The quest is silence: Mark Oakley talks to Judi Dench

‘Meeting is unbelievably important to me.’

Do you enjoy giving interviews?
It depends. I don’t mind it like this, because we’re relaxed.
I’m full of cold at the moment – which is very rare for me, because Daddy was a family doctor and the boys and I never had colds when we were children because we were kind of immune. And now suddenly this has hit me.

You were brought up in York. What was your childhood like?
Unbelievably happy. Unbelievably happy. I spent my time sewing, and my brothers and I were always on roller skates or bikes or swimming.
My mother was Irish, from Dublin; my father had spent most of his life in Ireland. I used to go out with him sometimes in the car, visiting [his patients], and he’d just knock at the door and walk in – and he’d always come away with something, a pheasant or eggs or something like that, which during the war years was absolutely wonderful.

Your mother was involved with the theatre, I believe.
She made costumes for the Mystery Plays when they came round. Daddy was very interested in the theatre, and they both were members of [York Settlement Community Players]. I saw my brothers [acting in school plays] when I was very little and we were taken to the theatre all the time. My only dream was to go to the [Old] Vic.
I remember going to see [the Ben Travers farce A] Cuckoo in the Nest at the York Theatre Royal, and a man jumping out of the cupboard at the end of the double bed these two people were in – in their combinations! – and I laughed so much that I made myself sick and my ma had to take me home. But she did take me back to see the end of the play another night.
The family was full of people reciting things – my pa could recite the whole of the Morte d’Arthur – and [we were] always very keen on singing and… So, it was very, very creative.

Looking back, what was it that led you into acting?
I always wanted to be a theatre designer, and went to York Art School with that in mind. But Jeff, the second of my two brothers, only ever wanted to be an actor…

Can you remember a moment when you thought: That is what I want to do?
Yes, I absolutely know the moment. Mummy and Daddy and I went to Stratford to see Michael Redgrave in [King] Lear. It was the most incredible set, like an enormous poppadom, and it blew my mind. I thought: ‘That’s the kind of designer I would like to be – and I don’t have that in my imagination.’
I mean, that just did it for me.

What was the appeal of acting?
It’s that wonderful feeling of a community of people [working] together, wanting to do something, and then – this is what’s wonderful about the theatre – wanting to do it better the next night. And the next night, better than that.
In Antony and Cleopatra, I knew that there was a line of Cleopatra’s that should get a laugh. We did a hundred performances and on the hundredth I got my laugh. I don’t know that I would have got it on the 101st, but I did that night.
I’ve been asked a couple of times to do a one-woman show and I’ve said: I couldn’t do that. I don’t even want to contemplate it. I wouldn’t know who to get dressed for.

Is acting something you feel you have to do?
Well, it’s something that I’ve chosen to do, and I’m lucky enough to be able to do – and hopefully I might be lucky enough to go on being able to do, but now I can’t read at all any more I have to find a different way of doing it.
It’s a calling. You’re very lucky if you have one, because there are people who don’t have that passionate urge to do something, you know? A lot of people are in things they don’t ever feel that they were cut out for or they enjoy.

Looking back to your earliest roles, what advice would you give your younger self?
Don’t fall in love so much!
What would I tell her? I used to read the critics; I don’t any more. John Neville, who played Hamlet when I went to the Vic [in 1957], told me very early on. You nearly always know when something is not right and you don’t need to open a paper and see a wonderful notice and then open another paper and see a crappy one.
You know, you have to be honest, you have to be true to your director, you have to be true to the other actors, and you have to get it better yourself.
Are you sensitive to criticism?
Well, because I can’t read any more, it doesn’t affect me any more. I think it would always hurt, but if it was reasonable criticism – not just saying, ‘Oh, I don’t like her!’ There’s nothing you can do about that.

Do you find as an actor that you are constantly an observer?
[I learnt] when I was a young actor that you must, without knowing it, have a little camera here, in your forehead. That’s not to say that when somebody you love very much is dying, say, you’re looking and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s how…’ You know, you’re not doing that, but [the ‘camera’] will record it in your mind, for recall.
As an actor, you’re asked to [portray] things that you’ve never experienced at all and you have to draw on something you have witnessed or heard or been told about… Sometimes, of course, you have to depend entirely on your imagination; but you must always be recording things in your head.

Do your performances come from deep within or are they, as it were, ‘put on’? If acting is about artifice rather than authenticity, I wonder whether it can sometimes injure your sense of self.
No, no, I don’t agree. It’s not about you at all. You are trying to be another person, in another situation – nothing to do with you. You’re the channel for telling Ibsen’s story or…
I’m only saying ‘Ibsen’ because, having just done what I call ‘Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?’, I know that the mother of my sixth cousin in Copenhagen was related to Henrik Ibsen, so that’s why I’m giving him a good notice. But, you know, if you’re trying to portray a character, in Ibsen or Chekhov or Alan Ayckbourn or David Hare, you’re a channel for it, but it’s not to do with you.
It’s like: Don’t fall in love with the leading man – unless it’s part of the play.

So, you’ve got your little camera in your forehead. When you play someone bitter and manipulative like Barbara Covett, say, in Notes on a Scandal –
Oh, God! I loved every minute of it!

– are you expressing something in your own nature through that character or are you simply reproducing something you’ve observed?
I don’t know. You have to put all the ingredients into the pot of the person that you can think of and then, with your director, you have to know how little or how much of each ingredient to use. Does that make sense? And you work towards that moment when Richard [Eyre] or Peter [Hall] or whoever says, ‘Yes, that’s spot on! That’s exactly it.’
Peter Hall has said that the irony of theatre is that ‘the mask’ brings out the authentic…
Oh, yes!

I wonder whether actors can find the mask reassuring somehow, in a way that diverts them from attending to their own selves.
I think that’s very true.
When I was at the Vic, I got Asian flu and I went on and played Ophelia and kind of cried the whole way through it. And when I came off, John Neville said to me: Never, ever do that again!
You know, it’s a balance, isn’t it? There are things that you have to take [on stage] with you and there are things that you have to leave in the dressing room for later.

It’s often said that tragedy is cathartic for the audience. Can it be cathartic for the actor?
Sometimes. Sometimes. If you have something to deal with in your own private life – especially if you’re grieving for somebody – the energy of giving a performance, of being another person in another situation and telling their story, can be cathartic, I think.
You can feel quite spent at the end of a performance.

Soon after your husband, Michael [Williams], died, you went to Canada to make The Shipping News and your friends told you: ‘You’re not facing up to your loss.’
I mean, it was a tremendous [challenge], to do it. [My co-star] Kevin Spacey couldn’t have been kinder, more thoughtful… And perhaps just having the energy to do it was quite good for me, actually.
I did three films very quickly, one after another. I did The Importance [of Being Earnest] straight after it, within a week or two; and then I think I did something else – I can’t remember. It was using up that great well of – not that the well felt any less, or the pain was any less, but at least the grief that it engendered, which becomes a kind of despair, was kind of used up.

And also you were back in a community of people, rather than sitting at home with your grief.
Yes, that’s right.

[The critic] Benedict Nightingale once described theatre as ‘a sort of gymnasium for the imagination’. It isn’t just entertainment that you’re offering as an actor, is it?
It’s a diversion, maybe, for people who want to get away from reality – God, don’t we all now? – and just forget themselves for a few hours and be immersed in something else.
Sometimes it can be an illumination – if you’re very lucky – for one person in that audience…
Acting was once a rather disreputable profession, but today some actors are looked to as moral guides, as seers, as political movers and shakers. How do you feel about that side of celebrity? Is it a good thing, or a distraction from your true vocation?
I loathe that word. I absolutely loathe it.
[To call someone] a ‘celebrity’ [makes them] sound so much better than anybody else – or so much grander, or tinsellier, or… You know, you think: Oh my God, you’ve got to shine and be all red nails and red lipstick. And I don’t want that. I don’t want it.
I really don’t think of myself as a celebrity. I think of myself as an actor who has been fortunate to have done a lot of things. I’m really quite a private person, actually.

You don’t feel obliged to use your fame to help some cause?
I don’t know… If there are ways that I can help practically in any situation, then yes – and of course I’ll do The Graham Norton Show, because he’s a great friend of mine. But I don’t want to just be ‘out there’. It sounds so pious, doesn’t it, to say [that] unless you can actually do something…
I don’t want to just be there to be a ‘name’.

Can we talk about Shakespeare?
We certainly can! [As I learnt from Who Do You Think You Are?,] I am related to Tycho Brahe, the famous Danish astronomer, and in his family tree are two people named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

I used to live in Denmark and you certainly look Danish.
Well, that’s what we found out: I’ve got a lot of Danish relations.

You’ve played many of Shakespeare’s greatest female roles. Do you feel that you know him? Do you think that’s possible?
During lockdown, I [could] wake up in the middle of the night and recall reams of Shakespeare. I could do the whole of the Dream for you now, or Twelfth Night. I can remember reams of Hamlet, of Measure for Measure. Not so much of The Merchant of Venice – I don’t like the play much. It’s strange, isn’t it? I don’t remember A Winter’s Tale, but the ones I did earlier I do remember. And the sonnets…
Many people today say they have no time for Shakespeare.
I heard a young person the other day say: ‘I’d like to see that play, but is it in that Shakespeare language?’

How do you react to that?
Well, they only need to see one thing that absolutely fires their imagination. That Shakespeare language can completely change your mind, if it’s done well. It has to be spoken well, I think.
I mean, there’s every reference you would ever need in Shakespeare, to everything that either has occurred or is about to occur or… You suddenly realise that Shakespeare summed it up in one line, you know?

You have a new partner now, the conservationist David Mills…
I don’t say ‘partner’, because I loathe that word. I just say ‘chap’.

Is love in later life different from before?
Oh, it’s always different, isn’t it? Always, always, always. With everybody. It’s never, ever the same. Never.

But it makes you happy?
Yes, it does make me happy. I feel very fortunate to have, you know, somebody to have a good laugh with. We don’t live together or anything, but it’s just very, very nice to have somebody who is such a good friend.

I think that a friend is where your loose ends find a home.
Yes. Because you put up with [each other’s] loose ends.

Exactly.
I have a lot of good friends. A lot of really good friends. I’m very, very lucky.

It’s interesting that ever since your school days you’ve been drawn to a spiritual tradition where people call each other ‘Friend’.
Yes. That’s essential.

You’ve said in the past that Quakerism is for you something indispensable.
I tried to go to Meeting yesterday for the first time in God knows how long, but because of my cold I didn’t go, which was very upsetting but there we are. I will go when I can.
Actually, the last time I was in Meeting was last July. We were in Cornwall and there’s a wonderful place called Come-to-Good near Truro, where we’d been before. David rang [the Friends there] and said, ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to be there on Sunday?’ and they said, ‘Come along just before half past ten’ and we went and three of them turned up and we had Meeting together, the five of us, sitting very dispersed in this glorious old Meeting house. And it was… well, it was wonderful.

What is it you value so much?
It’s the sharing with other people without stating something. It’s knowing that that group of people have come into the room with the intention just to be together and to be aware of what is created by being together.
It’s the quietness inside that I love. It’s like having a little completely quiet core, where somehow things that you observe, things that you hear about, things that people tell you, everything, can be considered and retained. Somewhere that’s completely quiet and private, like a Meeting that you have in your innermost being.
I can’t do without that. I couldn’t be without it.

How does that ‘completely quiet core’ relate to your work? Is it where you keep in touch with yourself?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I just know that it’s there – and that by going to Meeting it gets restored.

Michael was a practising Catholic, wasn’t he?
We kind of complemented each other.

Did you find that contrast easy to live with?
Oh yes, yes, yes, of course!

One of the attractions of the Quaker tradition is that it’s not so institutionalised. We’re all aware of the negatives of institutionalised religion, but can you see positives, too?
Of course I can! Of course.
I think everybody needs assurance – or they need to hear something which perhaps they have heard many times before but they need to be reassured. I just love going into a church and hearing a choir and the organ playing and that kind of resonance. I adore going to evensong. We were in Winchester not long ago and we walked [into the cathedral] and it was absolutely wonderful!
And, there again, I remember every prayer I ever learnt in the church. And that’s so useful.

Do you pray? Or meditate?
Yes, both those things – because it gives me a quietness of soul.
Meditating is, I think, just stopping for a minute and taking stock of oneself when there’s a lot of other things [going on].
That’s why Meeting is so wonderful. You know, sometimes it is an hour without anybody getting up to say anything. The silence drops. You feel it drop. People don’t understand that, I don’t think, until they go… But it just descends. It’s wonderful!

Is ‘God’ a word you use?
Yes, yes.

Some Quakers prefer other words, don’t they?
‘God’ is the [term] that I’ve kind of grown up to use, but of course I would be open to using others.

What does the word ‘God’ mean for you?
Have you got a couple of days?
What does it mean? What does it mean?

For you.
It means something that is entirely essential. That’s what it means. Something that I can’t do without.

If God is essential, does that mean that God is a reality?
A reality? A reality would somehow be embodied as something and I don’t see God… Embodied in symbols, yes, but not… I mean, I just feel it as… I keep saying, ‘an essential’… an essential piece of… an essential… Oh, this is very hard. Mark, honestly! A sense. An essential sense, and assurance…
I don’t know. I’m hopeless.

How is the Quaker tradition of pacifism shaping your response to what’s going on at the moment in Ukraine?
Well… You try, don’t you, to be open to both sides of an argument. You try to see the other person’s point of view.
It’s not a good week to ask me this.

Why is that?
Lockdown made me very anxious and I feel that my rhythm has gone a bit – well, a lot. And then we have Russia and Ukraine and there’s so much to – well, not even come to terms with. I now can’t watch the News at 10 at all. Of course you feel impotent – there’s nothing you can do, except send money to charities.
But I don’t know. I don’t know. I just don’t know.

How has lockdown made you anxious?
I don’t know. I find it very anxious-making to go to London – where my daughter and grandson are, for goodness’ sake! I know a lot of other people who feel the same – not about going to London, but they feel a kind of anxiety, you know, because the rhythm has gone.
You know, things were arranged to do, jobs were arranged, and they’ve got pushed [aside] and… So, there’s not a centre. You know, it’s all shifting.
And now the whole world is shifting and I think – well, it is very, very unnerving.

You need to go to Meeting…
That is unbelievably important to me. That may be why I’ve gone a bit wobbly during lockdown, because we haven’t been. The needle has gone off-centre a bit.

Your Quakerism is your compass?
Yes, it is!

There’s a great sense that things are falling apart, I think. Things we had thought were fairly secure we’re discovering are not.
It’s true. It’s absolutely true.

Do you think that the arts can help to put things back together again?
I do believe that. For some people. There are some who don’t have access to [the arts] in any way, but yes, I do believe that. If you can make people perhaps not be so aware of what’s happening for two-and-a-half hours or whatever, that is some help. Not much, but some.

You’ve referred to your failing eyesight…
I go up to people in the street and say, ‘Hello! How lovely to see you!’ and I’ve never met them before in my life!

But I’ve read that you hate the very thought of retirement.
You can cut that out. You can cut that right out.

So, retirement’s out of the question?
No, you’ve said it again, Mark. Come on!

Do you think about death?
I can’t talk about it.

But you think about it.
Yes. Who doesn’t?

And so much of your work is concerned with it, surely, in one way or another.
It’s about life, too, isn’t it? It’s also about attitude and circumstance and dealing with all sorts of things. H’mm. That’s all I’ve got to say about that.

You must sometimes wonder what you’ll be remembered for. What would you like to be remembered for?
Laughing, I think.

That’s a really important part of your chemistry.
It’s got me into a lot of trouble – a lot of trouble, one way and another – but it’s essential. Just being with people who make you laugh, who you can say anything to and they can say anything to you and – well, you know, we’re so lucky if any of us have that.

And the connection that comes with laughing together.
With laughter comes love, I think. Probably. I’ve never thought of it before, but I suppose it’s true. Unless you’re laughing at someone’s expense, in which case it’s not love!

Do you consider yourself a hopeful person?
I’ve never even thought of it. Am I a hopeful person? Ultimately, I suppose, I am.

Laughter is hopeful.
I know. Well, until we see the news again!

Mark Oakley is the dean of St John’s College, Cambridge. and former rector of ‘the Actors’ Church’, St Paul’s, Covent Garden.

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