And Furthermore (14 page)

The only nasty thing that happened to me during all those years of making
As Time Goes By
was at the Press Call for the first series. A woman journalist had the extraordinary nerve to ask me: ‘Who was the first person you slept with, and where was that?’ I couldn’t believe my ears. I vowed I would never expose myself again to such offensive questioning, and nor have I.

1993
WAS NOT MY HAPPIEST
year. I finally stepped off what had become for me the treadmill of
The Gift of the Gorgon
, and I had an even more upsetting experience in my family life before the year was out. It happened during what was otherwise a wonderfully fulfilling experience – Radio 3’s celebration of John Gielgud’s ninetieth birthday with an all-star production of
King Lear
. This was transmitted on his actual birthday, 14 April 1994, but because of the logistics of gathering that supporting cast, it was recorded the previous September. Ken Branagh had proposed this as a Renaissance co-production with the BBC, and he played Edmund. I was cast as Goneril, and the rest of the cast list read like a Who’s Who in British Theatre, with even the tiny part of the Herald played by Peter Hall.

We recorded it over a week, and the night before the final studio day I drove home to Surrey. Finty was now living in our old Hampstead house with a couple of friends, and she was woken by the smell of smoke. A burning candle had set fire to the curtains, so she called the fire brigade, who were there until 4 a.m. Fortunately the girls decided to sleep downstairs, because the fire blazed up again a couple of hours later, and virtually gutted the house this time before it was put out. I rushed up there as fast as I could in the morning, and in my relief that no one was hurt, and my distress at seeing the burnt-out shell of our first married home, I just burst into tears.

I rang Glyn Dearman, who was directing
King Lear
, to say I would now be a bit late for the recording, but I would be OK to do it so long as no one mentioned the fire. He managed to warn everyone except Sir John, who rushed up to me as soon as he came into the studio and burst out, ‘Oh, Judi, my poor darling, are you insured?’ His concern was just too much for me, and I broke down, sobbing on his shoulder. I lost a lot of precious theatre mementoes in the fire, but then Sir John, with his usual thoughtful generosity, sent me a little box that Peggy Ashcroft had given him, to help replace them. The fire overshadowed the end of what had been a lovely week, although our star himself, self-critical as ever, wished we had had more rehearsal time to get it better.

After that difficult year it was very good to go back to the National Theatre, which turned out to be my stage home for the next five years. The first production was of
The Seagull
, directed by John Caird, whom I had known at Stratford, though we had never worked together before. He wanted to stage it in the Cottesloe, but Richard Eyre insisted that it had to be in the Olivier.

I love Chekhov, but Arkadina is a hard part to play. She behaves so appallingly, she is the most terrible mother that anyone has ever written. In the middle scene, when she woos Trigorin, I used to get Bill Nighy lying on the ground under me, and after every line of mine he used to say under his breath, ‘Oh, my God,’ which I am sure is exactly what Trigorin was feeling.

If there were ever the slightest risk of my taking myself, or a particular part, too seriously, I can always rely on my friends to send me up, and I still treasure a poem I received from John Moffatt during the rehearsals for this play:

Next at the National was one of my very favourite plays,
Absolute Hell
by Rodney Ackland. This was partly at my instigation, as I had played Christine Foskett in the television production in 1991. It is based on a real Soho club, re-named La Vie en Rose, and is about the life of all these extraordinary bohemian people there at the end of the war. There was all the sleaziness of such a place, but the characters were touching and interesting. In those less permissive times of the early Fifties, when it was first staged in London, the critics panned it for its lack of morals, and it was taken off very quickly, to the great distress of its author.

Anthony Page persuaded the BBC to televise it in a rewritten version, and asked me to play the club owner, who was also based on a real person. By now Rodney Ackland was old and frail, but he came to the studio recording in a wheelchair, and watching it he was moved to tears. I was saddened by his reaction, until he said to me, ‘I didn’t realise I had written such a good play.’ I had a wonderful drunk scene towards the end, and the whole thing was such fun to do, that I said to Anthony afterwards, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to do this in the theatre?’ Three years later we did, with a number of changes to the cast. Bill Nighy had played Hugh Marriner, a failed writer, on TV, now Greg Hicks took the part on stage, and my old friend from our schooldays, Peter Woodthorpe, was the terrible and overbearing film director Maurice Hussey.

I thought I had made Christine too genteel on TV, so I made her much coarser on stage, and more drunk. In fact, although we were of course only drinking coloured water, I used to feel absolutely stocious afterwards. I can remember one night saying to Greg Hicks as we were on our hands and knees, ‘How can we both be so drunk on coloured water?’ There was a whole atmosphere about that play that was quite heady, and there were great rewards in it, because although parts of it are very sad, other parts are very, very funny.

The set at the Lyttelton was the bar of this club, with some stairs up the side, and you couldn’t get out the back, it was all contained very nicely in this set. So when we disappeared behind the back to serve somebody, you couldn’t get out.

I was only sad that Rodney Ackland didn’t live to see his play as praised by the theatre critics as it had been by the TV critics, even if there were some remarks about ‘a flawed masterpiece’. It could have run for much longer, but the Lyttelton was needed for the next shows. It is still the play that if anyone asks me what I want to be doing tonight, my answer is
Absolute Hell
.

Happily, my next appearance at the National was also very rewarding. I had always admired the songs in
A Little Night Music
, so I was thrilled when Richard Eyre asked me to play Desiréên Phillips; Armfeldt. The role of my mother was played by Sia she is only a year or so older than me, but that didn’t trouble her a bit. ‘We’ll do it all with wigs,’ she said. In fact she had asked the director, Sean Mathias, if she could play that part before she knew who was to play Desirée, because she was as mad about Stephen Sondheim’s score as I was. I would have to take something from it to my Desert Island, if the BBC ever asked me to do
Desert Island Discs
again.

I was glad that Siân had worked with Sean before, as I became a bit worried in rehearsals when we spent so long doing exercises with bamboo sticks, instead of working on the script. Siân kept telling me it would be all right, and I trusted her judgement.

The American actor Larry Guittard played my ex-lover, Fredrik Egerman; we only met on the first day of rehearsal, but quickly became terrific friends. To begin with, I kept falling over, in his number ‘You must meet my wife’ he’d turn the other way and I’d fall over. He’d turn back and think, Oh, good grief – where is she? I was just lying on the ground.

Stephen Sondheim was in London during the rehearsal period, and kept asking to come and see it, but Sean insisted on putting him off until he had sorted out the technical problems. We had another revolving stage, but thank goodness they seemed to have improved the technology since our troubles over
Mother Courage
. When Stephen eventually came to a preview, I was not sure whether he liked it, but I think he enjoyed it more at a later one. I asked him for a note on the ‘Send in the Clowns’ song, but he charmingly declined, saying, ‘No, that’s yours now,’ which was most encouraging.

The best moment in rehearsing a musical is when the band arrive, after weeks with only a piano accompaniment. I first realised that when I did
Cabaret
in 1968. I was sitting in Julian Belfrage’s garden, and that clever actor David Hutcheson asked me how far we were into rehearsal. I said about six weeks, and he said, ‘Wait till the band call.’ That is electrifying. You are standing there at the beginning, and then you hear the orchestra start up, and it is like an enormous kind of cushion that you are on. It is wonderful, because you are suddenly lifted up with it. It is even more thrilling if you can be absolutely sure of the notes you are singing, but it is still thrilling if you are not.

A Little Night Music
ran for a whole year in the repertoire, and then we came back for an eight-week run in the Olivier, giving eight performances a week. We played to packed houses, and it broke all previous box office records at the National, so everyone was happy. On New Year’s Eve, I turned upstage to Larry Guittard and opened my dressing gown to show him ‘Happy New Year’ written on my corset. On the very last night we were all very sad, so when I opened my dressing gown to Larry this time I had written ‘Go home, Yank’, just to cheer him up. I only meant him to see it, but had forgotten that the upstage band also had a very clear view.

We threw an end-of-show party with a late-night cabaret for friends in the other National Theatre companies. I dressed up in a dirndl skirt and flaxen plaits to sing a send-up of ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’, from
The Sound of Music
, with Brendan O’Hea. Brendan couldn’t resist sending me up as well, singing ‘You are sixty, going on seventy’, because he was always ribbing Siân and me about how old we were, and how amazing it was that we could get onstage at all.

I thought that was the end of my association with that musical, until the summer of 2010, when the BBC Proms decided to celebrate Stephen Sondheim’s eightieth birthday by presenting an entire evening of his music and asked me to sing ‘Send in the Clowns’ once more. I have played some large theatres but nowhere as vast as the Albert Hall, and I have never been so scared in my life. The delay before I went on seemed endless. They kept saying, ‘No, wait…wait…not yet…
Now
go on.’ So that was why I was late coming down those steps onto the stage, to face that huge audience. Fortunately, I couldn’t really see them at all, it just looked like a great sea of waving corn.

It was lovely to see Stephen again after all that time. Very sweetly he said afterwards, ‘Come to supper with me at the Ivy.’ ‘What, now? I’m afraid I can’t do that, I have to go home and look after my grandson.’

Singing at the Proms was another new experience I shall long treasure, and I did enjoy the knees-up finale with all the other singers, with Bryn Terfel on one side and Simon Russell Beale on the other.

The last play in the five-year cycle at the National was to be a new play by David Hare entitled
Amy’s View
, but before I could get down to that I had a date with the film cameras which promised to be fun, but turned out to be very important too in changing my whole relationship with the world of cinema.