Dame Judi Dench is currently on the crest of a professional wave. With the sole exception of Dame Maggie Smith, no other actress can sell a show on the strength of her name alone, and it is primarily Dame Judi's presence – despite a support cast of the stature of Toby Stephens (Dame Maggie's son by Sir Robert Stephens), Julia Mackenzie, Harriet Walter and Peter Bowles – that has been responsible for so much public interest in The Royal Family, which previews at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket from 24th October and opens on 1st November.
Dame Judi's current role is as the matriarch of a theatrical dynasty - hence the play's title - and the combination of actress and 'royal' in this play neatly combines the two types of character that she has excelled in playing in recent years.
She has won film stardom - relatively late in life - playing two queens: Elizabeth I and Victoria. The second was in Mrs Brown, a film about the relationship between the widowed Queen Victoria and her Scottish manservant, John Brown. Dench's portrayal of a famously tough - "We are not amused" - monarch won universal admiration; not least because she was able to convey the queen's vulnerability and essential femininity under an outer layer of toughness and regal hauteur.
There was nothing vulnerable about Elizabeth I, however, and Dench's performance as the Virgin Queen in the highly theatrical film Shakespeare in Love won her an Oscar. Here it was her ability to project a humour and worldiness as well as a sense of impregnable majesty that made her performance so memorable. And finally threw off Glenda Jackson's thirty-year stranglehold on the role, in which she had starred in the 1970s television series Elizabeth R.
Dame Judi's performances as a monarch have not always been a critical success, however: when she appeared at the National Theatre opposite Anthony Hopkins in Antony and Cleopatra the expected magic and majesty, between the stars as well as across the footlights, failed to materialise.
She more than made up for this when she starred in David Hare's play Amy's View, as Esmé, an actress - another strong woman who unlike Cleopatra was, eventually, a winner. The role of Amy, her daughter, was played by Samantha Bond, who both looked and, even more, sounded as if she really were her daughter. The two actresses have since appeared twice together in James Bond movies, with the appropriately named Samantha Bond appearing as Moneypenny and Dench as 'M', the head of the British Secret Service.
Amy's View started life at the National - where Dench has also appeared in the lead in Sondheim's A Little Night Music. Some people were surprised to learn that she could sing (albeit in as husky and individual a way as she speaks), but in her youth she was a notable Sally Bowles in Cabaret, giving a performance that some people consider the definitive stage performance of the role.
After a run at the National, Amy's View transferred to the Aldwych in London before making a successful crossing to New York, from where Dame Judi had to make an emergency return home when her husband, actor Michael Williams, fell seriously ill - he died earlier this year.
Dame Judi's character, Esmé, was an an actress who lived for the theatre and was determinedly removed from the 'real' world, until a financial disaster and then a personal tragedy forced her to confront life head on. Her response to these, and the collapse of her world, was to find strength and self-expression through the theatre.
Dame Judi's acting of the scene when her estranged son-in-law visits her in her dressing room before she appears on stage in a fringe theatre production was one of the most powerful twenty minutes of acting - made all the more moving by its restraint, and the sense of controlled emotion - that the West End has seen in recent years.
Her role in The Royal Family looks likely to further her reputation as a comedienne and player of strong actresses, while confirming her as one of the two most bankable Dames in theatreland.
If an enterprising producer could persuade a playwright to create a comedy written with the different strengths and styles of Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith - perhaps with Dame Maggie reprising her role as Mary, Queen of Scots (as played, briefly, in Peter Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage) and Dame Judi once again playing Queen Elizabeth I, he/she could guarantee a West End hit. Meanwhile, we have The Royal Family in which to see one of the West End's stage royals at the top of her form.
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending this review which appeared on the Theatre Now website on October 22, 2001.Return