Judi Dench opens up about every Shakespearean role she has played throughout her seven-decade career, from Lady Macbeth and Titania to Ophelia and Cleopatra. In a series of intimate conversations with actor & director Brendan O'Hea, she guides us through Shakespeare's plays, revealing the secrets of her rehearsal process and inviting us to share in her triumphs, disasters, and backstage shenanigans.
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.
