IF YOU dropped Judi Dench: With a Crack in Her Voice into a hot saucepan, it would melt into sticky toffee. A rhapsody of "adorables", "heavenlys", "brilliants", "vulner ables" trickle down every page of John Miller’s "This Is Your Life" hagiography. Friends and colleagues troop on united in tribute to "the best loved actress of our time . . . and a very special woman" (not forgetting her "compassion for the troubled and oppressed"). All that’s missing is the local Lollipop Lady.Dame Judi can survive such hyperbole unscathed, but it might have been wiser not to allow this puffed-up-pigeon Boswell over the threshold. Her husband, Michael Williams, noticeably keeps his counsel.
For theatre-goers of my generation Dench has been a luminous bench mark: in youth our Viola, then, later, the more worldly Millamant or Cabaret’s Sally Bowles and, recently, the ageing actresses Arkadina and Esmé in Amy’s View. She has defied categorisation, moving without apparent hitch from Cleopatra to Lady Bracknell. She has mucked in on sit-coms (A Fine Romance, As Time Goes By) and hit the Oscar A-list with Mrs Brown.
Miller promises a diary of some of this work-in-progress, but it’s a perfunctory effort. You suspect that his lurking presence in rehearsal was not always welcome. Richard Eyre, for one, politely shows him the door. Lamely, he resorts to a slogging cobble-job of plots, cast-lists and, most leaden, a trudge through old review clippings.
What’s new, then? We learn that Dame Judi likes shopping, word-games, needlepoint. Uh-huh. So far, so harmless. She is much given to "corpsing", giggling and Green Room jokes and pranks. "She’s such a blast," says one admirer. Yet what, for instance, made her Lady Macbeth so uniquely terrifying? There are whispers here of an inner steeliness, power and impatience. The director Sam Mendes notes a "great well of sadness". But Miller is so busy insinuating himself that he never listens.
Incidentally, I find it hard to trust a hack who claims Dench’s production of Look Back in Anger never came to the West End. It ran there for as long as Kenneth Branagh’s commitments allowed. Or one who assures us that "Life is never dull in the Williams’ household." Hang on. How can he possibly know?
David Hare, who has written for and directed her, says: "She’s just got the most complete acting brain . . . in terms of working on it as if it’s a painting, or something outside herself." Dench’s gift, in the direct English line of Ellen Terry, Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft, is a mystery to be celebrated. Alas, Judi Dench: With a Crack in her Voice should have been subtitled: "Warning - Too Much Sugar Can Damage Your Health."
This review appeared in the Daily Telegraph.