Part intimate memoir, part insightful commentary, the book shows how the Dame and the Bard make a winning combination ... This book could have been a cross between a starchy academic study and a meandering trawl through Dench’s past glories. Instead, it is a delight, at once lively, captivating and informative.
Mischievous and convivial, Dench delights in sending up O’Hea whenever his questions become too probing or pretentious ... Dench is famous for her reluctance to pontificate on the mechanics of her craft, preferring to work from instinct; yet it is precisely this quality that saves the book from becoming too dense and academic ... it’s a mark of Dench’s impish genius and O’Hea’s deftness that it genuinely feels like you’re sitting at her kitchen table with her. It’s companionable and compelling.
[Dench's] passion for Shakespeare shines through every conversation reproduced here ... Transcripts can run the risk of feeling somewhat dead on the page, but Shakespeare is saved from that fate, partly by skilful editing, so that the teasing, sparring and mischief that characterised Dench’s side of the conversation is faithfully reproduced here... but largely because her voice is so distinctive and familiar that you can hear it in your head ... A gloriously entertaining tour through the canon in the company of perhaps the most experienced living Shakespearean actor; reading it feels like a chat with an old friend.
An enchantment of a book ... Everything Dench utters comes with expert technical knowledge ... This is one of the wisest books about Shakespeare, and it has all the more emotional depth for the fact that it is grounded in a lifetime’s experience and is full of rich anecdotes.
[Dench's] love of the text on a line level and her knowledge of the characters is to the fore ... These transcripts could have been finessed into a long-form narrative of Dench’s life and career, but O’Hea’s decision to keep the direct interview style allows Dench’s voice and sensibility to prevail. It also results in a surprisingly pacy read. Between back-stage anecdotes, celebrity cameos, extracts of the text and Dench’s insightful analysis, the whole thing zips along.
Serious and thoughtful without being stuffy, this work shows Dench’s terrific sense of fun as she relates hilarious anecdotes that will make readers laugh out loud.
This is an enchantment of a book. It reflects the considered views of Judi Dench, a great actress now in her ninth decade, nearly blind, who has a photographic memory of her life performing the plays of Shakespeare. Her interlocutor in these conversations is Brendan O’Hea of London’s Globe Theatre and the effect is ravishingly sane and deep and wise ... This is one of the wisest books about Shakespeare, and it has all the more emotional depth for the fact that it is grounded in a lifetime’s experience and is full of rich anecdotes ... If you want to turn a child onto Shakespeare give them this book. And if you want to revisit the great Shakespeare you have seen or heard or read, buy it for yourself. It is full of romance and ribaldry and a deep sense of how the spirit of play can touch on the mystery of what Shakespeare gives us.
...this is a perceptive yet light-hearted read, suffused with Dench’s trademark twinkly-eyed humor. The format is clean and simple, a chapter-by-chapter question and answer trail through Dench’s interactions with the Shakespearean canon at so many of the country’s leading theatres. O’Hea asks something and off Dench goes with her insights and recollections, taking the work (mostly) seriously and herself not at all. Her enduring lifelong love of these plays, their humanity and universality, is unmistakable, but this is a refreshingly honest and unacademic take ... Dench’s scene-by-scene analysis of many works is sharp and her memory for seemingly inconsequential fragments, of line reading or costume, laser-like. Whether any but the most devoted acting student will want to be escorted through the minutiae of lesser-known dramas such as Coriolanus is up for debate, but there is much of general interest in her in-depth looks at Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.
[Dench's] memory is razor-sharp and her knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays is encyclopedic ... Dench’s memoir of the roles she has loved is a witty, thoroughly entertaining romp through the Shakespearean world.
Exuberant ... Of particular value are Dench’s lucid insights on her craft ... The breezy discussions make up in energy and passion for what they lack in rigor. It’s a refreshingly loose exploration of the Bard’s oeuvre.
