No show without Judi - dramatic tales from Dame Dench (+ a few ideas to keep theatre lovers entertained while the theatres are closed)
The great Irish playwright summed it up nicely in Juno and the Paycock: ‘The whole worl's in a terrible state o' chassis.’
Quite so. But, as a rule, theatre folk like to think they are exempt from global chaos.
This week - and next week and the week after - at the Bridge Theatre in London I should have been sharing a stage with Dame Judi Dench, Britain’s best-loved, most honoured, most regarded actress. We’d put together a show called I Remember It Well, celebrating Dame Judi’s extraordinary career on stage and screen. 10,000 tickets had been sold. Cinemas were asking if they could relay it across the land. Broadway beckoned. And now, of course, it’s all postponed.
When I arrived at Judi’s home last Sunday for a last-minute rehearsal, I said, ‘It’s not looking too good.’
‘Oh,’ cried Judi, with that trademark melting crack in her voice, ‘but people have booked their tickets – we can’t let them down. We’ll wash our hands, we’ll wear space suits, we’ll make sure we’re standing two metres apart on stage. The show goes on!’
Before running through some lines – ‘Do you know “How do I love thee, let me count the ways”? Let’s do that!” – and practising our song (‘Shall I change that line? It might be quite funny if I did’), we did our bit for the war effort. A government PR person had been in touch to ask if we could make a short video to encourage people to keep washing their hands for at least twenty seconds. With my wife Michèle as art director and Judi’s chap, David, as cameraman, we found a corner of the kitchen and, after much giggling, at the fourth take, achieved a result – of sorts. Us with soap suds to our wrists reciting ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ won’t rival W H Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ in the pantheon of public service film-making, but at least we tried – and Dame Judi’s purring at the video’s close (echoing her recent appearance in the movie musical Cats) is undoubtedly a collector’s item.
Judi Dench is 85. She remembers the war when theatres across the land stayed open, some of them through the worst of the Blitz. The first professional production she saw was during the war, at her local theatre, in York: Ben Travers’ farce, Cuckoo in the Nest. ‘I’ll never forget the man who appeared in long johns from a basket at the bottom of a bed. I screamed with laughter so much my parents took me home because they thought I’d make myself ill. My Ma took me back the next night to see the rest of the play. It was wonderful. I can still hear the sound of the string trio that played in the pit. I can still smell the disinfectant they used to clean the place.’
In 2005, Dame Judi appeared in the title role in Mrs Henderson Presents, a film that celebrated the life of the woman who, in the late 1930s, turned a disused cinema in Soho into the Windmill Theatre and came up with the idea of adding a little female nudity to the variety of entertainment on offer. Famously, even in the darkest days of World War Two, while the showgirls never clothed, the Windmill never closed.
That’s the spirit that Britain’s leading lady and I would have liked to emulate this week, but it seems Covid19 is less predictable than a doodlebug and even we can see that, under the circumstances, carrying on regardless is not an option. Life in the theatre has always been precarious. For example, in the old days, if you were an understudy you only got paid when you were called onto the stage – when, literally, you emerged from the wings, passing ‘the legs’ to do so. The legs are the long black curtains hanging at the side of the stage, masking the wings, and they are the origin, some say, of the theatrical saying, ‘Break a leg!’
It will be a few months now before I share the stage with the great Judi Dench. It is exactly fifty years since I first saw her on stage. In 1960, for my twelfth birthday, I was taken to the Old Vic theatre in London to see my first Romeo and Juliet. It was directed by Franco Zeffirelli and starred a young Judi as Juliet. I went with my parents. It turned out that Judi’s parents were there, too. When Juliet came on and said to the Nurse (played by Peggy Mount), ‘Where are my father and my mother, Nurse?’ a reassuring voice called out from the stalls, ‘Here we are, darling, in Row H.’
Dame Judi is a notorious on-stage mischief-maker, famous for doing what she can to make fellow actors laugh at unexpected moments by whispering improbable asides or hiding rude notes or unlikely props under cushions on the set. Sometimes her fellow players take their revenge. She was awarded her DBE in 1988 while she was playing Cleopatra at the National Theatre. On the night the news broke, the actor Michael Bryant, playing Enobarbus, strode onto the stage and murmured (none too quietly), ‘I suppose a quick f---’s out of the question?’ The new dame could scarcely suppress her giggles.
When, in her twenties, she first appeared in The Importance of Being Earnest, playing the part of Cecily, her John Worthing announced he was ‘Miss Gardew’s cardigan’ (instead of ‘Miss Cardew’s guardian’) prompting snorts of laughter from Judi that didn’t subside until the interval. Sometimes, when things go wrong, it isn’t a laughing matter. In 1982, when she was playing Lady Bracknell in The Importance at the National, one night she somehow managed to omit the famous line about the handbag and only realised what she had done from the wide-eyed response from the rest of the cast. On that occasion, she was mortified.
Theatre-goers love a good theatrical mishap, hence the success of The Play That Goes Wrong and its spin-offs, The Comedy About A Bank Robbery and, my favourite, Magic That Goes Wrong – all playing to capacity in the West End until Tuesday of last week.
The story of theatre is the story of disasters overcome. In Shakespeare’s day, the plague caused the theatres to be closed. Up until the early twentieth century, fire was the most dangerous hazard facing theatre folk. Over the centuries, scores of theatres (lit by candle and later by gaslight) burnt to the ground. In the summer of 1665, the Great Plague of London forced the closure of London’s largest playhouse, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It remained closed for eighteen months, reopened and happily survived the Great Fire of 1666. However, it later burned down more than once and, famously, went up in flames again on 24 February 1809, when the Irish playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was its manager. Found drinking wine in the street as the fire raged, Sheridan remarked, ‘Surely a man may be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.’ Sheridan was financially ruined by the loss of the building.
The Coronavirus will prove ruinous to all too many theatre people in the coming months. I know Dame Judi Dench’s heart goes out to them. Meanwhile, does she have a message for the theatre-going public? ‘Oh, yes,’ she says, narrowing her eyes. ‘We’ll be back. Mark my words.’
And we will be. For details of our rescheduled season - and for the new dates for my rescheduled one-man Break A Leg! watch this space.
PS
The Daily Telegraph asked me if I had any ideas to entertain self-isolating and social-distancing theatre lovers. I came up with these.
+ Create your own Judi Dench home cinema season. She has appeared in more than sixty films since winning her first BAFTA as Most Promising Newcomer for Four in the Morning in 1964. Order them from Amazon and watch them in chronological order. At one a night they will get you through your first two months of self-isolation.
+ Watching TV is fun, and can be stimulating, but essentially it’s a passive activity. To keep your mind active, learn some poems by heart. The great Dame Sibyl Thorndike (Bernard Shaw’s original Saint Joan) kept her synapses supple by learning a poem a day into her nineties. If you start by trying to learn just two lines a day (anyone can manage that), in a week you can have learnt a complete Shakespeare sonnet.
+ Now’s your chance to enjoy the complete works of Shakespeare. All 37 plays are available as a BBC DVD boxed set, though the quality of the productions is variable. Shop around and find some unexpected gems, such as the RSC’s musical Comedy of Errors from 1976 and Kozintsev’s 1971 Russian King Lear.
+ Put on a play! Am dram has long been part of our theatrical heritage - there’s a wonderful history and celebration of Am Dram just been published: Questors, Jesters & Renegades by Michael Coveney: highly recommended. Out of copyright scripts, from Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, are available online. Download the words, share the parts around the family, and do a family play reading via Skype or Facetime or, best of all, Zoom. (Be sure to treat yourself to an ice cream from the freezer in the interval.)