Dench as aging actress Esme Allen defends the theater with fire and wit against her daughter Amy’s lover, a trendy postmodern critic and filmmaker, who scorns theater as a dead duck. But Dench herself has had her moments of doubt. She recalls opening night of Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” with Anthony Hopkins in 1987. “Before we went on, I said, ‘Tony, people are dying and being born at this moment, and all we’re doing is pretending.’ But through the pretense, you have to cling to the reason you’re doing it. I want to make people angry or happy, make them think about something they haven’t thought of.”
Cleopatra was one of the triumphs of her four-decade career. “When [director] Peter Hall asked me to do it, I said, ‘Are you sure you want Cleopatra played by a menopausal dwarf?’ " Dench, 65, has a presence beyond her 5 feet 2 inches, with her cat-tilted eyes and sexy raspy voice. And no actress of our time has a greater range. It goes from Brecht’s “Mother Courage” to Lady Macbeth, to Shaw’s “Major Barbara,” to O’Casey’s “Juno and the Paycock.” That sexy rasp cracked open into song as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret” and sent in the clowns in Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music.” She’s won awards for her movie work in “A Room With a View” and “Mrs. Brown,” in which her Victoria captured the suppressed sensuality in the widowed monarch’s relationship with a Scottish servant. In Franco Zeffirelli’s upcoming “Tea With Mussolini,” she, Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright are the “Scorpions,” dotty British ladies creating a Little England in prewar Fascist Italy. And in her third Bond movie this fall, “The World Is Not Enough,” she’s again spy boss M, doing her own helicopter stunt, taking no macho malarkey from 007.
But Dench remains a pure theater animal. She turned down a play at the Royal National Theatre this season, telling director Trevor Nunn, “Can’t you offer me something more frightening?” The moving final scene of “Amy’s View,” in which Esme faces an invisible audience, symbolizes Dench’s calling. “You have to listen acutely to every single person in that theater,” she says. “And tonight I can do something better than last night. If I’m clever.” Dench takes clever to a transcendent level. Her impassioned intelligence galvanizes the life in that embattled phrase, the live theater.
