Shakespeare and Judi Dench

I absolutely loved listening to Judi Dench and fellow Shakespearean actor Brendan O'Hea chat about their work, their industry, their colleagues and friends, and the man himself in Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent.

On GoodReads, both are listed as authors of the book, though O'Hea did the lion's share of the work in converting 90 hours of discussion into book form. Dench suffers from macular degeneration, so reading and, I assume, writing and revision are now not possible.

The book's title is what Judi and her husband, Michael Williams, said about Shakespeare. Both were members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, aka RSC, and acting, mostly in Shakespeare's plays, was their job. They often acted together and lived outside Stratford-upon-Avon.  But I digress.

As Brendan says, Judi has an incredible memory regarding the productions she has been in, and I relished not only hearing about the director's vision and coaching, but the costuming, the set designs, the backstage chatter, the audiences, the pranks, the reviews and reviewers.

I appreciated Judi's and Brendan's discussions, at times contentious, about the various characters and especially how Judi's understanding of them changed as she changed and matured. The book is primarily a deep dive into each of the characters Judi played, not necessarily in chronological order, in each of the plays she was in. It starts with Macbeth--I loved hearing about her playing Lady Macbeth with Ian McKellan as Macbeth. I've seen the video of this production, and it is haunting and incredible and the best Macbeth I've ever seen.

I was gratified to learn that Judi dislikes Merchant of Venice and Portia for all the reasons that I do. She was in several productions of Midsummer's Night Dream, playing Titania, of course, but earlier she was one of the fairies when she was just out of acting school. She was Maria as well as Viola in Twelfth Night, Juliet as well as Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Isabella in Measure for Measure, Hermione and Perdita in the same production of Winter's Tale as well as Paulina later on, Katherine in Henry V, and the list goes on and on. Oh, I forgot, what a Cleopatra she was--I would love to have seen that production on the stage!

As Titania

In addition to remembering loads of specific details about the various productions, her ability to quote passages and not just from characters she played was outstanding.

However, three things really shine through and define Judi for me:

• Her reverence for her job--as an actress, she saw her job as telling the story as Shakespeare wrote it. That's not to say she had a problem with modern settings/costumes, she didn't--but she believed that the words told the story and she never wanted to deviate from the words. She respected the audiences she played to and felt an obligation to tell the story to them as well as she could.
• Her love of Shakespeare's genius--his words, his poetry, his understanding of the human condition in all its contradictions and complexity. She loves iambic pentameter and says its rhythm is the same as the human heartbeat. I loved her asides the passion or poetry or insight contained in a line would give her chills.
• Her joie de vivre is intoxicating. 

Truly a 5-star listen. And truly, this is a book that needs to be listened to--just to hear Shakespeare's words said aloud!

Oh, and the hardcover is exactly 400 pages, so this counts as one of my Big Book Summer Challenge books.

Judi Dench and Anna Quindlen: Memoirs

Faced with writing posts about two memoirs I recently finished, I decided to combine them.

I listened to Judi Dench's And Furthermore and loved every minute of it.  Read by Samantha Bond, who sounded so much like Dench that I usually forgot that it wasn't being read by the author, it was a joy from beginning to end.  I admire Dench's work as well as her sense of humor, work ethic, respect for her colleagues and audience, and unwillingness to sacrifice her soul to celebrity.

I loved hearing about her years in the theatre, doing mostly Shakespeare and other classical plays, before she entered the world of television and cinema.  I also loved hearing the backstory and her thoughts about some of my favorite things she's been in, namely As Time Goes By, Macbeth, Shakespeare in Love, Mrs. Brown, and Cranford. 

I was really eager to hear what she said about Pride and Prejudice, which I didn't care for as an adaptation, and was surprised that she didn't really say much about it other than after getting the part she rang up her old friend, Barbara Leigh Hunt, who played Lady Catherine in the 1995 BBC production, to tell her she would be playing the same part in a movie.  She talked a bit about the butler who played Lady Catherine's butler in the movie--he came with the estate and did such a great job that he gave up being a butler.  And that was it--she didn't weigh in on whether she thought it was a good adaptation, script, or anything.  Maybe her lack of stated opinion says it all.

After listening to this marvelous memoir of her long and illustrious career, I had the fleeting notion that maybe I would watch all her movies in order.  I'm not sure I have the time for such an endeavor but I do know she has done a lot of movies that I haven't seen that sound really wonderful.

Finally, I've found myself telling the family Judi Dench anecdotes all week--surely the sign of a memorable book.  This is by no means a "tell-all" book, but then I doubt I would've like it so much if it had been.

Anna Quindlen's memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, was a different beast altogether.  This is a very recently published book and it's been getting lots of press.  Since I've never read anything by Anna Quindlen, apart from some newspaper columns over the years, I wanted to find out if I liked her as a writer.

Honestly, I still don't know.  Her memoir was readable and interesting and I found myself resonating with her life to some degree--we are mostly of the same generation, though she's a tad older than me, but most of her childhood and adolescent and young adult memories were of stuff that I could relate to.  I suppose I should read one of her novels so that I can really see what makes her such a popular author as I really didn't get a sense of it from her memoir.