Anyone who saw last year’s clip of Judi Dench reciting a sonnet on The Graham Norton Show will know all about her remarkable memory for Shakespeare. “The man who pays the rent” is how she and her late husband Michael Williams described the Bard when they worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company throughout the 1970s; since then, Dench has played practically every major female Shakespeare role going, among them Cleopatra, Titania, Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Ophelia and Hamlet’s mother, Gertude.
Based on four years of interviews conducted with Dench by the actor Brendan O’Hea, this insightful and entertaining book finds her discussing those roles – each chapter is organised around a play and her recollections of performing in it – and her seven decades on the stage and screen. Blending anecdote and commentary, she recalls appearing alongside Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins and Kenneth Branagh, and once taking a curtain call with an escaped snake in her wig. In fact, Dench delights in tales of shows gone wrong and emphasises how “there is no right way of performing Shakespeare”. Assessing the merits of Macbeth for an actor, she notes: “Beautifully constructed, terrific story, great part … Short, no interval, pub: heaven.”
