Love's Old Sweet Song:
Judi Dench and Michael Williams
Judi Dench and Michael Williams have been famously paired in the television series A Fine Romance, where they played a courting couple of early middle age- who'd prevaricated about wedlock and had become ingrained as singles. Gentle comedy, graced with acting beyond its station, A Fine Romance had an extra frisson for the simplest of reasons: Judi Dench and Michael Williams are married in real life.

If A Fine Romance was ennobled by their presence, The Diary of a Nobody would yield up its immanent rich resources. Keith Waterhouse devised a script by making a lattice of the Grossmith original and his own sequel; thus, for the first time, a full chronicle of life at the Laurels was promulgated; it was as though The Iliad had been joined by The Odyssey. I was invited to attend a rehearsal, and made my way to a church hall in Chelsea. The building was crammed with Victorian furniture: elaborate screens, tables wilting beneath brocade, an upright piano with shaded brass candelabra, oil lamps, pipe racks like gunnels, heavy chairs with upholstered seats, two desks, antimacassars, the head of a moose.

Amongst the gimcrack and gewgaws the stars paced. Various girls fiddled making coffee or annotating scripts. Judi Dench, diminutive but erect, looking fierce behind large grey spectacles, shot to meet me. Instant warmth.

'Roger, you've come to see us. How kind. Michael - it's Roger from Oxford.'

Michael Williams, crumpled and concentrating, turned in greeting, and saw me installed at the edge of the set - for the alarming clutter, like a period lumber room, was the arranged set; these were the props for the run. 'We've been so lucky,' said Judi, 'we've had all these real things from the very first day. It helps enormously to get to know the objects, their feel and size.'

Indeed. Mr and Mrs Nobody is a fond celebration of tackle and chattels; a hosannah for the nineteenth-century fixture-fidgets.

'Julia Trevelyan Oman has been collecting it. You know,' said Judi, as if unmasking a secret identity. 'You know she's Lady Strong?'

'Yes. Did she borrow any of this from the V& A?'

'I don't think she did; most of it is hired. But this was bought.'

We were looking at a large wooden oven, like a timber Aga, with knobs and dials on the door. It was lined with lead, or it may have been zinc, and was the size of a maisonnette. The Wenham Lake Ice Safe.

'But I've no idea how we are going to move it. Weighs a ton, or several tons.'

The Wenham Lake Ice Safe, a pioneer refrigerator, acquires a disproportion in Carrie's life. Its arrival at the Laurels becomes her considerable ambition. As important to Mrs Pooter as the three sisters getting to Moscow; as Hannay knowing the secret of the thirty-nine steps; as Dorothy getting her red shoes back.

While Michael muttered his lines to himself, checking in a ring-folder kept on one of the desks, my brisk tour continued.

'These are the foods for the Mayor's Ball at the Mansion House: Chickens, hams, cakes, glazed pates: looking good enough to eat, and made of plaster - displayed on salvers, upon a tiered table which would wheel on and off.

'The whole of the room will be on a truck, and we'll shunt towards the audience.'

It was nearly time to begin. Michael remained in his ruffled red shirt, jeans, sneakers and jerkin; Judi began to wrap a quilt around her middle, in semblance of a long skirt.

'I did Keith's Mrs Pooter's Diary on Woman's Hour,' she said. 'I told him that I'd love to do it as a play, with Mike. Then the script arrived. It would have lasted five hours. We've managed to get Act One to an hour, Act Two to fifty minutes, and it must be shorter.'

Today was to be their first run-through without scripts, without costumes, with props. The director arrived, carrying a Gladstone bag. A big man, with cropped hair, a blue shirt and a determined stride; he looked like a confident vet about to spend a morning inoculating an entire herd of Friesians against brucellosis. It was Ned Sherrin, the cue-card joker, without whom no award show is entire. He sat at a trestle table and, while we awaited the tardy pianist, told stories: whether Eric Portman was alive or dead; what Peter O'Toole felt about playing an Arabian eunuch; seeing a ghost in the Russian Tea Room, New York; what Faye Dunaway was up to in a silly play called Circe and Bravo. Ned communicates in anecdotes; elaborate tales, like Matthew Arnold's epic similes - apparent digressions, conversational decor. In fact, the decor is the point, which you take away to ponder the meaning of.

'Roger,' he said finally, 'come and see this. It's a Wenham Lake Ice Safe.' I marvelled anew at the apparatus, and unsuspected trapdoors opened and closed.

A black-haired lady tottered in. Judi dived to greet her. It was Annie Hoey, Judi's dresser.

'I've been with Judi thirteen years. She's a lovely lady. None nicer. She does so many charity shows for free. Mr and Mrs Nobody has twelve changes, all of them elaborate and quick.'

Annie was sitting next to me. Rather a frail person, I thought, her pale skin the paler owing to her jet mop - like a porcelain doll. Judi was watchful, as of an ill relative. 'As for charity shows and readings, I went to the Cheltenham Poetry Festival with Michael Hordern. We had to endure, before we went on, incessant Bartok. Bangs and clonks and boings. Eventually, Michael Hordern let out one of his long exasperated groans - Ahhhnnnnnmmmmnn aghhh eogheenmmnnn ... And we giggled and giggled.'

The pianist still delayed, Annie was taken to see the Wenham Lake Ice safe. Ned Sherrin tried on a negro mask from his Gladstone bag; a brown plastic face, with white bone through the nose, and a curly frizz.

'Convincing?'

'Not,' came a Lady Bracknell voice, 'at all!'

'I hate masks, ' muttered Michael, 'I hate masks, perturbed.

A taxi was throbbing, waiting. It was the pianist. He'd detoured to the Wyndham's Theatre, where his briefcase was mislaid the night before. A tall gangling youth in a teeshirt, called Michael Haslam, he was taken to admire the Wenham Lake Ice Safe.

'It's been bought,' said Ned, out of his mask, 'so we've got to use it. The trouble is, it's too heavy to move.'

Michael Haslam tried on the negro mask. Apparently, there'd been a fleeting idea that the two musicians - pianist and violinist - would be attired as minstrels.

'I hate masks, I hate masks.' 'We'd better not finish early today, Ned,' said Judi.

'She went to Cecil Gee's yesterday,' cut in Mike, 'and bought three pairs of trousers, a dress and a jumper.'

'Fatal, fatal,' sang Judi, delighted, patrolling the set fast. 'You know,' she continued, 'doing this play, you do tend to slot people you meet into the characters. I meet Mr Darwitts, Mr Perkupp, Annie Fullers (now Mrs James, of Sutton), Mr Oswald Tipper or Daisy Mutlar every day, somewhere or other ...'

They were ready, at last. The piano began to bang, out of tune, Victorian parlour songs and Gilbert and Sullivan melodies.

'Two minutes of music to get yourselves opened up, ' said the director, back at his trestle. Mike, now Mr Pooter, sucked his pipe and looked pensive. A tinny cassette made the voice-over:

'Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see - because I do not happen to be a "Somebody" - why my diary should not be interesting ...'

Midway through this, Judi, now Mrs Pooter, stirred to her desk, and another, overlapping, voice-over:

'If he may entertain hopes of publishing a diary, then so may I - after all, it is not as if my dear Charlie were a "Somebody" whose thoughts and impressions are any more profound or worthwhile than the next person's.'

Actor and actress then sat at flanking bureaux and read out their journal entries in unison:

'My dear wife Carrie and I have just been a week in our new house ...'

'I hate it ...' states the lady, a withering fraction later. Instantly, a merry war between them is promised. Mr and Mrs Pooter were to address the audience directly - in this case, a bust of a Chelsea worthy, on a plinth, the eye level above Ned's, Annie's, mine. The collusion, the winks, the wry smiles, the tiny cocks of the head and pregnant pauses: all these were aimed at the bust. Both actor and actress scrupulously avoided living eyes.

Gradually, the actor's and actress's speeches to the audience became conversation with each other - but the script, being but the parallel text of diary entries, was not inherently dramatic. It was set in the past tense, for a start. Yet the transubstantiation of acting was taking place. Judi Dench and Michael Williams had been replaced by the characters they were playing: they were the living voices for the text, giving the subtlest of nuances to small moments - so that those sash cords and that bootscraper took on the significance of crowns and orbs in a history play.

What actor and actress were doing was instinctively - was it instinctive, or was it technique deployed with the steam up? - to search for the reality, the touching ordinariness, in the Pooters. There was no teasing, no superior detachment - so that when they battled over the butcher's bill, it was an authentic marital difficulty, not a silly fuss over nothing. King Lear's division of the kingdom is a fuss over nothing ('Nothing will come of nothing'); mistaken double orders of mutton and the quality of eggs portend dissension in the family, the breakdown of peace in the home. And when Mrs Pooter, recounting her husband's partiality for Lochenbar whisky and Jackson Freres champagne, confided that "I sometimes think my husband is a secret drinker' - beneath the joke, the overstatement, lingered sincere concern.

The worries and vexations of the Pooters were being performed as genuine; as genuine as Bloom's attentiveness to Mina Purefoy, or his preparation of Molly's breakfast tray, or his dropping by at the National Library of Ireland to investigate the fundaments of statuary. True humour comes from recognizing streaks of truth; even farce can only be successful if its madcap antics are deployed with utter credibility; it must be internally coherent and consistent. From Congreve to Wilde, from Sir William Schwenck Gilbert to Noel Coward, from Preston Sturges to the Goons: comedy, even the most fantastic and apparently surreal, has to recognize the law of reality ('The sum total of reality is the world,' said Ludwig Wittgenstein) before it can ascend on the wings of its own wit. Satire (Jonathan Swift to graphic artists such as Gerald Scarfe and Spitting Image) moves in the contrary direction: it dives from lofty bizarrerie to hit the real, like an arrow hitting an artery. Mr and Mrs Nobody, which in less delicate hands could have been a satire on tribal pretension - the Pooters have a desperate desire socially to improve themselves - was instead being performed as a comedy of manners. The furniture, the fans, the clothes, the deckle-edge notelets: the Holloway inhabitants wish to be as worldly as the burghers in Peckham, which to Carrie is the Promised Land. And the earnest desire to gentrify London boroughs, to read personalities into postal districts: social betterment is the eternal English fantasy.

The Pooters are busy self-improvers. Judi Dench and Michael Williams were hinting, in their acting, at the strain this tends to put on ordinary life; its ability to invite humiliation. The Pooters have servants, but Carrie works in the kitchen alongside them. She constantly refers to Sarah ('my maid'), as though the skivvy is a lady-in-waiting. Sarah ('my maid') was played as a mute panto of gormlessness by Penny Ryder - who loped and gagged. They seem, the Pooters, to be socially equivalent to the owners of shops and small businesses; the lower middle-class, dreaming to be mistaken for middle-class. The occasional genteel open vowel was used by Judi to indicate that the East End was not too many generations distant.

All this: the discrimination with which Mrs Pooter and Mr Pooter were being drawn, the extent of their self-knowledge and knowledge about each other, their urgent interest in etiquette, made ready for the receipt of an invitation to attend the Mansion House Ball. Hitherto, actor and actress had addressed auditorium, occasionally each other. Now, Judi and Michael each split up to indicate other guests, swirling in dances, and sometimes adopting different voices. We were in a church hall in Chelsea: an actor and an actress were rehearsing; yet I swear I saw a crowd in dicky and boa.

Arrival at the ball, and its edging into mortification, was preceded by a small scene of sudden emotion. As written, it is stiff and sentimental. Waterhouse leaves his predecessors alone at this point. The invitation arrives:

'Carrie darling, I was a proud man when I led you down the aisle of the church on our wedding day; that pride will be equalled, if not surpassed, when I lead my dear, pretty wife up to the Lord and Lady Mayoress at the Mansion House.'

'Charlie dear, it is I who have to be proud of you. And I am very, very proud of you. You have called me pretty; and as long as I am pretty in your eyes, I am happy. You, dear old Charlie, are not handsome, but you are good, which is far more noble.'

Judi Dench and Michael Williams made this exchange tender and fond; Carrie, indeed, could barely speak the last half-dozen words; they came out, choked with emotion.

We were in a church hall in Chelsea: an actor and an actress were rehearsing; yet I saw real tears bulge.

Real tears ? Or a representation of tears ? Acting is the real thing in contact with the make-believe; a happy deception. Judi and Mike were giving me new eyes: I thought I was seeing what I was not seeing. Henry James, in The Real Thing, published within a year of Diary of a Nobody, wrote about a painter who preferred artifice to actuality: 'I liked things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they were or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question.'

Whether Carrie's tears were Judi's it is neither subordinate nor profitless to ask. For they were an alchemy of the two. And quick as a flash Judi banished Carrie. They'd become too close. 'Sorry, I'm terribly off beam, aren't I?'

'I was like that yesterday, ' said her husband soothingly.

Then back into character they went, Charlie having a frightening explosion of anger when the precious invitation card is accidentally smeared with port wine. His eyes flashed with inarticulate fury and frustration: it was no panto tantrum.

For the Mansion House Ball, the plaster food was slid into place. Judi mimed eating a big meal; chewing discreetly, whilst watching Charlie Pooter drink himself silly. Then, the wild tarantella, ending with the embarrassing skid on the parquet. Now it was Carrie's turn to be mettlesome, the grand excursion having miscarried. The morning after crackled with feelings of shame and recrimination. Sarah ('my maid') crept about the parlour, a cartoon of politic stealthiness; Charlie had a murderous hangover; Carrie, however, was prepared for battle: 'I left him in no doubt as to what I thought of his conduct of the night before ... his deficiencies as a husband and as a gentleman - with particular reference to his leaving it to Mr Darwitts to assume responsibility for me in my distress ...'

It is the most major cloud on their marriage; the after-effects of the ball linger for days. The hurts accumulate. The Blackfriars Bi-weekly News publishes its string of misprints. The neighbours pester. 'We cannot go on like this. It will be better for both of us that I should go and stay in Sutton with Annie Fullers (now Mrs James) for a spell.'

A way she careens. Charlie is dejected. He polices the house, fiddling and fussing; crushed and lonely and sad. The pianist tinkled a lamentation. Then, after clocks chiming to mark the passage of days, the music broke into a gallop:

'Carrie back. Hoorah!'

'Home sweet home again!'

The queen was back in her counting house, making a lightning tour of inspection, disposing of dead flowers and slicking dust. Carrie waved a box at the audience, containing, presumably, an electroplated kettle. She'd been to an exhibition of kitchenware with Annie Fullers (now Mrs James).

It was lunchtime. We strolled to a pub, Mike and Judi eager to talk of family life, when they knew my wife and I were soon expecting a baby. They have a daughter, Finty.

'We're very close, the three of us,' said Michael.

'I was thirty-six, Mike was thirty-seven when we had her. The doctors at the hospital called me the Aged Ape.'

'Will you be there when Anna gives birth?'

'I don't much fancy it,' I confessed, 'but it is mandatory, I believe, these days, for the father to have an opportunity to die in childbirth.'

'I was there,' said Mike, 'and it was the most wonderful of experiences. I'd not have missed it for the world.'

'I didn't have a great deal of choice,' remarked Judi.

'Will Finty be an actress?' I asked.

'She's unavoidably been brought up amongst artistic and theatre people. She came with her mother to watch us filming Blunt, and she got on well with Ian Richardson. How they roared together.'

Michael plays Goronwy Rees in the espionage film.

'A strange man, Goronwy. Nobody could make him out. He was all things to all men - which is perfect for a spy. At Aberystwyth, the Establishment didn't like him - he went drinking with the students; that sort of thing. So when he did those articles on Burgess and Maclean for a newspaper, for £l,000 - he was always hard up - he was ostracized for his part in things, and never really recovered. They all died broken men, those defectors.'

Morgan Goronwy Rees, the littlest-known of the trio in Blunt, was born in 1909 and died about a decade ago. He combined a Fellowship at All Souls with the higher hackery: assistant editor at the Spectator, leader writer for the Manchester Guardian; and he translated Buichner's Danton's Death with Stephen Spender and wrote a history of Marks and Spencer called St Michael. Between 1953 and 1957 he was the Principal of the University College of North Wales. ..But was he a double-agent? He always claimed to have deserted the Communist cause after the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, but Guy Liddell and Dick White of M15 disbelieved him when he allowed himself to be interrogated about Burgess and Maclean in 1952; and though he told them about Blunt, Blunt was not interrogated for another fourteen years. His newspaper pieces about his suspicions (coinciding with the first public acknowledgement of the defectors' residence in Moscow) precipitated a social ruin.

The film Blunt saw Rees as shy and impressionable - bullied by the swot-mastermind of Blunt himself, and by the jolly tuck-shop Bunter of Burgess. Williams's was a touching portrayal of a man whose youthful idealism and allegiances came back to haunt with a vengeance; elements from a boyhood arcady pursue him, changed to hellions: 'You are one of us,' Burgess snarls. Worried, wretched, to whom should he be loyal? 'Guy is my oldest friend, , he tries to tell his wife - and gradually the spectre of an ancient illicit love affair clanks its chains. Williams's eyes and withdrawn stare signalled that embers of affection were quite likely to be rekindled - the little boy with the crush on the captain. Burgess makes him vow never to expose Anthony, nor to warn him that he, Burgess, will not be returning after babysitting Donald to safety.

What intolerable secrets! National Security and personal allegiance ('the sacred trust between friends a la Forster') are impacted, and Rees is easily made to confess by his wife, Margaret Ewing Morris. 'What's the promise Guy asked you to keep?' she demands - knowing there's demonology in the air. 'You've no cause to be jealous of Guy,' Rees responds. 'He's my friend [fatal pause], in the best sense.'

Williams, with tense understatement, was a picture of longing, sinking into a neurotic and hopeless torpor, by way of perplexity and degrees of puzzlement, as Margie dared her questions: 'Guy means more to you than I do, or the children ...What has Guy done?' Answers remain political: Guy tried to enroll him in the KGB ('We were all idealists then. I stopped.') - but the meaning of lingering loyalty is sexual: 'Friendship is another matter.' The wife's world collapses about her; Rosie Kerslake was eloquent in her acting of a woman confused, frightened and suddenly resentful. Guy is godfather to her baby; the evil fairy admitted by a husband who is still lying about real feelings, real deeds. Who were his absent friends she never met? What were the parties she was never invited to in Mayfair? Rees's defence is plaintive. He describes himself as an artless Mr. Pooter: 'I did warn you when we met that I had not a sense of self. Mr Nobody.' Rees impugns the Grossmiths's hero to exculpate his own dishonour, and in his insistence on ordinariness he's like a guilt- ridden Barbara Jackson in Pack of Lies deciding what to do: 'I'm not going to think about it. We've got to live a normal life. Let them do what they want. I'm not going to think about it.'

'Old Fin was once in her school nativity play - she was the innkeeper's wife,' said Mike. ' "What is the play about?" she was asked. "Well," she replied, as if stating the obvious, "it is about an innkeeper's wife."'

Judi started to giggle about my address.

Stratton Audley! What a name for an actor, like Beerbohm Tree. Your baby might act, Roger.'

'I was once the squire in a nativity play, ' I said, thinking back.

Ned had arrived with a tray of food. Chicken in mostly green slop with raw onion rings. Beyond him, making egress from the jakes, and heralded by the sound of gushing water, Annie Hoey, the dresser.

'Is Annie Irish, Judi?'

'Irish? She's as Irish as Kerry Ring, as my mother would say.'

'What did she mean by that? Your mother?'

'My mother always said things like that, like "If I go as brown as I'm red I'll be black. " She's had a hard life.'

'Who, your ma?'

'No, Annie. She makes trousers for the Royal Family.'

'She doesn't?'

'She does. She makes Prince Philip's trousers. She gets up at half-past six and goes to Conduit Street, where she makes trousers for the Royal family. Then she becomes my dresser every evening. The theatre is the passion of her life.'

Annie and Ned were upon us.

'Tonight, , said Ned, 'I shall see I'm Not Rappaport with Paul Scofield; then I shall go to Groucho's for two starters.'

'You,' said Judi with her hint of Lady Bracknell, 'have the heaviest social diary of anyone I've ever met.'

'Before that, ' he stated, 'I have to interview John Houseman at Broadcasting House.'

Ned had broadcasted his day.

'Tell us, do tell us, ' Judi began, and Mike, chuckled, 'the "Chuck, get back to the Planet of the Apes" story.'

'Well, Houseman produced in 1953,' began Ned, pausing only a smidgen for the computer cue-cards to flicker into position in his brain, 'Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. John Gielgud was Cassius. There was another film in 1970, Richard Johnson was Cassius, Robert Vaughn was Casca, Jason Robards was Brutus. Charlton Heston was Mark Antony and this time John Gielgud was Caesar. I bought the set for £900 for Up Pompeii, and Gielgud's bust appeared in the baths scene with Frankie Howerd and Michael Hordern. Anyway, Heston kept drying on the speech, "O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth. " Time after time they tried. "O, pardon me, thou. .." "O, for God's sake, Chuck, " said Gielgud.'

Judi and Mike joined in the punchline:

'"WHY DON'T YOU GET BACK TO THE PLANET OF THE APES!"'

'That's an apocryphal story, by the way,' said Ned, with a cautionary nod in my direction.

'American classical actors have their quirks,' said Judi. 'I remember opening on Broadway in Henry V, on Christmas Eve, with Laurence Harvey, and he kept his eye level three inches above mine; as though he was cross I didn't come up to his height. It was like this ...'

Judi was up on her seat, acting a tall man squinting to find a short lady.

Ned started to tell a story about yet another famous American actor, this one long deceased, who spent a season at Stratford.

'He was found molesting a spear-carrier. He considered all young actors available crumpet.'

'It was a gloomy day,' replied Judi, 'when the lavatories at The Dirty Duck, the Stratford pub, were treated with snowy grit. It meant the end of graffiti, and those lav walls were our noticeboards. A friend of ours was once in the Gents, when he noticed a message on a tiny knob of plaster. It said "Fred and me".'

We started to return to the church hall. Judi and Mike let the others go on ahead.

'Is it working? The play. Can you follow the story? Is it clear, what's going on? All the diary readings?'

It was no idle pleasantry, or fishing for compliments. They honestly wanted to know if the Pooters were coming to life.

'Carrie and Charles have a delightful dignity. And the two of you fill the stage with all the other characters.'

'Roger, you have said the right things.'

In the hall was a large lady, with bright eyes, grey curls and rubicund cheeks; dressed in tweeds and stout brogues, she looked like a dog show judge, or the local rector's wife.

'I've come to see, ' said Julia Trevelyan Oman, Lady Strong, 'The Wenham Lake Ice Safe.'

We convened about the object, as if nearing a font or a kennel. More hidden compartments were revealed, and we all murmured appreciation. On with the show.

A wax phonograph roll, or some recording device, began to plonk 'Pretty Mocking Bird' whilst Carrie sat at the piano. She sang, with gusto anyway, a parlour piece. Judi has a smoky, cabaret husk of a voice; she screeched it towards a ropy operatic soprano. It was very funny. Michael took up position as Cummings or Gowing, and acted their response and appreciations. He also played Lupin, by being a louche version of Charlie.

'When we first started rehearsing, Ned would stand where Lupin was meant to be, so we gradually came to believe the other characters were alongside us. And do you know, ' Judi exclaimed, 'I can see all those people. I don't know if it gives that impression.'

Having coped with the Mansion House Ball, the Pooters now have to receive news of Lupin's engagement, to a trollop called Daisy Mutlar. Carrie swiftly, efficiently reconnoitres her prospective daughter-in-law's family. Pleased with her sleuthing, she tells her agog spouse, whilst taking off long gloves, hat, unbuttoning a coat (all mimed): 'Miss Daisy Mutlar resides in Upper Holloway, at Avoncrest, No.17 Atha Grove, with her parents and brother. They have two servants living in - cook - general and maid. I chanced to pass along Atha Grove on my afternoon walk yesterday, and could not help but notice the house; it is a double- fronted residence with a porch, and claret glass surrounds to the bay windows, with engraved corner sunbursts.'

The details go on and on.

'That is the sum of our knowledge of Miss Mutlar for the present.'

A party is organized in the lady's honour. The event, its planning and inquest, dominates many days. The occasion itself occasioned virtuosity: actor and actress packed the room with a bustling throng; party games took place; energetic dances abounded; lavish food appeared. But the party games, dance partners and feast did not actually appear. Our thinking made them so. From the excess and abandon, the mood switched instantly when Mr Perkupp entered. Charlie's boss, it was an honour to receive him at The Laurels. A frost fell on the gaiety. And even though Mr Perkupp's censorious tread could be followed, there was no Mr Perkupp. A concentration of acting filled in and filled out the cast.

The play ended almost abruptly. There being a paucity of story, though a plenitude of incident, a conclusion could come at any time. Sufficient unto a day is the diary thereof. Suddenly, Lupin's wedding day was upon them; Mr Perkupp thawed and promoted Charlie; Carrie was delivered of a Wenham Lake Ice Safe, her pride and joy, her grail. While Judi and Mike performed amongst the tables and chairs, there had been activity on the margins. A stage manager and her deputy had been loading Sarah ('my maid') with her trays. Instead of a single tray, with a variety of meals and bottles standing by, there were a dozen identical trays, each with objects for a requisite scene already on board. Plus, arrayed like the impossible kitchens of television cooks, ranks of implements for Carrie: her custard bowl and whisk, apron, spoons, menu cards.

Sound effects were provided by Ned, who especially enjoyed being the trains chuffing past the windows; he also whistled and hooted for bells and clocks; for the fireworks he nearly shot his teeth out. If ever actor or actress mangled words or looked lost, Ned would chant the prompt. Few phrases, in fact, were muffed or mumbled. When a mistake was made, however, Judi grimaced as if gripped with a seizure; when offstage, Mike frantically leafed through his script. Julia Trevelyan Oman roamed the hall, adjusting and scrutinizing, her eye alert for anachronism, presumably, or a prize whippet. Gary Fairhall, who was to make two fleeting appearances as a factotum, spent most of the day boiling water in an urn. We who were watching chain-drank coffee. 'What do you think of Gary's appearing?' I'd been asked. 'It's very sensitive. We think it spoils the illusion of our acting to other invisible people.'

During the later afternoon, an emissary from Michael Redington, the producer, licked and counted out wads of twenties; these were distributed in buff envelopes. I alone went home empty-handed. Also during the late afternoon: the director's notes: 'During the dreadful pun about the sashcords, Mike, when do you think Mr Pooter would realize he's made a joke? How about if he is blank for a moment, then his wit dawns?'

Michael tried this, and it released the humour over and above the trite word-play of 'I'm afraid they're frayed.' (Pooter's tearful wheezing at his own aphorisms was to grow.)

'Those silk programmes from the Tank Theatre, you've got them, Judi?'

'I've got them. I'll flash them. ' A dirty chuckle.

Discussion next turned to Pooter's topper, how to bring it on and off, before the ball.

'The hat hasn't been used at this point,' said Mike, indicating the toilet for the ball.

'On the stage,' said Ned, 'it is going to look like an extra special occasion when you reveal it specially for the Mansion House. Bring it out with ceremony.'

'Flash it, Mike.'

'Perhaps he would find it under the table?'

Michael produced the headgear and, in character, spoke the lines covering the moment when Pooter paints the hat black.

'Let him paint it absentmindedly; painting unlikely objects is his hobby (the bath, books, sticks, flower pots - all crimson); he could be deeply absorbed, almost like a sleepwalker, and he'd simultaneously neatly put down a newspaper. Pooter is a neat, fussy, man. Then he'd do a double- take, looking at the hat, all glossy.'

That was me speaking. I listened with incredulity to myself, like a drunk mesmerized by his own rebellious limbs. I've never directed a play in my life; here I was directing Michael Williams and Judi Dench. Instead of giving me a cold stare, or throwing me out for presumption, Ned and his actors made out they were delighted to give my suggestion a try. With some modifications, the sequence was included.

Next they had to make fluid Carrie's departure for Sutton. 'What I must remember,' said Judi, 'is to put my diary away carefully. Could I have a ribbon to mark the page? When I return, and when I'm inspecting the house, I'll check that my diary is untouched.'

She muttered this to herself whilst pacing out the movements. They then worked on attitudes to Lupin, and his change of name from Willie. 'I keep drying on "No sign of Willie", have you noticed that? My favourite line, and I can't get it correct.'

'One hundred miles from London, and no sign of Dick, , said Ned.

'Come, come, sweet pussy,' added Mike. A ribald triolet.

Judi started to giggle when she attempted the lines again, and said Loopy instead of Lupin.

Carrie begins her recital of illustrious forbears: 'It is a proud and distinguished name, and one that goes back into the myths of history. The Berkshire Lupins (as my branch is) have graves in Reading and district ...' How could this be enlivened? It was in danger of being dull. Motives came easily.

'You see,' said Mike, 'I'm not too keen that he's changed his name.'

'And I'm very excited about it.'

They ran it again, Carrie tensing with relish, Charlie simulating falling into glumness - falling, in fact, asleep so that Carrie has to prompt him with "August 6th " and he jolts awake for his cue. A longueur had been made winning.

'There'll be lighting changes to mark more clearly the altering days,' explained Ned.

We gathered for a final time before the Wenham Lake Ice Safe, to experiment with fake champagne cork bangs. This seemed to be the pianist's skill. Gas was pumped in the empty bottle. After much adjusting, the cork popped with the tiniest sneeze. 'Well,' said Mike, philosophic, 'if it goes off, we'll yell whoosh!; if it doesn't, we'll get a laugh for flatulence.'

Tea was taken at the Pooters' trestle.

'Our house in Hampstead has been completely rebuilt. The builders were putting up wallpaper on the ceiling, and it fell in. The carpets were completely ruined. The builders have been making good since May 1985, and they are still not finished.'

'Fin's school, , said Michael, 'is opposite where Lillie Langtry lived.'

'Michael recently bought himself a motor tractor.'

'It broke down.'

'Do you know, he had a face like a wet weekend.'

'I must be off to Broadcasting House now,' said Ned, undecided, as I was, as to the extent Carrie and Charlie had started to usurp Judi and Mike's conversation.

'Can we share a taxi? We need to go to Sloane Square?'

'You know what that means,' said Michael, with forbearance, 'shopping, shopping.'

Why is Judi Dench the finest actress in England? Consider the compe- tition. Glenda Jackson, despite her fame for A Touch of Class and for her being an occasional co-star with the lugubrious Matthau (House Calls, Hopscotch), rushing in as a female Jack Lemmon, has little sense of comedy. She appears dour and serious; a martinet Elizabeth R, a self- lacerating Gudrun Brangwen. Glenda Jackson's laugh is sardonic; she's independent and beetle-browed, having an overmatter of bile in roles not quite demanding extensive rancour. A tragedian miscast in drollery, with Morecambe and Wise she looked like a headmistress in the end-of-year romp with a pair of naughty boys. She's an actress of much power - but she's disdainfully holding back, as though acting isn't entirely earnest.

Then there's Maggie Smith. She's been content to add her talent to poor comedies and international Agatha Christie murder mysteries. She presents us with caricatures of the diaphanous, dithery, willowy English eccentric: The Missionary, A Private Function, California Suite, A Room with a View. And her audience does not want her to stop playing the imposs- ible nanny goat. Her screen people are what some men like women to be - fussy, flighty, stately, a hint of androgyny, comportment for clothes and cosmetics.

What, therefore, makes Judi Dench different? She is free of the self- intentness of Glenda Jackson and of the high camp of Maggie Smith's acting. She bumbles like a diligent mother-rabbit (which she once played) and if there is a key to her acting, it may be her magnanimity. Her compassion is not scowling and political, like Glenda Jackson; her disinterest is not capricious, like Maggie Smith. Instead, in her performances she is alert to the moods and needs of those in whose company she finds herself. She likes to gauge and adapt to gatherings -and thus hates big, empty-hearted parties, preferring cosy cabals, where she can be humorous and assertive. Her ideal unit is the family. The actress's temperament is to appraise immediate company and snuggle to fit in; she imagines the sensitivity of a role and invests fictional character with psychological grain- so that Judi Dench's Carrie Pooter is alert to environment, as Judi Dench would be herself, in similar circumstances. And because the play in which Carrie appears, and Judi acts, constitutes these similar circumstances, act and actress merge.

This is what people mean when they talk of Judi Dench's humanity: it's her ability to close the gap between self and part. Thus, Mother Courage and Her Children was an interesting experiment. The selfish, profiteering, cunning old vixen would seem alien to the actress's nature. She was attired in an orange fright wig and a capacious great coat - a raddled she- cat, vigilant in her defence of her children -and this is how Judi Dench salvaged the part: Courage came to exist as a proud matriarch, ennobled as her family's exterminated; managing to be feminine against the odds, and in spite of herself (like her mute daughter Katrin - a rag-doll performance from Zoe Wanamaker - who drums as stubbornly as her mother pushes the cart). The cart was an elaborate caravan locked on rails and pivots, set up in a revolving clockwork stage -like an eternal machine. A baroque bassinet! A crazily over-burdened perambulator! Judi Dench's Mother Courage was an Earth Mother for the iron-age future.

Design was by John Napier, the designer of Cats. Photographs exist of Judi Dench in make-up and costume as Grizabella the Glamour Cat - the gin-sipper tart, who becomes the Jellicle candidate for ailurophilic ascension. She sings the sleazy 'Memory', the words derived by Trevor Nunn and Andrew Lloyd Webber from Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night'.

Grizabella, sad and slummy, was not included in the original Old Possum collection; Eliot thought her too melancholic for a nursery audience. The fragments containing her were kindly exhibited to the lyricists by the poet's widow, Valerie. Grizabella, in fact, is Eliot's Beatrice, Rose la Touche, Alice, Dulcinea del Toboso, Molly Bloom; his White Goddess and Muse. In The Cocktail Party she's Celia Coplestone, who is martyred in Kinkanja; in Cats, Grizabella is borne aloft from the Jellicle Ball {'Up, up, up to the Heaviside Layer, up, up, past the Russell Hotel'), to a nirvana of auto-tyres.

The Waste Land contains Grizabella in many manifestations: Marie the foreign aristo, reading at night, going south in the winter; the wet-haired hyacinth girl; Isolde; Madame Sosostris; Cleopatra; Philomel; the nervous lady; the East Enders, Lil, Lou and May; the hermaphroditic Tiresias; the secretary, seeing off her hopeless lover, putting a record on the gramophone; Elizabeth Ion the Thames; the Rhinemaidens; Kundry. Unfortunately, Judi Dench injured her leg in a dance rehearsal soon before the opening; Grizabella had to be played by Elaine Paige, who made off with the show. Imagine what the actress originally cast would've done with it. A mood like Deborah's in Pinter's A Kind of Alaska - a girl who fell into a three-decade coma, and who awakes as a sixteen-year-old inside an old body; a young, haunted voice in an aged carcass. Or Sally Bowles in Cabaret, the flapper past her prime.

Elaine Paige's cat was mournful, but shrill (Evita raised from the dead); Judi Dench's would have been mournful, but knowing. The photograph shows the Dench face peering through a tangle of mangy fur, coils of curl and drooping whiskers - like an extravagant rococco hairdo several years beyond its best and full of vermin; a ruined-castle plumage, flanked by big black bows. The mouth is slightly pursed, with a smudge of palest gloss; the nose, gently snub; and the eyes: Judi Dench has eyes of a cat most times, here they are twin comets coming into a symmetrical land; the eyebrows, attendant trails. Beneath, the mascara has smeared into watery puddles, as if formed by tears. A cat: daring and resilient, fissile and enigmatic, steel inside softness - Judi Dench is one of our most prankish, feline of actresses. To switch the gender of My Cat Jeoffry by Christopher Smart -

In Saigon, Year of the Cat Judi Dench was an erotic missy, watching the world end. She played Barbara Dean, an English employee at a Vietnamese bank. She witnesses the twilight of the gods: the ignominious American retreat. Parrying the attention of would-be suitors (one, a young Scot, played by Roger Rees), Barbara is willingly bedded by a dashing US Embassy official, Bob Chesneau (Frederic Forrest) - who dislikes too much closeness ('Why do you behave as if I'm your wife'). They fiddle whilst Saigon burns. The actress was sensual and sexy: the spinster attracted to the exoticism of the East, only to see it disintegrate, and half-enjoying the literal decadence - whilst masterminding exit visas and tickets for her native friends. In Vietnam, she's vital and accomplished; lifting-off in the helicopters, during the panic of the final days, however, she visibly settles into middle age; Bournemouth ('You feel watched, disapproved of all the time') is already casting its long shadow.

Barbara is destined for premature retirement, indolent fat-cattery. Judi Dench's Mother Courage, by contrast, was always the cheroot-chewing tom, a cat scavenging on a rubbish dump, living off the detritus of battlefields. With that cart of hers, packed with gypsy junk, she's a carrion cat hard-hearted and terse. She'd enter Saigon as the Americans are fleeing it. Judi Dench's performance was the more moving for not giving way to the sentimental (which underpins all Brecht like a foun- dation of marshmallow); the performance was the more moving for presenting an apparently unmotherly mother raucous-voiced and foul- mouthed. As her children are picked off, instead of making mute appeals to the audience, this Mother Courage turned away from us, hunched, sagging into her coat, slouching back to her caravan - pinioned on a giant dial. The woman was crushed by the inevitability of fate, yet determined to outface it. 'Sometimes I see myself pulling my cart through hell, selling brimstone. Or through heaven handing out food to the hungry. If I could find a place where there's no shooting, I'd like a couple of quiet years with the children. What's left of them.'

Thwarted maternalism has provoked many Judi Dench performances, right back to her comely, bosomy Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, opposite Ian Richardson's Oberon, wanting to mother the little Indian boy; or the vehement nurse on the cancer ward in Going Gently, whose professionalism was a means of keeping a hopeless sympathy for the hopeless patients at bay. Like Mother Courage, Sister Scarli implied deep feeling by suppressing feelings: they flowed into the slouch in Brecht; in the Stephen Frears television film, they flowed into her thorough bed- making, the emphatic nipping and tucking of sheets. And her Lady Macbeth, hair bound by a black turban, was likewise unexpectedly perfervid. Passionate, and boxed in with herself at Cawdor, a husband's ambition has taken the place of raising a child in her life. She was a Mistress Page or Ford for whom any milk of human kindness has soured into evil; a dynamic provincial hausfrau, with Fife for Windsor .

Best of all, regarding mothers and children, there's a film from 1965, He Who Rides a Tiger, directed by Charles Crichton. Shot in a watery black and white, within the pale and moody London vistas, set to period maraca plonks by Alexander Farris, and punctuated with police cars with bells for sirens, Judi Dench, headscarfed and busy, plays a teacher at a Dr Barnado's Home. Into her modest and selfless life comes a charming cat burglar (Tom Bell), who finds her goodness a refuge from his violent life.

They meet when Tom Bell tries to save a fox from an iron trap - and in Judi Dench he's found the cunning little vixen. Foxes and cats are the theme: the clambering and the thievery; also, on the walls of Judi Dench's flat there are pictures of cats. When Tom Bell's attention gets too lavish, she snaps, 'What do you think I am? Another vixen caught in a trap, waiting to be rescued?' She's a single parent, with an illegitimate child, and 'It's more important for me to find a father for Dan, than a lover for myself. 'In her independence Tom Bell quite meets his match; they are both bright survivors, whom by now new experiences will not much change. Tom Bell, despite flooding the orphanage with gifts and toys, keeps going back to a night of crime; and Judi Dench is tied to her own destiny: giving herself to dozens of dependants. Hence the title, he (and she) who rides a tiger 'can never dismount'.

What's so good about Joanne in He Who Rides a Tiger is the character's avoidance of sentimentality. The part could've been a Julie Andrews clone - and The Sound of Music came out the same year. But Judi Dench was convincingly careworn, and Mrs Boyle, in Juno and the Paycock, was an older careworn matriarch ('I killin meself workin', an' he sthruttin' about from mornin' till night like a paycock!'), apportioning time and affection between a live daughter and a dead son. Lady Bracknell, in The Importance of Being Earnest, was presented much younger than the dowager of tradition. Judi Dench's termagant actually flirted with John Worthing; she was still in the sexual game. Auden once called the play a verbal opera: 'The greatest composer on earth could have nothing to add to it. ' As directed by Peter Hall, it was a Da Ponte libretto, a Mozart chamber piece, with Judi Dench the coloratura Queen of the Night - the wronged mother - whose aphorisms were her protection ('You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our daughter ... to marry into a cloakroom, and form an alliance with a parcel'), like the barbs of Beatrice, who was played at Stratford opposite Donald Sinden's Benedick in 1976 as a lonesome, penurious cousin; Beatrice survived as Laura in A Fine Romance.

A fine romance was the subject of Michael Frayn's Make and Break, in which Judi Dench played Mrs Rogers, an unregarded secretary-bird, topping up drinks and scrubbing ashtrays for delegates at a trade fair for fire-resistant softwood laminates. Talked about in the third person by facetious businessmen, she becomes girlishly animated when suddenly noticed by the galvanic Mr Garrard - Robert Hardy, stomping and snapping like Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Siegfried Farnon. 'He's lost. He's like a lost little child,' croons Mrs Rogers, her hopes springing maternal.

And having been pulled from the edge of the drama to its centre, she was given speeches extolling a sweet philosophy of goodness and mindless solace - typing, washing-up, waiting. Monotony, repetition, is her gate to happiness - and other characters variously define their own contentments as religion, music, children or work. But Mrs Roger's avowed Buddhism is really a reflex of an aching loneliness - she's 'one of the lonely ones', ditched by her husband. 'They all leave us, don't they, the ones we depend on ...'. As a consequence, she allows herself to be nurtured on disappointment and promise of rejection. Judi Dench became a woman whose boiling-point is reduced to about zero.

But it was the television play, On Giant's Shoulders, which demonstrated Judi Dench's capacity for an aching benevolence, bounty and resolve. Terry Wiles, a thalidomide child, played himself in a drama of his adoption. The boy was abandoned at birth by his mother, and languished in a hospital until visited, and eventually taken out, by kindly Len (Bryan Pringle). Judi Dench was Hazel, Len's wife. Initially she is aghast at illness and disease. 'A thalidomide child isn't a pretty sight,' she's told.

Again, Judi Dench banished a cloying tone - even managing to keep the scene where Terry writes his heartfelt note. ('I love you, Mummy') from toppling into a sob. Hazel ran outside and blinked her tears away, staring at the bleak Peterborough landscape until it calmed her. Her Hazel was a stout, dowdy moll, prone to temper, who slowly, and with the smallest evidence of reluctance, exchanged her hostility towards the boy ('I'm not having him in the house taking over, because he would') with hostility towards those who wouldn't accept him. Len, meantime, devotes his life and savings to the invention of electric wheelchairs and contraptions; he makes an elaborate dodgem and artificial legs: 'He's a human being,' erupts Hazel after a failed experiment, 'not a machine.'

Len and Hazel are very poor; they have no children of their own. Terry's forthrightness has suddenly made them forthright - they want to legally adopt, for the three of them have grown very close, saving one another from lives of self-pity. When the social worker pays a call, however, it transpires Hazel has had a foggy private history: her father, she thinks, worked on the fairgrounds; she's had several previous husbands, and her own two children have been taken from her by the authorities, who thought her unfit for motherhood.

Hazel, a bit of a slattern, with her thick navy woollies, mousy hair and ill-fitting plastic specs; a more ordinary woman you couldn't expect ever to meet - she was portrayed by Judi Dench, however, as one of the most extraordinary women you could expect ever to meet. And this was achieved without over-balancing the part. The actress had disclosed Hazel's humanity, her inner resource, her coming to terms with exasperation.

Barbara Jackson, in Pack of Lies, doesn't come to terms with exasperation: it kills her. Judi Dench became a woman of small emotional range forced into unbidden heroics. The play switched the glamour of spy-rings (James Bond's thrilling travelogues, le Carre's Expressionist mode, Philby, Burgess and Maclean in their Pall Mall Clubs) for a world crushingly dull. Hugh Whitemore's drama deals with intrigue - but in a Ruislip suburban semi, rather than a Jacobean palace or Russian steppe. Bob and Barbara Jackson are Mr and Mrs Nobody ('the sort of people who stand in queues and don't answer back') - and Bob was played by Michael Williams - whose lives are invaded by the Secret Service. Agents commandeer an upstairs bedroom to spy across the street at Helen and Peter Kroger - who happen to be Bob and Barbara's best friends. 'Was it all a lie,' asked Judi Dench's character at the end, '. ..was it?' Neighbourliness and compatibility are revealed as counterfeit.

The Krogers's past, on which intimacy and openness was founded, was make-believe - so the Jacksons are multiply betrayed. 'I trusted Helen. I thought she was brash and noisy and sometimes a bit silly ... but I trusted her.' The Krogers have betrayed their country, transmitting news about sonar buoys to Moscow; the Jacksons have to betray the Krogers, by not disclosing the surveillance - and they also have to keep their child, Julia, in ignorance of MI5's real attention: 'Helen may have lied to us,' Barbara tells Stewart, the MI5 officer, 'but you've gone one better. You made us do the lying; we've even lied to our own daughter. ' MI5 itself betrays the Jacksons, by usurping their home, taking over their private lives: 'I wouldn't mind so much,' says Barbara, 'if you had told us the truth in the first place; you must have known it would be more than a couple of days ...' Layers and layers of mendacity are revealed.

The Jacksons are pulled into an extraordinary adventure, and yearn for their lost normal routine. Unlike the great folk-hero conspirators, they hate having to perform -the theatre of espionage sickens them (Barbara, on seeing Helen, is made to 'feel quite ill'), and Bob is the emollient Pooter, trapped by the game, knowing he's powerless. Michael Williams, compressed into a cardigan, was the meek suburbanite, shy and decent, whose conversation and pleasures interweave with those of his worrying spouse - a man for whom tragedy meant the car breaking down, a hole in his sock; a man who knows the authorities have made up their minds, so why dissent? A laconic Leopold Bloom.

Barbara, like Carrie Pooter, is goaded into a banal eloquence by the discomfort of strangers in her home, making themselves tea and pouring milk straight from the bottle. For her, Kim's 'game' is black magic, corrupting all who are involved ('Helen's lying and we're lying - we're all playing the same rotten game'). Deception does not invigorate; it's a fatal decadence, rendering rotten the blissful chores of dusting, washing, ironing, polishing, cooking. Having to act breaks her spirit. '... all the deceit and lies and ... I was so angry, so hurt - I was so hurt ...' Love, friendship, loyalty, the sanctuary of the family, are trespassed against. Acting is treachery.

Barbara Jackson is duplicated as Nora Doel in 84 Charing Cross Road - the screen adaptation of Helene Hanffs epistolary novel being by Hugh Whitemore who, as in Pack of Lies, was interested in American imperti- nence encroaching upon British reserve, with Helene for Helen, Frank's love of books for Barbara's painting. But the duplication is more than an author's theme: it's an accident of crossed destiny. In Hanffs The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, the sequel to 84 Charing Cross Road, we read: 'The closest friends Frank and Nora had for ten years were a book dealer named Peter Kroger and his wife ... The Doels and Krogers were inseparable. ' Nora and Frank went to the trial,' and discovered that everything the Krogers had told them about their past lives had been invented ... "They were the best friends we ever had, they were fine people, lovely people," , said Nora. The antiquarian books were used as receptacles for smuggling secrets to fictitious customers in Eastern Eur- ope, and it's as though Pack of Lies explores the home-keeping recesses Frank Doel - alludes to in 84 Charing Cross Road; the doilble-agent narrative replaced with chivalric love letters.

In the film, as Nora, Judi Dench has a vestige of an Irish accent, like Molly Bloom or Nora Barnacle; she wears a blondish wig of unkempt locks and has a tiny bit too much make-up - a post-war luxury, but suggesting a low-key exoticism. We see her age into a weary widow. She tries her best to amuse her self-involved husband (Anthony Hopkins), who even when erecting the Christmas tree with the children seems elsewhere, preoccupied. It's a passionless marriage thick with civilities and placid politeness. Meals, twenty years apart, are identical; accompanying chat, equally empty. 'Very nice, very tasty.' Nora and Frank tick along, Frank's amorous energy going into his transatlantic mail with Helene - so it's like Nora's almost being cheated on. Helene is Frank's ideal and absent love.

As Barbara, the deceived matron; as Nora, the emotionally skimped wife, Judi Dench brought an epic amplitude to the domestically miniature. (A Ruislip Demeter, goddess of the hearth, made to be Minerva, goddess of war; Irish Nora, a neglected Venus, turning into the pining Penelope.) But it's more than any technique, this calibre of acting. Making the ordinary extraordinary - Mann's bliss of the commonplace - is this actress's special genius; faith in little things, the diffusion of simplicity: she forges in the smithy of her own soul the uncreated conscience of her characters -to vary a phrase from James Joyce. She accommodates the very best feelings of the heart. She is our Joycean marinade - and even possesses areal half-lrish ancestry. Mkgnoa! Mrkgnao! Mrkrgnao!

Having attended the rehearsal for Mr and Mrs Nobody, I was eager to view the finished production at the Garrick Theatre. I called beforehand, with my wife, at Dressing Room One, situated far underground, like Churchill's war bunker. We were received effusively by the star in her modest cell. A noticeboard flanked by curtains pretended to conceal a non- existent window. John Mortimer once pointed out that there is an affinity between actors and prisoners: both live by artificial light. The notice- board was pinned with good luck cards - several, suggesting some private joke, being of gorillas.

Talk, Anna's bump looming large, was of babies.

'You might be getting tired now and again, feeling as though the baby is here already; but as soon as it's born, your time will never quite be your own again. I told Roger before, when I first had Finty I was forever calling my actress friends who were mothers and begging for advice.'

Judi Dench was beginning her make-up for the matinee; a madonna at her elaborate toilette. I got up to go, thinking these moments of cosmetic preparation private: the mystical assumption of robes and hairpiece; a priestess getting ready to sacrifice the oxen of the sun.

'No, you both stay, , she said, unrolling her stockings down a calf and massaging her feet.

First, she wet her hair and scooped it back with a large white band. Next, the actress wound a crepe bandage around her head as if for terrible surgery. Taking a tube, she squeezed orange goo onto a small sponge and smeared it allover her face - so that she looked like the 'before' picture of a fashion feature on wrinkle eradication. To have razored a cucumber and popped the discs on her eyes would have completed the effect. The orange goo hardened to suggest, at close quarters, jaundice; from the auditorium alone would the complexion look healthful. Next, the eyelids were shaded and the lips dabbed, with a purple stick. Some powder to the cheeks - and even from the far side of the small den, transubstantiation was apparent: a bubbly, bouncy woman had become a fine-featured lady. Her face and carriage had started to act.

During the face-painting ceremonial, mammiferous Dame Judi kept up a stream of advice on breast-feeding. She and Anna exchanged tips about parts of life menfolk never fathom; the Darwinian adventures of the body during pregnancy, its eruptions and rebellions.

'I acted until six months gone, which wasn't quite right for the part I was playing. You are in charge of yourself now. Soon all sorts of demands will be made. I remember bursting into tears. We were going out for dinner, and I was giving Finty her feed first. And she just wouldn't be quick enough.'

'Apparently,' said Anna, who'd been researching ante- and post-natal adventures since the day the Predictor fluid went black, 'if you are flustered, the milk won't pump.'

'It's psychological, breast-feeding.'

At this juncture I handed over a Phiz cartoon, from an. 1850's Punch, a coloured etching of a grand party. The actress requisitioned every appearance of tender gratitude and placed the picture on the overmantel. 'It's that dreadful party! There's Mr Perkupp! There's Daisy! There's Mr Gowing!'. Then she picked it up again and ran to fetch Michael. He came in, with half a beard.

'Ah, how are you, old fellow, ' he said, Charlie greeting Lupin; and a slight bow to Anna.

They have separate dressing rooms. Judi's contains a divan. There is a connecting door, or maybe it is the jakes. Annie Hoey, runner-up of regal trews, bore in the dress for Scene One; also a wig on a polystyrene stand: sharp centre parting, dragged into plaits, woven into a bob. Judi began fixing on bangles and rings.

'Are you going to be in today? Well, we shall do it for you. Where are you sitting? Okay. Look out!'

She went back to Michael's room.

'Michael, we shall do it for them!'

Coming back, she said, probably satirically, 'I mean, you are part of the production. You were the first to see the run-through.'

'I want a penny a night for my hat and newpaper idea.'

'Of course! I'm behind the scenery at that point, but when I come back on I'll point to it.'

Julia Trevelyan Oman's set arose like an archaeological exhibit: a full facade of Brickfield Terrace, with coloured paper stuck on the windows, pretending to be mullion stained glass. For the introductory voice-overs, Charlie and Carrie came to peer through the casements. Then, up flew the exterior of the house (showing the second story, where the musicians were situated in silhouette, and a frame for the front door); and the Pooter's palace came forward on the truck. There were the ornaments and paraphernalia I remembered from the Chelsea Church Hall, plus a ton of additional gewgaws and gimcrackery.

The swooping-into-view of this fussy museum won applause. But I thought, what with the walls (muddy varnish and deep ochre striped paper) and curtains (orange and black squares with tassels) now added, the effect was oppressive - Nora Helmer's Doll's House rather than Carrie Pooter's Wendy house. Antimacassars; open fans on the wallpaper; heavy framed prints hung on chains; plaster vases; the moose head; every item slurped with lacquer and lit with brown and beige light: the comedy could be in danger of stifling.

Charlie wore a fusty frock coat and elaborate stock-tie; and he had big whiskers. Carrie was tight in the skirts and petticoats of the I88os; she was an armoury of corsets and pins. The painstaking realism made it hard to adjust to the artificiality of the narrative form - the acting to invisible people, and the contention that neither character could hear the other recite. In the hurly-burly of the rehearsal, such devices and expectations didn't matter; it was so obviously make-believe, people acting. On the West End stage, however, the naturalistic design meant us to overlook our knowledge of a performance; the conjunction of a V& A set and stylized action jarred; especially at first.

Thus, laughs were slow; and when not slow, too dutiful. Lines and nuances which warmed with their guile at rehearsal were passing by, flat. The actor and actress began to push themselves harder, overdoing, slightly, the quick collusive glances at the audience - which got titters of compliance. Judi Dench knew this, for she suddenly withdrew the trick. Charlie's wheezing at his own jokes got a laugh the first time around; a small guffaw the second time around; silence the third time around; after that, bigger and bigger laughs, as the audience responded to a running gag of the production. Several scenes (the lumpy blancmange mixture; the steam from the trains; the Pooter's falling over when dancing) went by stonily. The lighting changes, which Ned Sherrin had promised would make clear the calendar, had the effect of breaking up the play into a series of small revue sketches; and as the scenes are all variations on a theme, the play seemed much too long. By speeding up the pace, the purview of the production had bagged out.

But to imply Mr and Mrs Nobody had diminished in its perceptual faculties would be false; the jokes were failing, but the marital comedy of manners was intact -indeed, they'd grown more subtle. Charlie had become more despondent, his dignity more fastidious - and he was completely oblivious to the irony of his gentility. (Promoted to Head Clerk, for instance, he thought, as did Carrie, he'd been Head Clerk for twenty-five years.) Carrie's caressing of brand names and dreams of gadgetry had become fluent and reverential. (In rehearsal Judi Dench occasionally stumbled on the catalogues and vast menus. ) Her detective- work about Daisy Mutlar had grown into a satisfied purr of information: a proficient spy debriefing.

Both husband and wife were fastened in a drama of social advancement. Charlie talked to the audience; Carrie connived with it, teasing her husband, yet living in his universe. We were their confidants, especially over Lupin. The Pooters's only son, a clerk and amateur actor for whom they hold out such hopes, was the invisible presence of rehearsal; a blank space, like the giant bunny Harvey. When he spoke, Charlie did an impersonation - and it did work more satisfactorily in the Chelsea church hall. Michael Williams, made up as a middle-aged Charlie, couldn't be anyone other than middle-aged Charlie. (The same problem occurred when Judi Dench was briefly Mrs Birrell. ) But actor and actress had perfected their ability to present the unspoken secret signals between a husband and a wife - signals indicative of worry and sympathy: their thoughts about wayward Lupin registered his existence. Lupin was not on stage but the effect Lupin had on his parents made Lupin loom. Only when made to speak did he disappear.

The aftermath of the Mansion House Ball, which they'd looked for- ward to so much, and which turned into a catastrophe, was played with rich feeling: Charlie's anger really an anger with himself; Carrie's tending to pettishness. The separation, when she goes to Annie Fullers's (now Mrs James of Sutton) froze laughter. Judi, fleetingly, had become a Holloway Juno: quick, capable, tried. Mr and Mrs Nobody took its place in the actress's best work: a woman coping as a wife, as a mother. Carrie's reward for fortitude? Charlie buys her a Wenham Lake Ice Safe.

How would the much-regarded object appear? A 'deus ex machina' from the flies? From a trapdoor? Gary Fairhall wheeled a small cupboard on, no bigger than a varnished hutch. The authentic object, so proudly demonstrated at rehearsal, had had to be jettisoned as too heavy, too cumbersome. So a mock-up deputized. The genuine was defective; the representation was preferred over the real thing.....

Thanks to Christie Reimschussel for sending me Stage People, by Roger Lewis (1989) a book from which this excerpt was taken.

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