Britain has some very brave senior actors, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it if you followed the British critical community. On March 18, Judi Dench, now 74, opened on the West End for the first time in three years to play the mother of the title character in Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade. General exultation from the ranks? Uh, not quite, the overnight reviews for the florid but far from dull play having been equalled in severity only by several of today’s Sunday papers, the female critics if anything more damning to that rare show populated entirely by women than their male confreres had been. Oh, if only this Michael Grandage production had followed on from Ivanov and Twelfth Night and given us another golden oldie, glisteningly done, on which to feast, went the general drift of reactions to Madame de Sade. Well, I for one applaud Grandage for taking a risk in programming this third of four mostly canonical texts in the Donmar’s yearlong residency at Wyndham’s. And while we’re at it, may we have a second season, please?
Back to Dench, who has come in for some rather rude suggestions that (a) the greatest classical actress of her generation is no judge of scripts and (b) that her ankle injury – resulting in the star’s absence from a spate of performances soon after opening – may have been a ruse to get her out of a play she didn’t like and in which she could not always remember her lines. Sound familiar? Similar aspersions (minus the memorisation bit) beset Dench’s great friend and exact contemporary Maggie Smith when Dame M. returned to the London theater two years ago after an even longer absence to star in Edward Albee’s scorching The Lady From Dubuque, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. That play was fairly roundly trounced and, against all expectation, did disappointing business, making negative waves as the first Smith venture anyone could think of not to recoup costs. (more…)
