UK title: Nothing like a Dame, starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins and Joan Plowright.

The definition of fanservice, in the best sense. Basically, a documentary in which director Roger Michell (who directed Peter O'Toole's beautiful swan song Venus and thus is no stranger to working with legends) feeds his four leading ladies cues, points cameras at them and lets them chat about work, husbands ("mine was the most difficult", says Joan Plowright, which, well, if you were married with Laurence Olivier...), jerk directors and aging. Which isn't belittlling Michell's - and his team's own work: intercut between Dames Dench, Smith, Atkins and Plowright chatting is footage from their career, and not the just the obvious tidbits but true rare gems in the form of filmed theatre footage or old tv interviews (he even found baby Judi Dench - in the sense of her being barely out of her teens - in the York Miracle Play! quoth Eileen Atkins, admiringly: "You've always had lovely tits, Jude"). But the great charm of this diverting enterprise consists of these ladies chatting away.

Not as if they were scripted by Oscar Wilde, I hasten to add - there are one liners, to be sure, but not in the rat-at-tat manner the characters played by these actresses would provide. And there are no big reveals of biographical secrets; for example, Maggie Smith states firmly, re: her marriage to Robert Stephens, that she prefers to think of the good days, and no descriptions of Stephens the alcoholic follow. It's not that kind of film. But it doesn't shy away from the awareness of what aging and mortality can also mean; Joan Plowright, the oldest, is blind now and has lost much of her hearing, and they all remember rolling their eyes at Edith Evans as young actresses, but not so much now. Otoh all four have such a keen sense of humor about it: Judi Dench's recounting of how the condescending medic who treated her when she was stung by a hornet asked her "do we have a caregiver?" is a comic masterpiece. ("I just did eight weeks in A Winter's Tale!")

They're also mordantly funny commenters on their own work. "Alan Rickman and I eventually ran out of expressions," is Maggie Smith's summation of shooting the Harry Potter movies. And then there are the surprising voltes. Judi Dench, re: how she got into the Bond franchise, mentions this was because her late husband Michael Williams was a spy fan. "Kim Philby was his idol."
The other three: "...????"
JD, elaborating, says there was this facing the press thing Philby did on tv at some point after Burgess & Mclean had skeedaddled and before he himself absconded, complete with having his Aged Mother at his side, and: "Every actor should watch that. The nerve! Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Who, me? I'm completely innocent. It's an acting master class."

(And then Michell actually provides the black and white tv footage in question of Kim Philby on British tv.)

(Another, very differnt thing about the use of old footage: Something I noticed, not for the first time, when comparing the footage of young Maggie Smith with her current self is that Toby Stephens looked nothing like his mother when younger - both when he was younger and when she was - but you can totally see the resemblance between them now.)

The most consistently articulate of the four turns out to be Eileen Atkins, which didn't surprise me since she's the only one who is also a writer. The recipient of the most (affectionate) ribbings is Judi Dench, for having first dibs on the roles these days ("my American agent told me, don't worry, there's be a cameo for you Judi Dench hasn't got her paws on yet"), but she's also the one given the last word: a beautiful, and in its understated tenderness not a little heartbreaking recitation of Prospero's "We are such stuff as dreams are made off " speech from The Tempest. And for all that this is essentially a cheerful film, celebrating these four actresses, you are, as a viewer, of course aware that any of them could leave us at any moment. But what joy (and sadness) they've given us through the years...

Saturday brought back a dash of rain and even snow, but also lunch with jesuswasbatman, dinner and theatre with kangeiko and queenspanky and of course Judi Dench & Ben Wishaw in the evening, so it was another great day.

If also one with disturbance and sadness. I visited the National Portrait Gallery, which I usually do when in London - it's never overcrowded (as opposed to the British Museum, especially this Easter Weekend - I strolled by, and the crowds were insane!), I like this trip through history via faces, and the temporary exhibitions are always interesting as well. This time, the exhibition du jour was "George Catlin: American Indian Portraits". Apparantly George Catlin, whom I have to admit I had never heard of before, spent most of the 1830s painting and sketching as many people from different tribes as he could, being aware that there was the danger of extinction for the Native Americans. In this, the museum notes tell us, he wasn't alone, and this part in particular made me sad and frustrated: the idea that the awareness there was a kind of slow genocide going on was there, and no one was doing anything. It's not new, of course, but seeing all these paintings - which are very different, highly individualistic, btw, not technically very skilled, but they get across a real sense of personality - just brought it home again.

Other, more familiar sections of the NPG also had their novelties: the Tudor section boasted of a newly identified portrait of Katharine of Aragon and one from roughly the same period, pre-Holbein and mostly pre-fatness, of Henry VIII. The Bloomsbury Group section that was focused on Julian Bell also included photos of a young Guy Burgess (who had been friends with Bell at Cambridge) and McLean (who, in these wonderfully wry mini biographies, is describred as as "diplomat, Soviet spy" who ended up "teaching international relations in Moscow"). Among the newest acquisitions is an "actors' last supper" photograph starring several of the current cream of the crop in Leonardo poses. See, our actors sadly would not get the idea. I love Britain.

Peter and Alice, the third play I absolutely wanted to see, was written by John Logan, who among other things wrote the script for RKO 521, aka still my favourite film about Orson Welles, and the latest James Bond pic, Skyfall, which makes me suspect that he wrote Peter and Alice specifically with Ben Wishaw and Judi Dench in mind. (Dame Judi's Alice gets to make a joke about how famous people should not be so tiny, while Wishaw's Peter is at one point described as "beautiful and damaged", but that's the least of it.) It's a play that takes a real life anecdote - Alice Liddell, who inspired Lewis Carroll, meeting when in her 80s in 1932 Peter Llewelyn Davies, who was one of the five boys befriended and later fostered by James Barrie, and who inspired Peter Pan. I've seen critics call the play overly wordy, but that wasn't my impression - not least because if you deal with both the real life characters and two literary creations, with the clash of fantasy and reality and the emotional mess that becoming a muse for a writer means, especially if you're a child and he's an adult man, wordiness strikes me as quintessential. Also, as I said to kangeiko later, my impression was that the play tries to do what A. S. Byatt did in her novel The Children's Book with the writer Olive and son Tom part of the plot (which was partly inspired by the fate of the Davies boys, which is why a climactic scene takes place at the premiere of Peter Pan, only she needs 600 pages and Logan does it in a one and a half hour play without a break.

Any play, film, biography dealing with either Lewis Carrol or James Barrie and their respective child muses has to face the big question mark about the nature of these relationships, and whether or not there was a sexual element in it. (A couple of years ago the film Finding Neverland, starring Johnny Depp as Barrie, tried to get around this by changing several facts, like having the boys' father, Arthur Davies, being already dead when Barrie meets the family, cutting down the number of children, and developing a tender understated romance between Barrie and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, but it still included a scene where a friend of Barrie's mentions there is gossip, and Barrie outragedly dismisses it.) This particular play's interpretation is that nothing physical happened in either case, but emotionally a lot did, and for children to have that intense love directed at them did do damage, in addition to the lure of fantasy and impossibility for reality to compete with it.

One of the play's devices is that Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, the literary creations, are also characters, interacting with their adult inspirers and each other, and whether or not this works was one of the things we debated afterwards: it did for me. As for the two stars, they were both marvellous: Judi Dench shedding and gaining years when Alice goes from old lady who finds it painful to move at all to the girl interacting with Dodgson/Caroll, at times like the girl playing Alice but even then with an awareness that Alice, as an eternal child in a book, can't have, in turns haughty, wistful, curious, sad and hopeful. Ben Wishaw, who looks far taller next to Judi Dench than I've ever seen him look on film, is so very, very broken as Peter, but never one note. The scene where he tells Alice - who lost two sons in the war - about his own war service, killing a man, then his mental breakdown - is something that is so devastating precisely because he doesn't chew scenery.

The scenes with Caroll and Barrie are both compelling and disturbing - Caroll going from spinning a marvellous story to asking Alice never to grow up, Barrie luring Peter into believing in Captain Hook, notably. Also the flashback to Michael Davies - Barrie's favourite - and his suicide. When in the end Alice is choosing to go back to Wonderland in her mind because the reality of old age, loneliness and genteel poverty is worse, but Peter can't and won't go back to Neverland, you understand both their choices, and they're both heartbreaking.

I'm not sure whether the play is objectively a good play. But it moved me immensely, and of all the plays I've seen on this trip to London, this cut deepest.

...this is her singing "Send in the Clowns" from 'A Little Night Music' at the BBC Proms 2010, for Sondheim's 80th Birthday Celebration.

A great interview with Judi Dench, apropos the impending new Bond film but covering all of her career. She's a pro as always and doesn't give any spoilers for Skyfall, but given her eyesight difficulties and age, I'm somewhat afraid the franchise might kill her M off and give us a new one. : ( Which since I love the Bond and M (or Bond/M) dynamic more than any other when it's Dench!M and Craig!Bond would make me very unhappy. Unless of course the new M is also a woman and played by Lindsay Duncan or someone of a similar calibre.


Meta about the Marquise de Merteuil, she who rules Les Liasons Dangereuses. One of my favourite female characters as well, and my favourite on screen incarnation of her is Glenn Close.


Elegant and Fine: beautiful short story plus meta on the other Problem With Susan in the Narnia saga. Not the Last Battle related one, but the part that's actually a problem for all the Pensieves, the fact they grew into adults in Narnia, with adult relationships, and then were made children again at the end of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

Shortly after Lost ended, rumour had it that Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson would be in another tv show together. This so far hasn't happened, which makes me pout, but then recent new photos of them make this Locke And Ben Forever person happy!