - and other characters variously define their own
contentments as religion, music, children or work. But Mrs Roger's
avowed Buddhism is really a reflex of an aching loneliness - she's 'one of
the lonely ones', ditched by her husband. 'They all leave us, don't they,
the ones we depend on ...'. As a consequence, she allows herself to be
nurtured on disappointment and promise of rejection. Judi Dench became
a woman whose boiling-point is reduced to about zero.

But it was the television play, On Giant's Shoulders, which demon-
strated Judi Dench's capacity for an aching benevolence, bounty and
resolve. Terry Wiles, a thalidomide child, played himself in a drama of his
adoption. The boy was abandoned at birth by his mother, and languished
in a hospital until visited, and eventually taken out, by kindly Len (Bryan
Pringle). Judi Dench was Hazel, Len's wife. Initially she is aghast at illness
and disease. 'A thalidomide child isn't a pretty sight,' she's told.

Again, Judi Dench banished a cloying tone - even managing to keep the
scene where Terry writes his heartfelt note. ('I love you, Mummy') from
toppling into a sob. Hazel ran outside and blinked her tears away, staring
at the bleak Peterborough landscape until it calmed her. Her Hazel was a
stout, dowdy moll, prone to temper, who slowly, and with the smallest
evidence of reluctance, exchanged her hostility towards the boy ('I'm not
having him in the house taking over, because he would') with hostility
towards those who wouldn't accept him. Len, meantime, devotes his life
and savings to the invention of electric wheelchairs and contraptions; he
makes an elaborate dodgem and artificial legs: 'He's a human being,'
erupts Hazel after a failed experiment, 'not a machine.'

Len and Hazel are very poor; they have no children of their own.
Terry's forthrightness has suddenly made them forthright - they want to
legally adopt, for the three of them have grown very close, saving one
another from lives of self-pity. When the social worker pays a call,
however, it transpires Hazel has had a foggy private history: her father,
she thinks, worked on the fairgrounds; she's had several previous hus-
bands, and her own two children have been taken from her by the
authorities, who thought her unfit for motherhood.

Hazel, a bit of a slattern, with her thick navy woollies, mousy hair and
ill-fitting plastic specs; a more ordinary woman you couldn't expect ever
to meet - she was portrayed by Judi Dench, however, as one of the most
extraordinary women you could expect ever to meet. And this was
achieved without over-balancing the part. The actress had disclosed
Hazel's humanity, her inner resource, her coming to terms with
exasperation.

Barbara Jackson, in Pack of Lies, doesn't come to terms with exasperation:
it kills her. Judi Dench became a woman of small emotional range forced
into unbidden heroics. The play switched the glamour of spy-rings
(James Bond's thrilling travelogues, le Carre's Expressionist mode,
Philby, Burgess and Maclean in their Pall Mall Clubs) for a world
crushingly dull. Hugh Whitemore's drama deals with intrigue - but in a
Ruislip suburban semi, rather than a Jacobean palace or Russian steppe.
Bob and Barbara Jackson are Mr and Mrs Nobody ('the sort of people
who stand in queues and don't answer back') - and Bob was played by
Michael Williams - whose lives are invaded by the Secret Service. Agents
commandeer an upstairs bedroom to spy across the street at Helen and
Peter Kroger - who happen to be Bob and Barbara's best friends. 'Was it
all a lie,' asked Judi Dench's character at the end, '. ..was it?' Neighbour-
liness and compatibility are revealed as counterfeit.

The Krogers 's past, on which intimacy and openness was founded, was
make-believe - so the Jacksons are multiply betrayed. 'I trusted Helen. I
thought she was brash and noisy and sometimes a bit silly ... but I trusted
her.' The Krogers have betrayed their country, transmitting news about
sonar buoys to Moscow; the Jacksons have to betray the Krogers, by not
disclosing the surveillance - and they also have to keep their child, Julia, in
ignorance of MI5's real attention: 'Helen may have lied to us,' Barbara
tells Stewart, the MI5 officer, 'but you've gone one better. You made us
do the lying; we've even lied to our own daughter. ' MI5 itself betrays the
Jacksons, by usurping their home, taking over their private lives: 'I
wouldn't mind so much,' says Barbara, 'if you had told us the truth in the
first place; you must have known it would be more than a couple of days
...' Layers and layers of mendacity are revealed.

The Jacksons are pulled into an extraordinary adventure, and yearn for
their lost normal routine. Unlike the great folk-hero conspirators, they
hate having to perform -the theatre of espionage sickens them (Barbara,
on seeing Helen, is made to 'feel quite ill'), and Bob is the emollient
Pooter, trapped by the game, knowing he's powerless. Michael Wil-
liams, compressed into a cardigan, was the meek suburbanite, shy and
decent, whose conversation and pleasures interweave with those of his
worrying spouse - a man for whom tragedy meant the car breaking
down, a hole in his sock; a man who knows the authorities have made up
their minds, so why dissent? A laconic Leopold Bloom.

Barbara, like Carrie Pooter, is goaded into a banal eloquence by the
discomfort of strangers in her home, making themselves tea and pouring
milk straight from the bottle. For her, Kim's 'game' is black magic,
corrupting all who are involved ('Helen's lying and we're lying- we're all
playing the same rotten game'). Deception does not invigorate; it's a fatal
decadence, rendering rotten the blissful chores of dusting, washing,
ironing, polishing, cooking. Having to act breaks her spirit. '... all the
deceit and lies and ... I was so angry, so hurt - I was so hurt ...' Love,
friendship, loyalty, the sanctuary of the family, are trespassed against.
Acting is treachery.

Barbara Jackson is duplicated as Nora Doel in 84 Charing Cross Road-
the screen adaptation of Helene Hanffs epistolary novel being by Hugh
Whitemore who, as in Pack of Lies, was interested in American imperti-
nence encroaching upon British reserve, with Helene for Helen, Frank's
love of books for Barbara's painting. But the duplication is more than an
author's theme: it's an accident of crossed destiny. In Hanffs The Duchess
of Bloomsbury Street, the sequel to 84 Charing Cross Road, we read: 'The
closest friends Frank and Nora had for ten years were a book dealer
named Peter Kroger and his wife ... The Doels and Krogers were
inseparable. ' Nora and Frank went to the trial,' and discovered that
everything the Krogers had told them about their past lives had been
invented ... "They were the best friends we ever had, they were fine
people, lovely people," , said Nora. The antiquarian books were used as
receptacles for smuggling secrets to fictitious customers in Eastern Eur-
ope, and it's as though Pack of Lies explores the home-keeping recesses
Frank Doel - alludes to in 84 Charing Cross Road; the doilble-agent narrative replaced with chivalric love letters.

In the film, as Nora, Judi Dench has a vestige of an Irish accent, like
Molly Bloom or Nora Barnacle; she wears a blondish wig of unkempt
locks and has a tiny bit too much make-up - a post-war luxury, but
suggesting a low-key exoticism. We see her age into a weary widow. She
tries her best to amuse her self-involved husband (Anthony Hopkins),
who even when erecting the Christmas tree with the children seems
elsewhere, preoccupied. It's a passionless marriage thick with civilities
and placid politeness. Meals, twenty years apart, are identical; accompa-
nying chat, equally empty. 'Very nice, very tasty.' Nora and Frank tick
along, Frank's amorous energy going into his transatlantic mail with
Helene - so it's like Nora's almost being cheated on. Helene is Frank's
ideal and absent love.

As Barbara, the deceived matron; as Nora, the emotionally skimped
wife, Judi Dench brought an epic amplitude to the domestically minia-
ture. (A Ruislip Demeter, goddess of the hearth, made to be Minerva,
goddess of war; Irish Nora, a neglected Venus, turning into the pining
Penelope.) But it's more than any technique, this calibre of acting.
Making the ordinary extraordinary - Mann's bliss of the commonplace-
is this actress's special genius; faith in little things, the diffusion of
simplicity: she forges in the smithy of her own soul the uncreated
conscience of her characters -to vary a phrase from James Joyce. She
accommodates the very best feelings of the heart. She is our Joycean
marinade - and even possesses areal half-lrish ancestry. Mkgnoa!
Mrkgnao! Mrkrgnao!

Having attended the rehearsal for Mr and Mrs Nobody, I was eager to view
the finished production at the Garrick Theatre. I called beforehand, with
my wife, at Dressing Room One, situated far underground, like Chur-
chill's war bunker. We were received effusively by the star in her modest
cell. A noticeboard flanked by curtains pretended to conceal a non-
existent window. John Mortimer once pointed out that there is an affinity
between actors and prisoners: both live by artificial light. The notice-
board was pinned with good luck cards - several, suggesting some
private joke, being of gorillas.

Talk, Anna's bump looming large, was of babies.

'You might be getting tired now and again, feeling as though the baby
is here already; but as soon as it's born, your time will never quite be your
own again. I told Roger before, when I first had Finty I was forever
calling my actress friends who were mothers and begging for advice.'

Judi Dench was beginning her make-up for the matinee; a madonna at
her elaborate toilette. I got up to go, thinking these moments of cosmetic
preparation private: the mystical assumption of robes and hairpiece; a
priestess getting ready to sacrifice the oxen of the sun.

'No, you both stay, , she said, unrolling her stockings down a calf and
massaging her feet.

First, she wet her hair and scooped it back with a large white band.
Next, the actress wound a crepe bandage around her head as if for terrible
surgery. Taking a tube, she squeezed orange goo onto a small sponge and
smeared it allover her face - so that she looked like the 'before' picture of a
fashion feature on wrinkle eradication. To have razored a cucumber and
popped the discs on her eyes would have completed the effect. The
orange goo hardened to suggest, at close quarters, jaundice; from the
auditorium alone would the complexion look healthful. Next, the eyelids
were shaded and the lips dabbed, with a purple stick. Some powder to the
cheeks - and even from the far side of the small den, transubstantiation
was apparent: a bubbly, bouncy woman had become a fine-featured lady.
Her face and carriage had started to act.

During the face-painting ceremonial, mammiferous Dame Judi kept
up a stream of advice on breast-feeding. She and Anna exchanged tips
about parts of life menfolk never fathom; the Darwinian adventures of the
body during pregnancy, its eruptions and rebellions.

'I acted until six months gone, which wasn't quite right for the part I
was playing. You are in charge of yourself now. Soon all sorts of
demands will be made. I remember bursting into tears. We were going
out for dinner, and I was giving Finty her feed first. And she just wouldn't
be quick enough.'

'Apparently,' said Anna, who'd been researching ante- and post-natal
adventures since the day the Predictor fluid went black, 'if you are
flustered, the milk won't pump.'

'It's psychological, breast-feeding.'

At this juncture I handed over a Phiz cartoon, from an. 1850's Punch, a
coloured etching of a grand party. The actress requisitioned every appear-
ance of tender gratitude and placed the picture on the overmantel. 'It's
that dreadful party! There's Mr Perkupp! There's Daisy! There's Mr
Gowing!'. Then she picked it up again and ran to fetch Michael. He came
in, with half a beard.

'Ah, how are you, old fellow, ' he said, Charlie greeting Lupin; and a
slight bow to Anna.

They have separate dressing rooms. Judi's contains a divan. There is a
connecting door, or maybe it is the jakes. Annie Hoey, runner-up of regal
trews, bore in the dress for Scene One; also a wig on a polystyrene stand:
sharp centre parting, dragged into plaits, woven into a bob. Judi began
fixing on bangles and rings.

'Are you going to be in today? Well, we shall do it for you. Where are
you sitting? Okay. Look out!'

She went back to Michael's room.

'Michael, we shall do it for them!'

Coming back, she said, probably satirically, 'I mean, you are part of the
production. You were the first to see the run-through.'

'I want a penny a night for my hat and newpaper idea.'

'Of course! I'm behind the scenery at that point, but when I come back
on I'll point to it.'

Julia Trevelyan Oman's set arose like an archaeological exhibit: a full
facade of Brickfield Terrace, with coloured paper stuck on the windows,
pretending to be mullion stained glass. For the introductory voice-overs,
Charlie and Carrie came to peer through the casements. Then, up flew the
exterior of the house (showing the second story, where the musicians
were situated in silhouette, and a frame for the front door); and the
Pooter's palace came forward on the truck. There were the ornaments
and paraphernalia I remembered from the Chelsea Church Hall, plus a
ton of additional gewgaws and gimcrackery.

The swooping-into-view of this fussy museum won applause. But I
thought, what with the walls (muddy varnish and deep ochre striped
paper) and curtains (orange and black squares with tassels) now added,
the effect was oppressive - Nora Helmer's Doll's House rather than Carrie
Pooter's Wendy house. Antimacassars; open fans on the wallpaper; heavy
framed prints hung on chains; plaster vases; the moose head; every item
slurped with lacquer and lit with brown and beige light: the comedy
could be in danger of stifling.

Charlie wore a fusty frock coat and elaborate stock-tie; and he had big
whiskers. Carrie was tight in the skirts and petticoats of the I88os; she
was an armoury of corsets and pins. The painstaking realism made it hard
to adjust to the artificiality of the narrative form - the acting to invisible
people, and the contention that neither character could hear the other
recite. In the hurly-burly of the rehearsal, such devices and expectations
didn't matter; it was so obviously make-believe, people acting. On the
West End stage, however, the naturalistic design meant us to overlook
our knowledge of a performance; the conjunction of a V& A set and
stylized action jarred; especially at first.

Thus, laughs were slow; and when not slow, too dutiful. Lines and
nuances which warmed with their guile at rehearsal were passing by, flat.
The actor and actress began to push themselves harder, overdoing,
slightly, the quick collusive glances at the audience - which got titters of
compliance. Judi Dench knew this, for she suddenly withdrew the trick.
Charlie's wheezing at his own jokes got a laugh the first time around; a
small guffaw the second time around; silence the third time around; after
that, bigger and bigger laughs, as the audience responded to a running
gag of the production. Several scenes (the lumpy blancmange mixture;
the steam from the trains; the Pooter's falling over when dancing) went
by stonily. The lighting changes, which Ned Sherrin had promised
would make clear the calendar, had the effect of breaking up the play into
a series of small revue sketches; and as the scenes are all variations on a
theme, the play seemed much too long. By speeding up the pace, the
purview of the production had bagged out.

But to imply Mr and Mrs Nobody had diminished in its perceptual
faculties would be false; the jokes were failing, but the marital comedy of
manners was intact -indeed, they'd grown more subtle. Charlie had
become more despondent, his dignity more fastidious - and he was
completely oblivious to the irony of his gentility. (Promoted to Head
Clerk, for instance, he thought, as did Carrie, he'd been Head Clerk for
twenty-five years.) Carrie's caressing of brand names and dreams of
gadgetry had become fluent and reverential. (In rehearsal Judi Dench
occasionally stumbled on the catalogues and vast menus. ) Her detective-
work about Daisy Mutlar had grown into a satisfied purr of information:
a proficient spy debriefing.

Both husband and wife were fastened in a drama of social advance-
ment. Charlie talked to the audience; Carrie connived with it, teasing her
husband, yet living in his universe. We were their confidants, especially
over Lupin. The Pooters's only son, a clerk and amateur actor for whom
they hold out such hopes, was the invisible presence of rehearsal; a blank
space, like the giant bunny Harvey. When he spoke, Charlie did an
impersonation - and it did work more satisfactorily in the Chelsea church
hall. Michael Williams, made up as a middle-aged Charlie, couldn't be
anyone other than middle-aged Charlie. (The same problem occurred
when Judi Dench was briefly Mrs Birrell. ) But actor and actress had
perfected their ability to present the unspoken secret signals between a
husband and a wife - signals indicative of worry and sympathy: their
thoughts about wayward Lupin registered his existence. Lupin was not
on stage but the effect Lupin had on his parents made Lupin loom. Only
when made to speak did he disappear.

The aftermath of the Mansion House Ball, which they'd looked for-
ward to so much, and which turned into a catastrophe, was played with
rich feeling: Charlie's anger really an anger with himself; Carrie's tending
to pettishness. The separation, when she goes to Annie Fullers's (now
Mrs James of Sutton) froze laughter. Judi, fleetingly, had become a
Holloway Juno: quick, capable, tried. Mr and Mrs Nobody took its place in
the actress's best work: a woman coping as a wife, as a mother. Carrie's
reward for fortitude? Charlie buys her a Wenham Lake Ice Safe.

How would the much-regarded object appear? A 'deus ex machina'
from the flies? From a trapdoor? Gary Fairhall wheeled a small cupboard
on, no bigger than a varnished hutch. The authentic object, so proudly
demonstrated at rehearsal, had had to be jettisoned as too heavy, too
cumbersome. So a mock-up deputized. The genuine was defective; the
representation was preferred over the real thing.

I'M DYIN', AIGYPT -DYIN'.

Whilst performing in Mr and Mrs Nobody at night, Judi Dench rehearsed
Antony and Cleopatra during the day. Regal and grave at the same time as
they're capricious and merry, Carrie and Cleo are compatible - and the
actress played them as issuing from the same nature: women as divinities
- Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, superintending her lands like Carrie ruling
The Laurels. Both had fingers clogged with rings and wrists a-jangle with
bangles; both never stopped pacing out whirlpools on stage. Both are
goddesses of Love: and Judi Dench's fantasy of arranging fish on beds of
ice (on chat shows she's said that had she failed in the theatre, she'd have
been happy to sell fish) suggests that, like Venus, she was born from the
sea; form from the foam, or what Joyce calls 'the great sweet mother'.
Goddesses of love, Carrie and Cleo carryon, bewitching their menfolk.

Note: This next very long part is about Antony and Cleopatra --
not Judi Dench and Michael Williams. I think the author lost his way a bit ... well, quite a bit, actually.

Antony and Cleopatra is not a pageant, though it is often presented as
though it ought to be - Charlton Heston, in 1972, returned to the
costumes and scale of Ben-Hur, and provided that opportunity for Ned
Sherrin to buy discarded sets; Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, filmed with
Vivien Leigh, was an opportunity for Higgins and Eliza to wear Nile
fancy dress; the Burton and Taylor Cleopatra was an opportunity for
Joseph L. Mankiewicz to go on a spending spree, indulging the extra-
mural romance of the stars. Rex Harrison was Caesar (Olivier turned it
down), and footage with Peter Finch, directed by Rouben Mamoulian,
was abandoned. The entire episode was like an imprudent war.

In Carry on Cleo Sid James guffaws as Antony, Kenneth Williams
cackles as Caesar and Amanda Barrie skinny dips in milk as a nymphet
Egypt, the sexiest Egypt since Claudette Colbert, who was brazen and
teasing in Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra, acting inside sets blown up from
Victorian genre-paintings ... No, the play isn't a tattoo, it's domestic
and intimate. Antony and Cleopatra are Edward and Mrs Simpson: the
besotted princeling who trafficks away his kingdom for the love of a
much-married hoyden from luxe America (the sale of the Windsor
baubles was like revealing the inventory of Cleopatra's treasury); or Mars
and Venus in Veronese; or an aged Romeo and Juliet - even to the extent
of misreported deaths and a conclusion in a vault. Cleopatra: she's Bizet's
Carmen, Wagner's Kundry, Pound's Circe, Nabokov's Lolita. She's
Scarlett O'Hara and Hollywood vamps. (As we know, she's Molly
Bloom, 'Cliopatrick', and she's Carrie Pooter, with her banquets and
Jackson Freres' champagne.)

Antony and Cleopatra was nonetheless directed by Peter Hall like a lost
opera. On a permanent burnt-umber amphitheatre of a set, an ochre
sepulchre, the spirit of particular place was abandoned. Rome, Greece
and Egypt weren't discriminated, and Cleopatra would enter as Octavius
was leaving. A wandering wall, broken into segments, with a lofty,
panelled door, flanked by a ruined pillar, dominated. The effect: abstract
neo-classical, by a designer who had loitered too long in art galleries
looking at the seventeenth-century dream of the ancient world, with odds
and ends of classical statuary amongst the rubble; with people wearing
velvet doublet and buttons under the classical armour.

The romantic ruin, becomingly decrepit, with wide-open spaces for
the congregating of choruses, was a set for something grand, stately -
hence, grand opera. The triumvirate was a trio of tenor (Octavius),
baritone (Lepidus) and bass (Antony); coloratura soprano was Cleopatra
- Judi Dench slimmed down like Callas. We did indeed have moments of
choral speaking: Octavius, Lepidus and Antony chanted to Pompey
'That's our offer' and 'show's the way, sir'; Antony's attendants say, 'Fly?
not we'; and his servants holler, 'The gods forbid!'

And yet Hall's not to be expected to operate other than as if he had an
opera on his hands. His dramas are consistently ritualistic, reverential -
The Oresteia, The Importance of Being Earnest; and, contrariwise, his operas
have a supple theatricality - the nighthawk Don Giovanni, the games
people play in Le Nozze di Figaro, the striking-out of Albert in Britten's
Albert Herring. He directed Antony and Cleopatra as if it was his Clemenza di Tito; a thing of grandiosity and marble: the marble about to melt, if only
the orchestra would arrive.

Bereft of music (apart from a dozen braying fanfares and honking
trumpets), the production felt fatally incomplete, like a resurrection of
the Samuel Barber Antony and Cleopatra, adapted by Zeffirelli for the
opening of the new New York Met. At the Lincoln Center, in 1966,
incomplete because the stage hadn't been built; or perhaps Hall was
waiting for Kaffka's score (1779) or Berleburg's (1883) or Yuferov's
(1900) or Ardin's (1919) or Malipiero's (1938). The big Olivier stage
wants big treatment. But Roman soldiers marching in the aisles and
Dolby speakers clunking out war cries only muffled the real play.

Antony and Cleopatra is about the self; knowing thyself; to thine own self
being true; the presentation of the self in everyday life. Shakespeare
implies that any core of selfhood, self-possession, is a great fiction. The
self is a shady hollow from which we're in flight. The self is a volatile
heart of darkness made out of past, present and fantasy; a crucible of fact
and reminiscence - infinitely recombined and rearranged. Think of a
Picasso cut-up or Pound's vortex or a choppy film by Fellini: the 'self' is
like the quirkiness of form. Strokes of havoc unselve the sweet especial
scene!

There is no centre, no composed self - only moods, possibilities; so
many available performances. This can make for madness (Lear, Ophelia,
Othello, Hamlet, Antony) or a comic liberation (Falstaff, Hamlet again,
Cleopatra). In Dryden's All For Love, this psychological fluidity is shifted
to Dolabella, who is smitten with Cleopatra late in the play:

But yet the loss was private that I made;
'Twas but my self I lost: I lost no Legions;
I had no World to lose, no people's love.

Dryden's is a diminished Antony: he is but a representative of history and
culture rather than a private individual. Shakespeare is interested in the
private individual. Rome and Egypt are less interesting to him than the
competitive versions of self within each main character. As John Bayley
says in Shakespeare and Tragedy: 'The contrast in the play ... is between
the figure one puts on ("Eros, thou yet beholds't me?") and the dissipa-
tion of that rigid persona. ' Shakespeare's concern is the liquet action of
personality- of the self's many corruptions.

In this way, Antony and Cleopatra doesn't only demand great actors: it is
an examination in great acting; an intensively theatrical play, dealing with
the limits of self-dramatization, ostentation, reclusiveness, mummery,
conjury, sham. Thus when Antony describes Cleopatra as a repository of
every divergent emotion - the 'wrangling queen / Whom everything
becomes' and in whom 'every passion fully strives / To make itself. ..' -
Cleopatra retorts, 'I'll seem the fool I am not; Antony / Will be himself. ,
But Antony, in Egypt, does not seem, to Philo, Antony -which
assumes some fixed' Antony' exists, at least to Philo's imagination:

...when he is not Antony,
He comes too short of that great property
Which still should go with Antony.

Antony is perfectly aware that he's compromising the public side of his
nature: 'These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, / Or lose myself. ..,
And the death of his wife in distant Italy is a further guilty jolt, making
current pleasure 'The opposite of itself'.

From the witch-queen finally breaking off, he breaks up: 'But my full
heart, , he says to Cleopatra, 'remains in use with you. ' He distributes
affections; a process of dispersal and the sundering of self:

Our separation so abides and flies
That thou, residing here, goes yet with me;
And I, hence fleeting, here remain with thee.

Quitting, Antony implies he'll stay in spirit with Cleopatra, who'll dwell
in a limbo - 'idleness itself' - until his body returns to claim its soul. And
she patrols her palace, planning and cancelling order and amusements,
deep in active reminiscence:

O times!
I laugh'd him out of patience; and that night
I laugh'd him into patience ...

Cleopatra is an enchantress, her own switchback variations of personality
exacerbating Antony's - even to the extent of drawing him out of himself
for a game of cross-dressing: once, they exchanged identities: '[I] put my
tires and mantles on him, whilst / I wore his sword ...' And, the
messenger coming with news of the marriage to Octavia, her tone
instantly alters from cat to spider woman; she flirts with the messenger,
then strikes him, threatening to rip out his eyes. 'Good madam,' says
Charmian, 'keep yourself within yourself.' Recovering composure,
Cleopatra knows her actorial gifts went momentarily out of control. She
was briefly mad:

These hands do lack nobility, that they strike
A meaner than myself; since I myself
Have given myself the cause.

Their grand passion was in the past - 'Eternity was in our lips,' Cleopatra
reminisces; her future is imagined as a longing preterite: 'his remem-
brance lay I in Egypt with his joy' or 'My salad days / When I was green in
judgement ...' Her limbo is all her yesterdays. Antony by contrast, back
in battle, languishes in a harsh political present tense.

Pompey realizes that the triumvirate is not founded on genuine amity
and he hopes to make that weakness his strength - exploiting the break-
up, the division, which Antony's hasty match with Octavia is really
meant to be bonding. That marriage is an effort 'to knit your hearts / With
an unslipping knot' - a reference to Antony and Octavia's brother,
Octavius, rather than a connubial image for actual bride and groom. And,
in any case, the groom doesn't expect to be much at home. The ways of
the world, he warns his new wife, 'will sometimes / Divide me from your
bosom.' Let alone leaving Octavia alone, a soothsayer tells Antony to be
rid of Octavius - 'Make space enough between you' - and so he betakes
himself to Athens. 'You take from me a great part of myself, ' says
Octavius of his sister, as she packs her bags for Greece.

The play begins with Antony and Cleopatra having to split up; the idea
of dissension and fragmentation informs the rest of the drama - a world
multiplying, mating, destroying, dividing, like a restless organism.
Octavius's treachery against Pompey, and his general disrespectfulness,
urges Antony to an avenging war, which Octavia tries to persuade him
against: 'the world should cleave' to have husband set upon brother. But
Antony is preoccupied with an abstract:

...If I lose mine honour,
I lose myself.

He must defend his sense of self; Octavia, finding his attitude towards her
intolerably neglectful, as he dreams only of soft beds in the East, slinks
back to Italy, where she's described as 'an obstruct 'tween his lust and
him': she's the air-pocket between Cleopatra and Antony and once
removed, the ancient lovers are free to reunite, for an improvident battle
with Rome, at Actium. Canidius explains why they were defeated.

Had our general
Been what he knew himself, it had gone well:
O, he has given example of our flight
Most grossly by his own.

That is, had Antony been his usual heroic self; had he been what he knows
he has it in himself to be, then it might have been a victory. But what's
happening in the play is that Antony's losing a sense of what he is; he's
falling apart: 'I have fled myself ...' Enobarbus is disgusted at the
uncharacteristic behaviour and so 'will seek / Some way to leave him' -
betaking himself from Antony's company like a pettish ex-wife, a depart-
ing spouse.

Antony is quite aware of his altering state; he realizes his nature is
disintegrating. 'Let that be left / which leaves itself, , he says with resigna-
tion, when the servants and companions walk out with their treasure.
And Enobarbus tries to fathom how this present Antony connects with
the soldier who once slew Brutus:

I see men's judgements are
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
Do draw the inward quality after them,
To suffer all alike ...

Fate, he says, is character - and Antony 'becomes his flaw': he's turning
into a monument or stage-joke of the besotted old lover.

Temperamentally, Antony tries to assert a waning power; he has a
messenger whipped ('I am Antony yet') and, before Cleopatra, he puts on
a display of anger and authority - and he overdoes it. Cleopatra interjects
with 'Not know me yet?' But after the ritual squabble, they are reunited.

Since my lord
Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra

Together again after all these years, their happiness is a phantom dawn.
Wars intrude. Octavius's battle formations are such that' Antony may
seem to spend his fury / Upon himself. ' And, losing the sea-fight,
'Fortune and Antony part here'; he wishes his ancestors had imparted
moderation into his make-up, so that he could 'Subdue my worthiest
self.' Contemplating his own volubility, his own changeableness, he
panics at all the dissimulation: he doesn't want to be an actor. The purified
man he wants to be is 'indistinct / As water is in water' - but personality is
a befuddling fluid:

Here I am Antony;
Yet cannot hold this visible shape.

The only solution to psychological waywardness, the only way Antony
can mobilize the mercurial, is to commit suicide:

...there is left us
Ourselves to end ourselves.

Killing himself, he'll be 'conqueror of myself' - though he can't even
achieve that, and the play ends in a style of black farce, as his half-
disembowelled carcase is winched aloft. He declares:

Not Caesar's valour hath o'erthrown Antony,
But Antony hath triumph' d on itself.

To which Cleopatra responds, with how much irony?

So it should be, that none but Antony
Should conquer Antony.

Dying by 'that self hand / Which writ his honour in the acts it did',
Antony's the man who haunted himself, the quibbles of self being his
tragedy -or mock-tragedy, if Cleopatra has anything to say on the
subject. Suicide for her is a love-game, solemnity a sport. She tells a
messenger to spread word that she's about to exterminate herself; Char-
mian joins in the shenanigans:

The soul and body rive not more in parting
Than greatness going off.

This is the misinformation triggering Antony's metaphysical and des-
tructive self-inquiry. But only when Octavius later thwarts some of her
political intrigues does Cleopatra think of death with any earnestness.
She'll join Antony in his apotheosis: her memory of him is not of a man
but of a charmed landscape -he's dissipated into the rock and stones and
trees:

For his bounty
There was no winter in't: an autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping.

The victorious Octavius wants defeated Cleopatra ('Hear me, good
madam: / Your loss is, as yourself, great') to succumb to a belittlement,
and go to Rome as a freak-show. 'I should not, , she replies, 'be noble to
myself. ' An actress, whose lifelong show is herself, she'll not now be
stage-managed by anyone else; there's vast pride and assertive majesty in
her rejection of inferior theatre:

The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage as, and present
Our Alexandrian revels: Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' th' posture of a whore.

Antony kills himself because he's a mess and existentially collapsing.
He can't cope with the idea of being an actor-with being merely a player.
Cleopatra kills herself because her plurality and sense of self is inviolate -
and she does not want to lose control of her precious waywardness. She's
an actress who doesn't want to be impersonated by anyone else. Antony's
lost control, and his waywardness is uninvited. Theatre is a shambles to
him. Cleopatra's death is a grandiose farewell performance; Antony's the
botch of an understudy - and he does think he's his own clunky replace-
ment. Cleopatra's suicide is a liebstod. Judi Dench wore a golden cape, like
an angelic Isolde -and death brought no spasm. Her body was as
immobile as a cathedral effigy, or Lady Diana Cooper as the Madonna in
The Miracle. Antony's suicide is an obscene botch - his body is lugged like
Falstaff in the buck-basket; he becomes a comic prop. Antony totally
disintegrates; in death, Cleopatra atomizes: she becomes a spirit, an idea,
an event - she dissolves into the black sun of herself:

I am fire, and air; my other elements
I give to baser life ...

Attending a play can be an amusement, a disappointment, a bore, a
revelation. At Antony and Cleopatra, I scribbled in my programme -
disfiguring advertisements for Rioja and Martini Rosso - my notes
becoming, at the risk of appearing like the muttering professor at Peter
Brook's Deadly Theatre, the gymkhana of the foregoing few pages.
Because the ox-blood set didn't bother to differentiate location, about
which the text is specific- it's Shakespeare's most panoptic drama -the
dark, shadowy stage forced emphasis upon the differentiation of charac-
ter, and the different aspects within the same character: hence the elabor-
ate sensation of self; of being in and out of one's self etc. An opera without
music was Hall's homage to his cold-water mentor, F. R. Leavis, for
whom literary analysis 'is a process of re-creation in response to the black
marks on the pages' (The Living Principle). And for Hall, the black marks
are as the notes on a stave.

Finally ... back to Judi and Michael ...

'Edgar! You must've acted in this play so many times!'

Edgar looked like a member of the Red-Headed League -ginger all
over and with heavy horn-rims - but actually he was an actor.

'I know some of it quite well, ' he answered. Yes, yes. Darling, you
were marvellous, quite marvellous, I'll go now so you can lie down.'

'Bye, Edgar! Hello, girls.'

Judi Dench looked up at two blushing, smirking, acne-popping
speechless nymphets.

'Are you doing it for O-level? It does so help to see the play on a stage,
doesn't it? You get an idea of the story - all spread out.'

The girls, giggling, followed Edgar, glowing, out.

'Roger! Come this way!'

It was my turn for an audience with Aigypt. The dressing room was a
motel cubicle, with a partition concealing a shower and a table with
make-up sticks and vital impedimenta. A supermarket cardboard box
contained the gold cape, crushed now like tin foil, and the crown - a
cardboard and smarties nursery-school effort. Another carton contained
an ivory dagger, a pearl ring and a rubber asp-each object joke-shop jobs
close to.

Two hops, and we were past the partition and in a recess with a divan,
more bouquets than for a state funeral, cards, telegrams, a magnum of
Moet, a copy (illustrated) of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The bouquets
made for a heavy sweet smell of decomposition.

I was bidden give post-natal details.

'He sleeps through the night, Tristan? Every two and a half hours,
Finty! I thought I was going to die. No sleep for months. I remember one
morning making the announcement to Michael, "Today I am going to
die." I was convinced I was going to get up and drop dead there and then.
But it surpasses everything. Everything!'

The actress was in her Cleopatra kit with an evening show ahead. Her
complexion was slopped with a thick heavy orange, which had dried in
wrinkles, like an aerial photograph of the Kalahari, and the gauze of the
wig was pulled low on the brow - so Judi Dench resembled Ashya in an
early stage of crumbling. But with her legs drawn up on the bed, arm
dangling from over knee, the effect was cocky, sphyngine.

'Cleopatra is all Shakespeare's women in one go. The stage, the whole
time, is filled with her lovers, or former lovers, or the children of her
lovers, or would-be lovers. Pompey! She had his father! Imagine! I'm
doing it all again in an hour. Re-do the make-up. Untangle my wig. Then
I'm driving up to York - a nephew's baptism.'

Cleopatra is an actress who ransacks her own temperamental gamut; the
paradox is that the ransacking is regenerative. Like the phoenix, she
flames into being. Judi Dench is an actress whose characters are of her
own character: for her to play Cleopatra is to intimate a huge poem of
personal accomplishment; a parade of her heart. Notions of self weren't
imagined: they were felt. An idiomorphic party. And the production
began with much giggling and romping, as Cleopatra brought in Antony
- carried on the shoulders of an eunuch - by a leash. There was much movement, pacing, prowling. It was as though Antony was in Egypt on
an eternal furlough, the Nile his pleasure garden and Cleopatra his playmate.

That her stage partner was not her real husband made for a switch of
perspective: Carrie Pooter preincarnated as Cleopatra, mating with a
decaying hero instead of a rising clerk. And in any case, Michael Williams
is not a natural Antony, as Alec McCowen is not. McCowen could never
convince us of power burning itself up; Williams's power is deeply
interior - the fire which seems out but sleeps beneath the cinders (as
Corneille would put it): hence his heroic Mr Nobody, his flailing Gor-
onwy Rees (like Babs in Pack of Lies), his Bob in Pack of Lies (squashed like Nora in 84 Charing Cross Road).

What Antony requires is a man relinquishing command of himself,
almost somnambulantly, drugged with mandragora; it must be a sur-
render equivalent to Lear smartly dispossessing himself of Albion. And in
Anthony Hopkins, Judi Dench had a consort well able to portray mighty
resignation. Slapping, rolling, given to sexual repartee, this Cleopatra
with this Antony was coquettish, skittish, swishing in slinky silk panta-
loons. Her many trinkets and beads gave a gypsy look; and her orange tan
and tight curls made Cleopatra the image of Cleo Laine; a folk-song
Isolde.

Judi Dench was never at rest - poetry in literal motion, as she described
arcs and spirals. An alert cat; a blinking sphinx: pouncing, jabbing,
purring, scratching. A pussy trapped by Egyptian responsibility, by
being in love, and by Octavius's designs. Hers is the nature to hop forty
paces in the market: a restless, rebellious energy; Carrie Pooter sent up the
Nile. And the strides and bustling, whether appearing through net
curtains and pelmet and varnished screen with a ruined egg custard, or
whether coming through a baroque portal waving an ivory dagger and
carrying a gold-embossed ledger - it's the same restlessness and energetic
rebellion.

There's also a smack of sexiness. Judi Dench shed a stone to play
Cleopatra, excavating a pert waist and litheness for splashing about in the
river. The actress is a mix of boyishness and unmistak