London Times
Judi Dench and Peter Hall play tug of love
These old friends are reuniting after 48 years to give Shakespeare's Midsummer Night’s Dream a delightful surprise twist
Lesley White
An audience with the royals is always nerve-wracking, but at least there is usually a butler on hand with a stiff drink. Today, alas, there is only sad-looking guacamole in a tub for lunch, and a loudspeaker intoning: “Fifteen-minute call for Gentlemen of Verona.” Then again, we are visiting arts royalty, unsubsidised, egalitarian, concerned with the classical canon and the common good, curtsey not expected. Dame Judi Dench and Sir Peter Hall are enthroned but determinedly ungrand, stars who prefer to see themselves as troupers, busy as bees with plans for the future (he as director emeritus at the Rose Theatre in Kingston upon Thames; she with her late-flowering movie career, including another M in next year’s Bond), but, given half a chance, relaxing into their shared past as into a warm bath.
This month, Dench opens as Titania in Hall’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 48 years after they staged it for the RSC at Stratford — the oldest fairy on the block, although not, thankfully, with a diaphanous frock and gossamer wings. When Hall called to offer her the role, he didn’t pause for breath in case she thought he’d gone mad, explaining that he wanted her to play the queen of the forest as Elizabeth I, in a play within a play. “There was a slight pause after I’d finished my spiel, and she said, ‘Right, I’ll do it.’” “Just like that with us, isn’t it?” Dench smiles. “It tends to be,” he replies. “Yes, it is. It’s very nice.”
They are like a clever, doting old married couple, finishing each other’s sentences, mildly disagreeing on dates, forgetting names, happy in their jokey reminiscence. In a tiny dressing room at the Rose, we huddle before the bulb-lit mirrors, although between these two home-grown legends, the twinkle factor almost requires sunglasses. He is 80 in November, bearded and wry and hacking pitifully this morning. “The cough has come back,” he wails. “Oh, it hasn’t,” she soothes, as if to a little boy. “Did you get cold yesterday?”
She is four years younger, swathed in elegant cream layers, petite, soft, cuddly (not that you’d ever dare) and utterly rigorous: a few years ago, he offered her the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and she told him “where to get off”. Her speciality is being adored — however much she curses her national-treasure status — and Hall seems as susceptible as the next man. Close up, she can look shockingly old, but only if, like me, you have come fresh from viewing her near-naked appearance as Titania in Hall’s 1968 film of AMND. Diana Rigg played Helena and Helen Mirren Hermia, but neither of those fêted sex kittens is half as alluring as the 33-year-old Dench, daubed a foresty green, with fig leaves to cover not much of her modesty and fired with such wanton lust for the donkey-headed Bottom that she gives Equus a run for its money.
She has never seen the film, but remembers the costume all too well. “It was just ivy,” she chuckles naughtily. “I got in in the morning, and it was stuck on. I was painted green and wore wellingtons. I was meant to have clothes, but Peter thought they didn’t look right against a real background, so gradually the clothes got eroded.” She had no misgivings about disrobing in a chilly November location, only about the wildlife: spotted snakes with double tongues would have posed no problem, but the earthworms wriggling beneath her bare body were suddenly too much to bear. “I was frightened of worms. We were lying in the bower, and, just as we were about to start filming, I leapt up and everything went up in the air. I was screaming.” She beams a late apology at the director, who seems to have forgiven her.
Partly, Dench agreed to the new production to help Hall draw audiences to a local theatre considered unworthy of funding by the Arts Council — “Who regard southwest London as having enough theatres,” he says. In the mood for a blockbuster, he worked out what Shakespeare parts were left to “the Dame”, and it appeared she’d done the lot. “Some of them several times,” he laughs, and his leading fairy shoots him a mock-surprised look. “Elizabeth was a keen theatre patron who often had Shakespeare’s company to the palace, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream was in the repertory. There were plays in which the court participated. She was a great dancer and musician, so we thought, ‘Why couldn’t the queen play Titania?’”
Dench has serious, award-winning form playing queens: Victoria in Mrs Brown, the performance that impelled Harvey Weinstein to make her a movie star at 62, and the ageing but mischievous Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, which won her an Oscar and a Bafta. What difference to the role of the beauteous Titania does the pock-marked monarch make? The actress looks stricken for a moment. “Oh, I can’t answer that at the moment...”, but, as she likes to scare herself, we can assume that the slight panic is part of her equipment.
It helps that she knows the role by heart. “I know all the parts... they stay in there.” She first played Titania at the Mount, a Quaker boarding school in York. “It was a huge thing to have been chosen,” she says, still proud. After drama school, she played both the first fairy and Hermia, and Hall’s 1959 Dream, with Charles Laughton as Bottom, was one of the first productions she saw at Stratford. Before that, she had watched Michael Redgrave’s Lear on a school-holiday trip with her parents, while ordinary aircraftman Hall was stationed down the road with the RAF Education Corps, doing his national service, taking the bus to the theatre and standing at the back for two shillings.
Hall set up the RSC in 1960; Dench arrived to join his troupe in 1962. Their original Dream, with Ian Richardson as Oberon and Ian Holm as Puck, opened at the Aldwych, he recalls. Dench corrects him gently. “No, no, we started at Stratford.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, then it went to the Aldwych, where I wasn’t in it, but Michael [Williams, her late husband] was. We weren’t married then. You see...” She looks momentarily forlorn. “This play is so entwined with my family. It was a beautiful production at the Aldwych, with a big tree. Mikey and Ian Richardson set up a little bar inside it, and had a stiff vodka before the very end of the play.”
Dench lives with her daughter, Finty, and 12-year-old grandson in Surrey, but has always talked of her second “family” — of the theatre companies, the camaraderie of the ensemble. Since Williams’s death in 2001, after 30 years of marriage, its ties have been her security and her comfort. “I couldn’t do anything on my own,” she says flatly. Her private and personal realms merge seamlessly: Finty was directed by Hall at the Rose in Bedroom Farce last year; her friend Diana Rigg’s daughter, Rachael Stirling, plays Helena in the new Dream.
Much as Pete and Jude dote on each other, however, a memory-lane venture like this could be swamped in melancholy; and Dench is thinking of her husband through much of our conversation. For all her film triumphs (Iris, Notes on a Scandal, Rob Marshall’s musical Nine and, of course, the Bonds, in which her acerbic M is more indispensable than the latest six-pack lead), classical theatre is her home and history. It is also a sustaining connection with Williams and the life they shared: domesticity, acclaim, a very English sort of stardom and, in the best of times, a stage. In 1972, they both appeared in the RSC’s London Assurance. “I was hugely pregnant in it, too,” she laughs, “and it was very unsuitable. I had this wonderful part of a virgin in a Gloucestershire garden and, before Sinead Cusack took over, Janet Whiteside was saying over my huge stomach, ‘Do you feel nothing stirring?’”
Of her nine collaborations with Hall, it is not their Dream she remembers most affectionately, but their 1987 Antony and Cleopatra, with Anthony Hopkins, at the National Theatre. Hall was a taskmaster at times; if she is the famous, bigger-earning star, he is still the boss. “Nobody misses anything out with Peter. There’s no cheating. No mis-scans.” When she and Miranda Foster were called to rehearse the death of Cleopatra, they thought it would take half an hour. “Three hours later, Peter’s still standing there with a lectern, making everybody speak the verse properly. And Miranda got up and went [she imitates Foster’s cheeky, overemphasised rhythm]: ‘Our roy-al la-dy’s dead.’ I was in hysterics. And there was a moment. And Peter said: ‘Thank Christ!’”
Hall looks bemused. “Really? I have no memory of that at all.” “Oh, yes,” Dench says firmly. “And we had a picnic each night inside the monument. They asked us for our favourite food, and we said it was seafood and a glass of champagne. And on the last night, there it was. You’d never have known from the front.”
“In 1962, at the end of the Dream,” Hall recalls, looking at his leading lady, “I said to this one, ‘One day, you’ll play Cleopatra.’ And she said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous! A little runt like me? I couldn’t possibly. And I said, ‘Well, just bear in mind, when the time comes for you to play her, that I’m first in the queue.’ Twenty years later, the phone rings and it’s Dame Judi, saying, ‘Hello. I’ve been asked by Stratford to go and do Cleopatra. Will you do it?’ And I said, ‘How long have I got?’ And she said, ‘Oh, about a week.’”
The night before we met, Dench was watching Sir Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot with her old friend Roger Rees, an assistant set painter in the Stratford of her youth who ended up playing Hamlet there, an apprenticeship whose demise she mourns. “There just isn’t the opportunity for that to happen now, for young actors to learn,” she says. “When I went to the Vic between 1957 and 1960, I never left the side of the stage. Dame Peggy [Ashcroft] was fantastic to me when we did The Cherry Orchard...” Hall cuts in: “I only had reason to reprimand Dame Peggy once, and that was at the height of the Wars of the Roses [his 1964 cycle of Shakespeare histories]. At the matinée, it was reported to me that she was listening to the cricket on a tiny radio affixed to her helmet. A lot of junior actors who were cast as soldiers were coming for the latest score. She was passionate for cricket...”
Despite their grumbles about long-lost repertory companies and stingy arts funding, neither veteran is gloomy about the state of the modern theatre. Hall points to the fact that his Stratford season ran from spring to autumn, but it now “trots on all round the clock”. What keeps him going is the next play: “I don’t like not to be in rehearsal.” As for the venerable queen who hates her wrinkles but cherishes her unnatural energy, what sustains her is work, doing the crossword, learning something new each day, the buzz of the undisclosed movie for which she has just signed up, beginning four days after the Dream closes. “I will lie down for four days, I think.”
More meaningful than any of that, though, is her misty-eyed pride about taking her grandson — “my Sammy” — to see Brendan O’Hea’s Cymbeline. She also took him to All’s Well That Ends Well — “Three times!” — and Jude Law’s Hamlet. “His attention span is normally short, but he sat throughout it without moving. If it’s interesting enough, you see, they will.”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is in preview and opens at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames, on February 15
Judi Dench and Peter Hall play tug of love
These old friends are reuniting after 48 years to give Shakespeare's Midsummer Night’s Dream a delightful surprise twist
Lesley White
An audience with the royals is always nerve-wracking, but at least there is usually a butler on hand with a stiff drink. Today, alas, there is only sad-looking guacamole in a tub for lunch, and a loudspeaker intoning: “Fifteen-minute call for Gentlemen of Verona.” Then again, we are visiting arts royalty, unsubsidised, egalitarian, concerned with the classical canon and the common good, curtsey not expected. Dame Judi Dench and Sir Peter Hall are enthroned but determinedly ungrand, stars who prefer to see themselves as troupers, busy as bees with plans for the future (he as director emeritus at the Rose Theatre in Kingston upon Thames; she with her late-flowering movie career, including another M in next year’s Bond), but, given half a chance, relaxing into their shared past as into a warm bath.
This month, Dench opens as Titania in Hall’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 48 years after they staged it for the RSC at Stratford — the oldest fairy on the block, although not, thankfully, with a diaphanous frock and gossamer wings. When Hall called to offer her the role, he didn’t pause for breath in case she thought he’d gone mad, explaining that he wanted her to play the queen of the forest as Elizabeth I, in a play within a play. “There was a slight pause after I’d finished my spiel, and she said, ‘Right, I’ll do it.’” “Just like that with us, isn’t it?” Dench smiles. “It tends to be,” he replies. “Yes, it is. It’s very nice.”
They are like a clever, doting old married couple, finishing each other’s sentences, mildly disagreeing on dates, forgetting names, happy in their jokey reminiscence. In a tiny dressing room at the Rose, we huddle before the bulb-lit mirrors, although between these two home-grown legends, the twinkle factor almost requires sunglasses. He is 80 in November, bearded and wry and hacking pitifully this morning. “The cough has come back,” he wails. “Oh, it hasn’t,” she soothes, as if to a little boy. “Did you get cold yesterday?”
She is four years younger, swathed in elegant cream layers, petite, soft, cuddly (not that you’d ever dare) and utterly rigorous: a few years ago, he offered her the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and she told him “where to get off”. Her speciality is being adored — however much she curses her national-treasure status — and Hall seems as susceptible as the next man. Close up, she can look shockingly old, but only if, like me, you have come fresh from viewing her near-naked appearance as Titania in Hall’s 1968 film of AMND. Diana Rigg played Helena and Helen Mirren Hermia, but neither of those fêted sex kittens is half as alluring as the 33-year-old Dench, daubed a foresty green, with fig leaves to cover not much of her modesty and fired with such wanton lust for the donkey-headed Bottom that she gives Equus a run for its money.
She has never seen the film, but remembers the costume all too well. “It was just ivy,” she chuckles naughtily. “I got in in the morning, and it was stuck on. I was painted green and wore wellingtons. I was meant to have clothes, but Peter thought they didn’t look right against a real background, so gradually the clothes got eroded.” She had no misgivings about disrobing in a chilly November location, only about the wildlife: spotted snakes with double tongues would have posed no problem, but the earthworms wriggling beneath her bare body were suddenly too much to bear. “I was frightened of worms. We were lying in the bower, and, just as we were about to start filming, I leapt up and everything went up in the air. I was screaming.” She beams a late apology at the director, who seems to have forgiven her.
Partly, Dench agreed to the new production to help Hall draw audiences to a local theatre considered unworthy of funding by the Arts Council — “Who regard southwest London as having enough theatres,” he says. In the mood for a blockbuster, he worked out what Shakespeare parts were left to “the Dame”, and it appeared she’d done the lot. “Some of them several times,” he laughs, and his leading fairy shoots him a mock-surprised look. “Elizabeth was a keen theatre patron who often had Shakespeare’s company to the palace, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream was in the repertory. There were plays in which the court participated. She was a great dancer and musician, so we thought, ‘Why couldn’t the queen play Titania?’”
Dench has serious, award-winning form playing queens: Victoria in Mrs Brown, the performance that impelled Harvey Weinstein to make her a movie star at 62, and the ageing but mischievous Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, which won her an Oscar and a Bafta. What difference to the role of the beauteous Titania does the pock-marked monarch make? The actress looks stricken for a moment. “Oh, I can’t answer that at the moment...”, but, as she likes to scare herself, we can assume that the slight panic is part of her equipment.
It helps that she knows the role by heart. “I know all the parts... they stay in there.” She first played Titania at the Mount, a Quaker boarding school in York. “It was a huge thing to have been chosen,” she says, still proud. After drama school, she played both the first fairy and Hermia, and Hall’s 1959 Dream, with Charles Laughton as Bottom, was one of the first productions she saw at Stratford. Before that, she had watched Michael Redgrave’s Lear on a school-holiday trip with her parents, while ordinary aircraftman Hall was stationed down the road with the RAF Education Corps, doing his national service, taking the bus to the theatre and standing at the back for two shillings.
Hall set up the RSC in 1960; Dench arrived to join his troupe in 1962. Their original Dream, with Ian Richardson as Oberon and Ian Holm as Puck, opened at the Aldwych, he recalls. Dench corrects him gently. “No, no, we started at Stratford.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, then it went to the Aldwych, where I wasn’t in it, but Michael [Williams, her late husband] was. We weren’t married then. You see...” She looks momentarily forlorn. “This play is so entwined with my family. It was a beautiful production at the Aldwych, with a big tree. Mikey and Ian Richardson set up a little bar inside it, and had a stiff vodka before the very end of the play.”
Dench lives with her daughter, Finty, and 12-year-old grandson in Surrey, but has always talked of her second “family” — of the theatre companies, the camaraderie of the ensemble. Since Williams’s death in 2001, after 30 years of marriage, its ties have been her security and her comfort. “I couldn’t do anything on my own,” she says flatly. Her private and personal realms merge seamlessly: Finty was directed by Hall at the Rose in Bedroom Farce last year; her friend Diana Rigg’s daughter, Rachael Stirling, plays Helena in the new Dream.
Much as Pete and Jude dote on each other, however, a memory-lane venture like this could be swamped in melancholy; and Dench is thinking of her husband through much of our conversation. For all her film triumphs (Iris, Notes on a Scandal, Rob Marshall’s musical Nine and, of course, the Bonds, in which her acerbic M is more indispensable than the latest six-pack lead), classical theatre is her home and history. It is also a sustaining connection with Williams and the life they shared: domesticity, acclaim, a very English sort of stardom and, in the best of times, a stage. In 1972, they both appeared in the RSC’s London Assurance. “I was hugely pregnant in it, too,” she laughs, “and it was very unsuitable. I had this wonderful part of a virgin in a Gloucestershire garden and, before Sinead Cusack took over, Janet Whiteside was saying over my huge stomach, ‘Do you feel nothing stirring?’”
Of her nine collaborations with Hall, it is not their Dream she remembers most affectionately, but their 1987 Antony and Cleopatra, with Anthony Hopkins, at the National Theatre. Hall was a taskmaster at times; if she is the famous, bigger-earning star, he is still the boss. “Nobody misses anything out with Peter. There’s no cheating. No mis-scans.” When she and Miranda Foster were called to rehearse the death of Cleopatra, they thought it would take half an hour. “Three hours later, Peter’s still standing there with a lectern, making everybody speak the verse properly. And Miranda got up and went [she imitates Foster’s cheeky, overemphasised rhythm]: ‘Our roy-al la-dy’s dead.’ I was in hysterics. And there was a moment. And Peter said: ‘Thank Christ!’”
Hall looks bemused. “Really? I have no memory of that at all.” “Oh, yes,” Dench says firmly. “And we had a picnic each night inside the monument. They asked us for our favourite food, and we said it was seafood and a glass of champagne. And on the last night, there it was. You’d never have known from the front.”
“In 1962, at the end of the Dream,” Hall recalls, looking at his leading lady, “I said to this one, ‘One day, you’ll play Cleopatra.’ And she said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous! A little runt like me? I couldn’t possibly. And I said, ‘Well, just bear in mind, when the time comes for you to play her, that I’m first in the queue.’ Twenty years later, the phone rings and it’s Dame Judi, saying, ‘Hello. I’ve been asked by Stratford to go and do Cleopatra. Will you do it?’ And I said, ‘How long have I got?’ And she said, ‘Oh, about a week.’”
The night before we met, Dench was watching Sir Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot with her old friend Roger Rees, an assistant set painter in the Stratford of her youth who ended up playing Hamlet there, an apprenticeship whose demise she mourns. “There just isn’t the opportunity for that to happen now, for young actors to learn,” she says. “When I went to the Vic between 1957 and 1960, I never left the side of the stage. Dame Peggy [Ashcroft] was fantastic to me when we did The Cherry Orchard...” Hall cuts in: “I only had reason to reprimand Dame Peggy once, and that was at the height of the Wars of the Roses [his 1964 cycle of Shakespeare histories]. At the matinée, it was reported to me that she was listening to the cricket on a tiny radio affixed to her helmet. A lot of junior actors who were cast as soldiers were coming for the latest score. She was passionate for cricket...”
Despite their grumbles about long-lost repertory companies and stingy arts funding, neither veteran is gloomy about the state of the modern theatre. Hall points to the fact that his Stratford season ran from spring to autumn, but it now “trots on all round the clock”. What keeps him going is the next play: “I don’t like not to be in rehearsal.” As for the venerable queen who hates her wrinkles but cherishes her unnatural energy, what sustains her is work, doing the crossword, learning something new each day, the buzz of the undisclosed movie for which she has just signed up, beginning four days after the Dream closes. “I will lie down for four days, I think.”
More meaningful than any of that, though, is her misty-eyed pride about taking her grandson — “my Sammy” — to see Brendan O’Hea’s Cymbeline. She also took him to All’s Well That Ends Well — “Three times!” — and Jude Law’s Hamlet. “His attention span is normally short, but he sat throughout it without moving. If it’s interesting enough, you see, they will.”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is in preview and opens at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames, on February 15
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