And Furthermore by Judi Dench

Author:Judi Dench
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781250002143
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Published: 2012-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

11

A run of tragedies

1989-1992

I HAD SUCH HAPPY EXPERIENCES at the National Theatre with Peter Hall that when Richard Eyre took over from him as Director in 1989 and asked me to play Gertrude in his opening production of Hamlet I jumped at it. I hoped it might erase the memory of my difficult times as Ophelia thirty years before at the Old Vic, but it was not to be.

Daniel Day-Lewis was cast as Hamlet, and I thought that I would try and play Gertrude like his real mother, the actress Jill Balcon, tall and dark, but found I couldn’t do it. David Burke was the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, and however hard I tried, I couldn’t believe that he and I could have produced Dan. It was also difficult for me not to try and echo Coral Browne, who had been so magical in the part in 1957. Richard Eyre was simultaneously grappling for the first time with all the administrative demands of running the National, with its three theatres, and both of us had some tricky moments with John Castle who was playing Claudius.

Dan had his own identity crisis which overwhelmed him a little way into the run. He had suffered the loss of his real father, the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, and one night in the dramatic meeting with the Ghost of Hamlet’s father the two bereavements merged for him, he just seized up and could not carry on. Michael Bryant came to make his first entrance as Polonius, and found Dan crying uncontrollably in the wings. While he took him back to his dressing room I went to find Jeremy Northam, our Laertes but also Hamlet’s understudy. He went as white as a sheet, but he changed costumes and finished that performance. He did several more until Dan recovered enough to return to the part, which he did when we took the production to Dubrovnik, though even that was not without its extra drama. At the moment when he banged his head against the wall he momentarily forgot that at Fort Lovrjenac it was made of stone, not the wooden scenery of the Olivier.

I had played Ophelia here on the Old Vic European tour, and I was both surprised and touched to find a Yugoslav television crew following me around at the first-night party, so at least someone had remembered that earlier performance. I took some beautiful photographs of a helicopter lowering the gigantic statue of Hamlet’s father into the castle at Dubrovnik.

Returning to this particular play in a different part had its problems, but curiously I was made a similar offer during the run at the National. Sam Mendes came to see me and asked me if I would play Madame Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard, the part in which Peggy Ashcroft was so wonderful at the RSC when I was Anya. Peggy was always in my mind when I played it for Sam, as she had been when I did it on television for Richard Eyre in 1980.

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