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.”
Owing to Dench’s deteriorating eyesight, most of her lines are read here by Barbara Flynn, who captures her impish humour and vast knowledge, and revels in the ripe language. But Dench still has walk-on parts, reciting excerpts from the plays under discussion with her customary brilliance and reappearing at the end for a Q&A with O’Hea where the pair of them bicker affectionately and reflect on how they came to write the book.
• Available via Penguin Audio, 12hr 5min
Further listening
House of Flame and Shadow
Sarah J Maas, Audible Studios, 29hr 42min
The third book in Maas’s Crescent City series sees heroine Bryce marooned in a strange new world and desperate to get back to her family in Midgard. Actor Elizabeth Evans narrates.
Abroad in Japan
Chris Broad, Penguin Audio, 8hr 8min
The writer and YouTuber narrates his memoir in which he shares details of his life as a bewildered Englishman in Japan.
