Free And Furthermore by Judi Dench

Stratford ourselves. After the York disaster, Frank Hauser asked me to return to Oxford for The Wolf , written in 1911 by the Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár. This was another British premiere by Frank for a classic European play unknown here, and it was wonderful to be directed by him again, you just felt totally confident that there was somebody on the bridge. This was his farewell production for the Oxford Playhouse after seventeen years, which was one of the reasons I was keen to be in it.
    Leo McKern was to play my insanely jealous husband, and Teddy Woodward my lover. We had a scene where we were all drinking, and one night Teddy knocked the bottom of his glass and it broke off, so I handed him mine. Leo said, ‘What good’s that going to do us?’ as we had some stage business with the glasses later on. In the first act Leo had a line, ‘I’m so happy,’ and a man shouted out, ‘Well, I’m glad you are!’ But everybody else seemed to enjoy it, with the exception of Finty. She was brought in when I was having a costume fitting, and when she saw me dressed up she burst into tears. She got more used to seeing me like that as she grew up.
    The show transferred to London, but we kept getting moved from one theatre to another – the Apollo, the Queen’s, and then that barn of a theatre, the New London. We called ourselves the only touring show in London. After six months I called it a day, and left to do my second musical, The Good Companions , with a director who was not in the same league as Frank.
    Braham Murray seemed all over the shop to me, and I had never done a musical from the beginning before, so I didn’t know that it was all rewritten in rehearsal. For Cabaret Hal Prince had ironed out all those usual teething problems during the American run, but now we were starting from scratch. Ronald Harwood had adapted J.B. Priestley’s original play, André Previn wrote the music, and the lyrics were by Johnny Mercer. Christopher Gable was in it, and I was so bewitched by working with a real ballet dancer, after my childhood dreams, that all the way through the run I used to try and catch him unawares, and run at him and jump into his arms, so that he could hold me up in that wonderful balletic pose. Poor Chris.
    This was the first time that I worked with John Mills, and not many people realised that he was a proper hoofer, he really could tap dance. He had a song and dance number that used to bring the house down. I managed to get to know him really well, because my first entrance was in a little car with John, and we used to sit in it for ages before we were needed, and just talk. It became like a private confessional, and Johnny said, ‘Afterwards I’ll have this car put in the garden. I’ve said things to you in this car that I’ve never said to anyone!’
    He and his wife Mary used to invite Michael and me to dinner with them after the show, and because our curtain came down quite late we had to tell the restaurant beforehand what we wanted to eat. So when Johnny came on with a clipboard in one scene, calling, ‘Miss Trant, Miss Trant,’ he would come up to me with the whole of the menu, and say, ‘What do you think you’d like tonight?’ We would go right down the menu and choose something, and I would say that Michael would probably have the fishcakes.
    Johnny was a man after my own heart. He and I organised a very elaborate practical joke to play on a member of the company who we didn’t think was behaving very well. He kept going and looking down at the orchestra, and we were thinking, Oh, come on, there is a show supposed to be going on here. We had a scene at Crewe Station with three big theatre companies all going off in different directions on other trains, with a huge number of suitcases. So we put two stage weights in the case for this particular person, and John had to give them out. Everyone used to take their case and swing it up above their heads, but of course his case was so heavy