And Furthermore (10 page)

A Fine Romance
appealed to an audience that had never seen us in the theatre, and those who then came to see us in
Pack of Lies
hoped that they were going to see those two dotty people. We had a group of American college students who came to one of the TV recordings, and one of them asked, ‘Miss Dench, do you ever get a chance to do any classical theatre?’ What could I say but, ‘Oh yes, once or twice.’

One famous modern classical role I regretted accepting was Mother Courage for the RSC at the Barbican. Howard Davies had come to tell me the story, but as I had not read the script what I didn’t know – and Howard had omitted to tell me – was that she is never off the stage. I was so cross when I found this out on the first day of rehearsal that I said, ‘Well, who translated this? I can’t make head nor tail of it.’ Howard said, ‘Hanif Kureishi, this is him here.’ Hanif has never spoken to me since.

I thought that I should really not have said yes to this, that this was a big mistake. But then of course we started to work on it, when the anger or fright is turned into adrenalin, and gradually ideas form. People often ask, ‘Don’t you have difficulty learning the lines?’ Sometimes I do have a lot of difficulty learning the lines, but the real difficulty is working out why the character says the line, and what is going on between the lines, which is often more important than the line itself.

Before you start to rehearse you are looking at the wood, which is composed of many trees. You start rehearsing and you are inside the wood; you know that you are in a wood, but you don’t know what the trees round you are until you start to recognise them. Then the moment the audience comes in, it is as if you have been transported away from the wood, and that is when I think the most important part comes in – when you decide which is the straightest way through the wood. This is part of the economy of presenting a character, because I think what you leave out is more important than what you put in.

I had admired John Napier’s work ever since we had worked together at Stratford, and his set design for
Mother Courage
looked absolutely beautiful, but the engineering of the machinery was faulty, so my cart that trundled around on rails never worked properly. One night it did just one circle of the stage and suddenly one wheel stuck, so it wouldn’t move at all. I went forward and made a speech to the audience, ‘Look, we are the RSC, not the RAC, so I’m afraid we can’t fix this wheel, and you’ll have to come back another night.’ I thought it was quite funny, but the audience were furious, and they didn’t laugh. Zoë Wanamaker was playing my daughter Kattrin, and she and I raced in the car from the Barbican to Joe Allen’s restaurant in Covent Garden for an early supper. I was meeting Michael later for another supper, but it didn’t matter. Zoë said, ‘So this is what Joe Allen’s looks like on a Tuesday evening at ten past eight.’

But the cart did break down so many times, and at the end as I was going off to war and was supposed to be pushing it on my own, I had to have four or five stagehands helping me push it; a great help for me at the time, but not much help to the story. The whole thing was very hard work. I loved all the singing, but I didn’t like plucking the chicken – that was horrible, and I didn’t know how to do it.

I found in a skip the overcoat that Michael had worn as the Fool in
King Lear
, which I wore at rehearsal, and it worked so well I kept it for the performance. I had clearly in my mind that the wig should be red, and look as if just anybody had cut it, so that it was always standing on end. I was convinced about that, and said so to Lindy Hemming, our costume designer, on the first day, and she produced one exactly like that. Then I couldn’t bear to part with it.

We did a run-through as rehearsals were almost over when I thought I had got near to the right performance, but Howard bawled me out afterwards, saying, ‘The thing about her is you mustn’t make her a heroine.’ I don’t understand about the Brechtian alienation; I know what he means, I’ve read about it and understood it, what I don’t understand is how you involve the audience with the character’s personal predicament. They all spoke about Helene Weigel in the Berliner Ensemble production, and that moment where she heard of the death of her son; well, if what she did is alienation, then I don’t understand what the word is.

The boys used to have to give me money for the drinks I sold from the cart, and at one matinee they gave me American Express cards instead of money. So in the evening I had vinegar put in the drinks which they had to knock back, and they all spat it out in a great spray.

After the physical strain of
Mother Courage
it was lovely that the other play in the repertoire was
Waste
by Harley Granville-Barker, about a sexual scandal in the Edwardian era. I had two very nice, neat little scenes, both in the first half, so a lot of nights I used to go home at the interval, because traditionally if you don’t appear in the second half you are allowed to do that. But now I don’t think I should have done really.

Stephen Moore was with me in
Mother Courage
but not in
Waste
, so we were surprised one night early in the run when he strolled across the set in a dinner jacket. The audience saw nothing strange in that. But I noticed, and when he was playing Captain Hook in
Peter Pan
at the Barbican I thought I would pay him a return visit, dressed as a pirate. I wore my wonderful red lavatory brush of a wig as Mother Courage, borrowed a pair of trousers and a leather jacket, added a patch over one eye and a great big red beard, and joined the other pirates onstage. I stood right in front of Stephen and he didn’t even notice me. Then I didn’t know how to get off. Stephen can play anything from Brecht to Ayckbourn, with a special gift for comedy, but neither of us has yet had the chance to repeat those unscheduled walk-ons.

Waste
was such a success that it transferred to the West End, and I was back at the Lyric again. It was during the run there that I was offered the part of Cleopatra, and was faced with the difficult decision of choosing between two directors, both of whom I admired and had worked with before.

IT WAS AT THE LAST-NIGHT
party for
The Importance of Being Earnest
at the National Theatre that Peter Hall said to me, ‘You ought to play Cleopatra, but we’ve got to find the right Antony.’ I said, ‘Yes, how wonderful, how lovely that would be, and it’s so far away it doesn’t get alarming yet.’ Not long after that Terry Hands also said to me, ‘You ought to play Cleopatra,’ and I said, ‘How absolutely wonderful, yes, how lovely.’

I didn’t think much more about it, until in the middle of
Waste
suddenly there were two productions of
Antony and Cleopatra
announced, and I was asked to play her in both of them. I was in the most terrible state about it, and I asked Terry to drop by and see me. When he did, I told him, ‘Terry, I did promise Peter first,’ and he said, ‘Yes, but that was at a party, it wasn’t in an office, it wasn’t a proper offer.’

I felt extremely badly about that, it was only because I was so flattered to be asked to play it that I was foolish enough to say yes to two people. Terry and Peter had rather a row over it, which made me so upset that I said I wouldn’t play it at all. Then Terry wrote me a long letter saying that I must do it, even if it wasn’t for him.

Before the National production could go into rehearsal I was committed to something very different –
Mr and Mrs Nobody
, playing Carrie Pooter opposite Michael, with Ned Sherrin directing. I was longing to do it, because I knew and loved the original book,
The Diary of a Nobody
by George and Weedon Grossmith, and Michael and I mistakenly thought it would be an absolute breeze. We played all the speaking parts, Penny Ryder played the maid, and Gary Fairhall was the general factotum; they mimed everything, and did most of the hard work. But it was fantastically hard for all of us; at one point I was wearing three costumes on top of each other because the changes were so quick, we often only had seconds to do them. I lost a lot of weight during the run, which was a great help for Cleopatra.

It was a glorious piece of writing by Keith Waterhouse, and I loved working with Ned. To begin with, I couldn’t believe he would want to work with me, because he had worked so often in association with Caryl Brahms as his co-writer, and she simply loathed me. She wrote a series of notices which would have seared your eyebrows off. One said of me: ‘as Juliet she conveys about as much as an apple in a Warwickshire orchard’ and another about Isabella: ‘this performance is better than I dared hope, but Rosalind Iden should have played the part’. She used to make dismissive references to ‘Dench J.’, as if I were still at school, though I am glad to say that in the end we became quite good friends just before she died, after she saw
Macbeth
.

Ned’s rehearsals were such good fun, he was precise, and funny, and very astute; then suddenly he would sit back and say, ‘The Williamses are on automatic pilot.’

During the run Kenneth Branagh rang up and said, ‘I want to see you, will you meet me?’ I thought he was going to ask me to do something, and I would have to say no because I was committed to play Cleopatra. But instead he astonished me by saying, ‘Would you direct
Much Ado
?’ I talked about it to Peter Hall, who said, ‘Absolutely, go on, you’ve got to do it.’ So I did, and I learnt a lot from that experience, which I will explain in the next chapter.

The reviews for
Mr and Mrs Nobody
were mixed, but the audiences loved it, and we ran for over four months before I had to go back to the National to start rehearsals for
Antony and Cleopatra
. By then Peter had got his Antony – Anthony Hopkins, who had just played two punishing leading roles at the National in David Hare’s
Pravda
, and
King Lear
. Tony had never read the play before, and nor had I, though I had seen Peggy Ashcroft play it with Michael Redgrave at Stratford years ago.

I was always anxious about playing her, because whenever I said I was going to play Cleopatra people used to openly laugh in my face. ‘Cleopatra? You?’ So I was really paranoid about it, and at the first rehearsal I said to Peter, ‘Well, I hope you know what you are doing, setting out to direct
Cleopatra
with a menopausal dwarf.’

But Peter was in marvellous form for it. I remember a reading we had up in the conference room, and he was so enthusiastic. After the reading he said, ‘Oh, it’s going to be rather marvellous,’ and that was a great boost to our morale. He stood at a lectern with his script, and it was like being conducted in an opera, it was very exciting. He made the story really clear. I found out lots of things about her, that she was pregnant, for instance, when the news came that Antony had been married in Rome. Peter gave me two notes which I still pass on to all students. The first was: ‘Don’t think that you’ve got to come in and play all of Cleopatra in the first scene. All you do is play aspects of her in all the scenes, and by the end hopefully you’ll have the whole character.’ That is a wonderful note to be given, and actually it applies to any part in any play.

The second note was when I was worrying about how I could possibly live up to Enobarbus’s great speech about her: ‘the barge she sat in…’ Peter said, ‘Don’t believe everything that everybody says about you in the play. Enobarbus is only back in Rome with his mates in the pub, having a drink, and they are all asking, “What’s she like, what’s she like?” So of course he’s going to say, “My God, you could smell the perfume coming across.”’ That put a whole different complexion on it. The truth of it is that everyone is saying all this about them, and suddenly you see these two people who are behaving like real shits, behaving really badly.

It was important to keep the momentum and the truth of the story alive, and one way to do that was not to set anything too much. Because Tony and I changed our moves every time in rehearsal, Peter asked, ‘Do you want to settle this? Do you want me to set it, or shall we just leave it fluid?’ Neither of us spoke at all for a minute, because neither of us knew what the other one wanted to say, and then both of us said, ‘Can we just leave it fluid?’ That meant we had to have follow-spots on us, because sometimes Tony would walk out one way, and sometimes he would not walk on at all, so we didn’t quite know where the other person was going to jump. It kept the whole thing fresh.

Peter told the girls, ‘Just go with Cleopatra, go where she goes, and stop when she stops, it should be like a shoal of fish.’ When we were going to rehearse the first scene, Tony and I arrived early that morning, before all the others, and we rolled about on the floor a lot. Just before the first run-through I found a penny and put it in my bag. I touched that penny before we did every run-through, and then I had it sewn into my dress. I am not really superstitious, but I know the reasons for many of those old theatre traditions, like not having real flowers onstage because actors slipped on them.

Peter was a stickler for the verse, as one should be. He said, ‘If you actually adhere to verse-speaking in this way, it will never let you down, you will never run out of breath. You will never suffer that problem where your voice becomes so thin and strained because you just haven’t got enough breath to push it to the end of the line. If you obey the caesura in the middle of the line, and somebody ends on a half-line, then you must answer exactly, so that it makes up the full line.’

When Helen Fitzgerald, Miranda Foster and I were rehearsing the death of Cleopatra with her maids, Peter was there at the lectern hammering out the beat to get it right. We were the whole morning doing it, and at the end we finally came to the bit about ‘our royal lady’s dead’, and there was a pause, and Peter said, ‘Thank Christ!’

He warned me that the great challenge is that she has got to have a fifth gear, which has not been seen yet, and it is what she goes into after Antony dies, a kind of overdrive, and it wasn’t until I did it that I understood what he meant. She becomes another person really. After we had been running for about three months, Peter came back and said the production had got a bit baroque, and I knew exactly what that meant, when you embellish things.

I needed to get used to the snakes, too. I am not really frightened of snakes, only worms, but it was difficult. Michael told me just to give them names, then I wouldn’t be so frightened. Peter said that the visual impact of this dead woman with the snakes still alive in her hand was very potent on stage. So we auditioned some snakes. The blindworms didn’t get the part – much too wormy – but the garter snakes did. We had two of them, and one of them escaped during the run and got into the back of the set of
A Small Family Business
which Michael Gambon was doing at the time. The snake I used on the first night sloughed its skin the night before, and I thought, Don’t we all sleep with fright? But it looked absolutely beautiful, it looked like the paint department had got to it.

The fear factor was pretty high for all of us. I remember saying to Tony on the first night, ‘People are being born and dying at this minute; we’re just doing a play, that’s all we’re doing.’ That first night was one of the happiest first nights I have ever had, because there was so much to remember, and I like that. I like being given notes just before the first night, I love it. First of all there was the prejudice about me playing the part in the first place, and there were so many things to think about, not least being thrown off the monument. It was a vast undertaking, but the first night of
Antony and Cleopatra
was the best performance we had given of it so far, and we didn’t think, as we sometimes do, Oh, the dress rehearsal was better.

Getting up into the monument was not so difficult – it was getting down which was tricky. On the first day Peter said, ‘I don’t know how we are going to do this. There are some stairs, I suppose you could come down there.’ I said, ‘Get rid of the stairs, you’ll think up a way of coming down.’ It shouldn’t be a careful moment, it should be a desperate one. So I was passed down a lot of strong hands.

Miranda, Helen and I were up in the monument for twenty minutes, during the scene where Antony’s servant Eros runs on his own sword, and as we sat in the dark we would talk about what ideally we would like to eat. For me it was always seafood and a glass of champagne, I was very boring about it. On the very last night, as we climbed up into the monument, the other two went up quite quickly, and when I stepped inside this dark gloom they had tiny little torches which they switched on, and there were three dressed crabs and half a bottle of champagne, and we sat there and ate it. We had to wait for Tony’s shout below us so that we could pull the cork on the champagne.

He never minded not being in the fifth act; far from it, he loved it. In his death scene at the top of the monument, as he was lying there cradled in my arms, he used to whisper,

‘I’m going upstairs to have a nice cup of tea. You do Act V, and I’ll have a nice cup of tea.’

We never knew how big the armies were going to be each night. There would be an announcement on the tannoy backstage asking for volunteers to be part of the Egyptian and the Roman army, from anyone playing in the Lyttelton or the Cottesloe who wasn’t on. So, depending on which other plays were in the repertoire that night, sometimes we would get a huge army, and sometimes we would only get about six people, and they would rush across the big Olivier stage from downstage left to upstage right, and there was very little time, because they had to change their colours for the different armies.

My dresser Lou was an aromatherapist, so between a matinee and the evening performance she used to give me a marvellous aromatherapy massage, and I never used to wash the stuff off, because I thought it was so right that Cleopatra should have this musk-like smell.

We had wonderful costumes designed by Alison Chitty, who put the Romans in steel-greys and blues and white, very pale, cold colours, and all of Egypt was in orange, yellow and pink, earth colours. There were beautifully made tassels for the Egyptians, and when Antony went back to Rome in his armour Alison gave him one of her tassels to hang from his belt, which told the whole story of the loucheness of Egypt, and him going back into this very upright, buttoned-up society in Rome.

That production was memorable in so many ways. When I was opening my mail one morning I spotted a very official-looking envelope, and I thought it was a summons, so I stuffed it unopened in my bag with all the other summonses and parking tickets. When I opened it during the matinee I had a really severe shock. I had to read it several times before it sunk in that I was going to be made a Dame of the British Empire in the New Year’s Honours. Of course I couldn’t tell anybody, though I did tell Michael and swore him to secrecy. Tony Hopkins’s birthday is on 31 December, so that night all the dressing-room windows were thrown open for rousing choruses of first ‘Happy Birthday’ and then ‘There is Nothing like a Dame’.

Earlier that month several of us took part in a gala at the Old Vic to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Dame Peggy Ashcroft. Tim Pigott-Smith, who was playing Octavius in our play, had appeared with Peggy in
Jewel in the Crown
, and he did a very funny version of ‘The one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu’, dressed as his character in that TV series, wearing one black glove to indicate Merrick’s prosthetic hand. I pulled his leg about that, and rashly said to Tim, ‘That’s strangely attractive, that black leather glove.’ The next night he wore one glove as Octavius in the last scene, and I pretended not to notice. So next he hid it in the basket with the asp, which did make me gasp. Well, that was literally throwing down the gauntlet.