"When Judi Dench played Lady Bracknell (at the National Theatre in 1982), she brilliantly side-stepped all comparisons by portraying the tension and melancholy of a much younger dowager, non-stentorian and with the bloom still on, whose husband, dining alone with his meals on trays, was a considerable brake on her social and indeed sexual potental.
"Her success in the role did not obliterate Edith Evans, and Maggie will have to start all over again when she (if she) finally delivers her reading. But it was quite a good swipe. And Dench has also had her RSC triumphs as Hermione/Perdita in The Winter's Tale, and as Viola, Portia, the Duchess of Malfi, Beatrice, Lady Macbeth and Imogen in Cymbeline. She followed her Lady Bracknell at the NT with an equally unexpected, and equally memorable, Cleopatra. Any competition Maggie mustered at that time was confined to Canada, so that the impression, in Britain at least, was that Judi Dench had become our leading tragedienne.
The release of feeling, a sort of glorious shiver with an instantly recognisable crack in her voice, characterises all these Dench performances. The renewed monstrosity of Bracknell will be something left to Maggie to accomplish when she gets round to her second Aunt Augusta (Lady Bracknell's name was adopted by Graham Greene for his travelling aunt). Dench generously concedes that it is Maggie's extraordinary way of looking at the world that marks her out, her delightful sense of the absurd: 'She does things in such a daring way that she leaves me standing. She also leaves me laughing.'
"Everyone loves Judi Dench, just as everyone loved Ellen Terry. But her drive is of a different calibre to Maggie's, less gnawing, less obsessive. John Moffatt says that Maggie, like Paul Scofield, is possessed by a demanding and driving genius, but that she also skirmishes in the realms of camp by inhabiting a world that is peculiarly her own, rather as Beatrice Lillie did. Maggie loves a line of Bea Lillie's, said of a hopeless case leaving the stage: 'She'll never find the kitchen, she's that moody.'
"And, as Maggie's performances are often a series of elaborately contrived masks that proceed to disintegrate, she further arouses interest in what she might really be like under the skin. As Peter Hall says, 'When the public sees Maggie Smith in a play, the public becomes voraciously interested in what kind of person Maggie Smith is.'
"There are various points of similarity between Maggie and Judi Dench, but that is not one of them. Judi Dench is known to be a cosy, comfy creature with good manners, good breeding and a pronounced liability to burst into giggles and gales of laughter. Everything is more dangerous, acidulous and beadily observed with Maggie.
"This is not a value judgement on their respective talents. But Maggie, especially in comedy, presents the role, while Dench puts herself in its centre and works outwards, negotiating the limits of her own characterisation at the same time as she meets the rest of the actors and the surrounding production. This method leads, not all that surprisingly, to the occasional aberration in the costume and wig departments, where Dench is often reprehensibly careless. Maggie never makes such mistakes."
Thanks to Delda White for sending me these passages which appeared in the book Maggie Smith: A Bright Particular Star by Michael Coveney, published in 1992.