Introduction
by Brendan O’Hea
This was never meant to be a book. My plan was to record Judi Dench talking about all the Shakespeare parts she has played and, with her blessing, to offer it to the archive department at Shakespeare’s Globe. But when a friend of her grandson overheard one of our many discussions at her home in Surrey, and was intrigued to know what all the laughter, passion and arguing was about, it made me wonder if these interviews might have a wider appeal.
The Man who Pays the Rent was the name that Judi and her husband, Michael Williams, gave to Shakespeare when they were working for the Royal Shakespeare Company almost continuously throughout the 1970s. Sadly, Michael died in 2001, but he makes a number of appearances in this book and I’ve loved getting to know him more through Judi’s stories.
For a long while, I thought of calling the book Herding Eels. Judi Dench is almost impossible to pin down – especially when it involves talking about herself and her approach to acting. Added to which is her inability to pass up an opportunity to muck about: she’s unable to eat an orange without carving a strip of peel into comedy teeth; if a parcel arrives at the house, the packaging will need to be fashioned into a hat; and I’ve lost count of the number of times where, mid-interview, I’ve had to sit and watch while she tried to see how much Butterkist popcorn she could fit into her mouth.
There was also another stumbling block to overcome. Judi admits to working purely on instinct, and was anxious that we might get bogged down with an academic analysis of the plays. But she needn’t have worried because, as will become patently obvious in the pages that follow, neither of us are academics.
Although we have been friends for many years (we first met when acting together in A Little Night Music at the National Theatre in 1995), I have learnt so much more about her during these interviews. I always knew her to be kind, generous, playful and witty, but I hadn’t, for instance, appreciated her phenomenal memory. Apart from being able to recite entire scenes of Shakespeare, she remembers events from her childhood in microscopic detail; names of actors, dressers and stage-doorkeepers dating back to the start of her career; and possesses a photographic memory of almost all her costumes.
Many of the directors Judi has worked with have been at the vanguard of British theatre, and it has been a pleasure to be transported into their rehearsal rooms. Her insights on Shakespeare are incisive and refreshing in their simplicity. (In fact I’ve never known her to reveal so much about her own craft.) But above all, it’s been an immense privilege to have an actor at the top of their game for nearly seven decades lead me by the hand and introduce me to these extra-ordinary Shakespearean women.
The interviews were conducted over four years. We would start by having a general chat about the play. I would then read each scene, asking questions along the way, and Judi would offer a running commentary (whilst picking me up on my mispronunciations and Welsh accent). In the case of Henry V, Richard III and The Comedy of Errors, in which she appeared on screen, we sat down and watched the films together, which I found instructive and she found excruciating.
Judi has always loved to paint and draw, and her scripts are full of doodles in the margins. Her eyesight has deteriorated over the years and she now finds it difficult to see. She only agreed to include her recent illustrations in the book when a friend suggested that they might inspire other people with visual impairment to start painting.
In the unabridged transcripts for the interviews, Judi precedes almost every sentence with the words ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’ and ‘possibly’ (not to mention a few F-bombs along the way). This would have become too tiresome to read so I’ve cut most of them. But what they revealed – the adverbs, not the swearing – was her reluctance to be dogmatic. The only thing she’s certain about is that there is no right way of performing Shakespeare.
I read somewhere that trying to work out Shakespeare’s personality was like looking at a very dark, heavily varnished picture in the Portrait Gallery. At first you see nothing, then you recognise a few features, and then you realise that they are your own.
I think the above is also true of Shakespeare’s characters. They reflect our own selves back to us. As Judi once said to me: ‘There are as many interpretations of Shakespeare as there are people who have ever been, are and will be.’
What follows are just one person’s reflections …
MACBETH
Lady Macbeth
Macbeth was the reason I went into the theatre. I saw my brother Peter play King Duncan in a school production. He had to say ‘What bloody man is that?’ and I thought: My God – swearing! If this is Shakespeare this is for me.
You’ve played Lady Macbeth twice?
Yes, first at Nottingham, in 1963, and then we took the production to Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Peter Brook maintained that his was the first company to tour West Africa but in actual fact it was ours.
The audiences were wonderful – very vociferous. In the sleep-walking scene a woman shouted out, ‘Oh my God, she’s washing her hands and there’s no basin.’ And they loved the rhymes, they found them hilarious. ‘The thane of Fife had a wife’ got a belter. They’d yell, ‘Say that bit again.’
It was very taxing playing outside in the heat, though. I remember seeing vultures sitting in the trees and I said to the actors, ‘For God’s sake, twitch when you’re dead, they’re waiting to eat us.’
And then Polly Adams, who played one of the witches – well, her tooth blew up and she couldn’t go on. A woman from the British Council offered to step in, said she knew the lines. But when it came to the spell around the cauldron – ‘Eye of newt and toe of frog, / Wool of bat and tongue of dog’ – she forgot the words and said, ‘Wool of bat and two pork chops.’
You also played Lady Macbeth for the RSC?
Trevor Nunn, 1976, at the Other Place in Stratford. Trevor was reluctant to be involved at first, as he’d recently directed it for the main house, but Ian [McKellen] and I threatened to pull out if he wasn’t. There was no money. It was a very pared-back production. A circle of chalk on the floor and plain wooden orange boxes to sit on. We wore muted blacks and greys except for King Duncan who was all in white. I had a black dress and black boots, and it was my idea to have a black headscarf.
Were you ever frightened of the play?
Frightened?
There’s often a lot of superstition surrounding Macbeth. Didn’t Roger Rees break his leg at one point?
Yes, he did – had to play Malcolm in a wheelchair. No, I don’t think I’m superstitious. I don’t like whistling in the dressing room, but then it’s usually me doing the whistling, and I always call it The Scottish Play when I’m in a theatre. We had a vicar who would occasionally sit in the front row with a crucifix. And I remember one day walking back with Trevor from the Other Place, rehearsals weren’t going very well – I think it was the bareness of the set: too exposing – and I said to him, ‘It’s not going to work, is it?’ And at that moment I fell off the pavement.
Eventually it felt very liberating to have stripped it all back. It was alarming and terribly exciting because the audience were so close. It was very intense.
We first meet Lady Macbeth reading a letter from her husband.
Yes. I suspect she’s read it many times, studied it, memorised certain passages. I may even have mumbled some of the lines.
What’s important is that you establish the couple’s passion for each other in this scene. A key line is when Macbeth refers to his wife as ‘my dearest partner of greatness’. At a time when women were perhaps not considered so equal – ‘dearest partner of greatness’ – that’s a real clue to their relationship.
In the letter, Macbeth reveals that he has met these three very strange people who have saluted him, saying, ‘Hail, King that shalt be.’ Lady Macbeth’s mind is racing. ‘Hail, King that shalt be.’ But Macbeth won’t do anything to promote himself, he lacks ambition and ruthlessness, he’s ‘too full o’ the milk of human kindness’. She knows him terribly well.
And of course she’s also revealing something about herself. But I don’t think she should come on as a grim go-getter. Or an unbelievably evil woman. If she was evil she’d have no reason to conjure the spirits. You shouldn’t think straight away: ‘Oh, here’s trouble.’ You should see it growing.
Does she ever question the prophecy of the weird sisters?
I don’t think she does. And nor does he. But then remember at that time, witches and witchcraft were very much …
God, I heard a terrible thing. D’you know Edinburgh well? At the bottom of the castle there used to be the sewers. And if somebody was accused of witchcraft they’d drag them up there and drop them in, and if they didn’t drown in all that sewerage and stuff, they’d take them out and burn them. It’s stayed with me so vividly. Don’t want to be thought of as a witch, do you?
Not in Edinburgh.
Not in Edinburgh, no. Bradford’s OK. [Laughs.]
A messenger arrives to say, ‘The King comes here tonight.’ Meaning Duncan.
The coincidence. Especially having just read that letter. It’s fortuitous, plays right into their hands. It must be so unnerving for her, mustn’t it?
SERVANT
The King comes here tonight.
LADY MACBETH
Thou’rt mad to say it.
And that’s what’s called a pick-up line – a complete iambic pentameter which is shared. When it’s written on the page like that, that’s Shakespeare telling you to pick up your cue.
After the servant leaves you say, ‘Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.’
Now that – yes – I used to wait and listen and see if anybody was about, and then I’d kneel down to summon the spirits. And in the middle of that speech – I can’t remember at which point exactly – I would take in far too much air and become dizzy, and then quickly jump back.
She knows she’s crossed the line into something profane – gone too far meddling with witchcraft. It’s like being in the middle of a seance and discovering something unbelievably fearful. But she needs to invoke the spirits to help her – ‘fill me from the crown to the toe, top full / Of direst cruelty’. She must lose her femininity – ‘unsex me here’. Macbeth needs a push, and with the help of the spirits his wife is the one to do it. She is the spur that pricks him on.
Is it true that when Trevor was asked if the Macbeths were the Nixons—
He said, ‘No, they’re the Kennedys.’ They’re the golden couple. They adore each other. And she’ll do anything for him. If he wants to be king then it’ll come to pass. ‘You are Glamis, you are Cawdor, and we know what’s been promised next. You’re going to be the effing King, darling.’
And you’ll be the Queen.
She’s not interested in that. I don’t think she does it for herself at all. She does it for him. She’ll push him towards what she believes to be his due.
So you’ve read his letter, you’re told the King’s arriving tonight, then Macbeth appears.
MACBETH
My dearest love,
Duncan comes here tonight.
LADY MACBETH
And when goes hence?
MACBETH
Tomorrow, as he purposes.
LADY MACBETH
O never
Shall sun that morrow see.
Your face, my thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters.
It’s an orchestral score, isn’t it? Shakespeare tells you how to act it. Lady Macbeth completes the shared line, which shows her mind racing. And after ‘Shall sun that morrow see’ there should be a pause because it’s not a full iambic pentameter, which means you’re allowed some kind of a reaction. Peter [Hall] taught me that and it opened a huge door for me.
In that pause, I think she’s gauging what Macbeth is thinking. She sees that his mind has gone exactly where her mind has gone. She discerns naked ambition in his face, and it’s obviously shaken him to the roots. Oh God, it’s so beautifully constructed.
When she says, ‘He that’s coming’ – ‘He’ meaning King Duncan – ‘Must be provided for’, is there anything loaded in that word ‘provided’?
Oh, I think so. They’re speaking in code. It’s chilling.
LADY MACBETH
He that’s coming
Must be provided for; and you shall put
This night’s great business into my dispatch,
Which shall to all our nights and days to come
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.
She finishes the speech with a rhyme. Does that mean she wants to put an end to the conversation?
Could be. Or maybe the rhyme makes it more conclusive, all the more likely to happen. And she hasn’t chosen the word ‘sovereign’ by accident.
Lady Macbeth welcomes King Duncan. But she’s alone. No Macbeth.
Well, he’s mucking about in his room, isn’t he, getting frightened and nervous? But there would have been nothing odd about her greeting Duncan by herself. Duncan’s her cousin. She says later, ‘Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t.’ They’re family.
Copyright © 2023 by Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea
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