Judi Dench gets chatty and cheeky about Shakespeare

This is only one of many colorful anecdotes to be found in a new book in which the much-loved and critically lauded actress celebrates Shakespeare’s art and comments on her craft. It is a craft Dench has honed to perfection over a career spanning seven decades, from the role of Ophelia in “Hamlet” in 1957 as an ingenue fresh out of drama school to Paulina in “The Winter’s Tale” in 2015 while an 81-year-old national treasure. “Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent” takes the form of in-depth interviews that Dench gave over four years. Part intimate memoir, part insightful commentary, the book shows how the Dame and the Bard make a winning combination.

Each chapter revolves around an individual play and Dench’s role or roles in it. Her interlocutor, the actor and director Brendan O’Hea, steers her through the drama and feeds her questions or prompts relating to a variety of aspects, from plot strands to line delivery to character development. Dench shares her expertise and her experience, and along the way sprinkles in witty recollections from productions.

In the opening section on “Macbeth,” she reveals that the Scottish play was the reason she went into theater in the first place. For her, it has everything: “Beautifully constructed, terrific story, great part, good memories — I remember so much of it. Short, no interval, pub (Dirty Duck): heaven.” She views “Macbeth” as a thriller and in other chapters argues that “The Merry Wives of Windsor” resembles a pantomime and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” a comic sex romp (“Titania and Oberon are so randy”). In the latter, she enjoyed playing First Fairy, a character with an attitude and an agenda: “She can’t hang around chatting, justifying her movements to some sprite she doesn’t know — she has a job to do.”

When playing Mistress Quickly in “Henry V,” Dench imagined her as “flinty, as if she’s been hewn out of rock,” while as lonely soul Imogen in “Cymbeline” she “often felt like Sisyphus pushing an enormous boulder up a hill.” Dench had a better time of it as Hamlet’s mother, “Dirty Gerty,” and particularly relished being bedecked in extravagant costumes and jewelry. As Dench remarks, “I think Gertrude is quite a bling person.”

Discussions of some plays and parts provide springboards to fascinating tangential topics. While dissecting “Coriolanus,” Dench muses on why certain plays are more popular than others. An examination of “The Merchant of Venice” — for Dench “a horrible play” — leads to the issue of censorship. And during reflections on “King Lear,” Dench veers off to speak out against updating Shakespeare to render his work more accessible: Simplifying him, she argues, “traduces the language, reduces our imagination.”

At regular junctures, Dench imparts nuggets of wisdom. We learn about lighthouse acting and pickup lines. We get a how-to guide in miniature — how to play comedy and tragedy, how to give a soliloquy and speak iambic pentameter. Dench believes that less is more in her profession: “Acting is learning how to edit,” she explains. “Finding the minimum we have to do to create the maximum effect.” She has little time for actors who take the role home with them (“You take the character off with the costume”) or who, in pre-performance read-throughs, “sit around and intellectualize it all.” On several occasions, she employs a character to illustrate her point: Fight scenes have to be choreographed, she says, “otherwise you’re going to get through a lot of Desdemonas.”

The book is interspersed with short sections on theater-related subjects, with titles as varied as “Critics,” “Audience,” “Rehearsal,” “Stratford-upon-Avon” (“where my heart is,” Dench confesses) and the inviting “Fireside Ramblings.” Here and elsewhere, Dench recounts tales of acting alongside the likes of Ian McKellen, Kenneth Branagh, Daniel Day-Lewis, Anthony Hopkins and her late husband, Michael Williams. Her most compelling stories relate to antics backstage (“a subterranean world which the audience never get to see — and maybe for the better”) and hiccups onstage — careless accidents, dubious props and mangled lines. Once, in “Romeo and Juliet,” she sneezed while lying on her lover’s tomb; another time, she spoke the line “Where is my father and my mother, nurse?” — and heard her father call out, “Here we are, darling, in row H.”

Dench likes when things backfire — “There’s magic to be mined in mistakes” — and many of her stories and responses are imbued with impish glee. She comes across as chatty and cheeky but also perceptive and analytical. In addition, she is impressively no-nonsense, quick to chide O’Hea for overthinking matters, and refreshingly self-deprecating, describing her Cleopatra as not so much a stately sovereign as a “menopausal munchkin.”

This book could have been a cross between a starchy academic study and a meandering trawl through Dench’s past glories. Instead, it is a delight, at once lively, captivating and informative. At 89, Dench’s eyesight is deteriorating, but she refuses to let age completely wither her. Throughout these pages, her memory remains prodigious, her passion for Shakespeare undimmed, and she still has the capacity to entertain.

Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New Republic.

Shakespeare

The Man Who Pays the Rent

By Judi Dench with Brendan O’Hea

St. Martin’s. 400 pp. $32