Roger Michell (2018)

It was only after we’d watched Nothing Like a Dame on BBC2 that I discovered Roger Michell’s documentary had had a limited release in cinemas a few weeks previously.  Not sure why:  this formally unambitious piece – four talking heads plus a good collection of illustrative archive footage – seems perfectly designed for television.  A quartet of acting dames – Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith (alphabetical order) – chat and reminisce about their lives and work.  They express firm views on how to read and not to read Shakespearean verse.  They talk about their late or former husbands.  Michell filmed the interviews over the course of two days at Plowright’s West Sussex home:  the nostalgic texture is enriched by this being the place where she and Laurence Olivier lived for many years.   It makes both practical and a kind of emotional sense that Plowright hosts the event.  At eighty-eight, she’s the best part of five years older than the other three (all born in 1934) and nearly blind.  She also retains a strong, matriarchal quality.

In other ways, Plowright is not – for this viewer anyway – the senior figure at the gathering.  She makes a light-hearted remark to the effect that her work opportunities these days are constrained by her visual disability and by whether Dench has already snapped up the cameo role in question (though the latter is also now struggling with failing eyesight).   How the audience rate the four actresses will likely depend on how much film, TV and theatre they’ve seen and in what proportions.  Because my primary interest has for so long been cinema, I find it hard to see Joan Plowright and Eileen Atkins in the same league as Maggie Smith, let alone Judi Dench.  Atkins may be a naturally modest character or perhaps Michell left more of her on the cutting room floor:  whatever the reason(s), she comes across as a supporting player in this exclusive company.   When Dench and Smith are sitting on a two-seater sofa together, it reinforces the sense that they’re the leading ladies.

As not just a Dench fan but a fellow York native (our families lived on opposite sides of the same street, Heworth Green, when I was a young child), I was fascinated by the archive film from the York Mystery Plays of 1951, the first of three appearances she made in these productions before the start of her professional career.  And her reaction to the ageist condescension of a paramedic who treated her recently for a hornet sting on the bum is more than a comic highlight of Michell’s film.  (The paramedic asked, ‘Now, how old are we … and do we have a carer?’  In reply, Dench fulminated, ‘Fuck off!  I’ve just done eight weeks at the Garrick Theatre!’)  The fury is bracing because Nothing Like a Dame, although it’s greatly entertaining, is decidedly melancholy too.  According to the last of a long list of admiring adjectives on the BBC iPlayer web page, the four dames are ‘unbelievably young’, which, in its way, sounds as patronising as did the well-intentioned paramedic.  It’s wide of the mark too.  Maggie Smith, amusing as she often is here, seems particularly oppressed by mortality.  Judi Dench’s expletive undeleted is a welcome instance of rage not against the dying of the light but at the blinkers that prevent people from seeing it shine in old age.

2 June 2018