Notes on Judi Dench's Talk (Part 1)

Scribbled notes (Part 1) of Judi Dench's talk, 17 March 2010, Rose Theatre, Kingston, London. Facilitator: Stephen Unwin (Artistic Director, Rose Theatre)

SU: How did you start, this love for theatre?
JD: Initially studied to be a designer. At age seven, JD went to see her brother perform in 'the Scottish play'
She was excited he spoke the word, "Bloody" on stage. That was something she doesn't mind doing, uttering (what was then considered a 'bad' word), jumping up and down the sofa in delight when she returned home. She then went to watch her older brother, Jeffrey, perform in Taming of the Shrew. Jeffrey Dench has been an actor longer than she has.
Her house has been filled with Shakespeare just as some homes are filled with classical music. She has been exposed to Shakes since very young.

SU: How to encourage the youngsters to love theatre?
JD: Recently had a Saturday matinee for kids- they laughed at some places. Now if only they would remember the place (a theatre!) and where (& why?) they laughed...
JD: Nottingham Playhouse was the first theatre rep to reach West Africa, despite whatever Peter Brook says (laughter from the audience)
When they went back again to West Africa in 1969, a huge theatre movement was happening in Nigeria, Ghana & Sierra Leone.
SU: mentioned something about the reaction to theatre in West Africa as 'unvarnished response" (I like that phrase)

Next, (did JD suddenly go back to the first ques, about the beginnings of her love for theatre? I think SU guided her back to it)
JD mentioned watching an all-girl performance of Julius Caesar (when she was young) She thanked God she wasn't involved in it- if she did she wouldn't be interested to act at all. (laughter, of course, from the audience- she shivered in mock disgust as she told this story)

As a student, JD went to Stratford and she saw a fantastic set design which made her abandon her plan on doing set design. She had conventional thoughts of design- curtain goes up, curtain goes down, some set change happen behind curtain, curtain comes up again.
This production did not bring down any curtains. It was Michael Redgrave in King Lear.
So she did the next best thing: acting.

SU: So you followed what your brother (Jeffrey) did?
JD: Yes

On entering Central School of Speech & Drama, JD couldn't really remember if she had to audition. (So funny! She look perplexed- I really don't remember, she said)
JD remembered a written exam. Pause. Then she said she may be making this all up altogether (more titterings from audience)

JD: (As actors) We have to know we are pretending rather than believing (then made some gestures indicating she doesn't really believe in that- 'method' of acting?)
JD does takes the pretending deadly seriously. Deadly serious. (I sense the emphasis on that phrase) Deadly serious.

JD: When in the Vic, she, with other younger actors learnt on the wings of the stage. Nobody went off to the dressing room. All observed from the wings. That was her theatre education.
I learnt from everybody
SU: "Like a sponge"

JD: One thing she does is to watch a show in the theatre (repertory) she considered joining/acting in. Watch a show that's been performed last before the productionshe was supposed to be involved it That was what made her join the Vic.
JD: Check on the amount of energy required in the theatre, Check the last production, to get the measure of the theatre.

SU: Asked about her time in Stratford with Peter Hall in 1962
JD: It was thrilling, wonderful memories, Measure for Measure, Midsummers Night Dream

SU: JD is so lucky to be fully at work in ensemble/repertory as a 20 something actress during her time. (1960s, I presume?)
JD: (thoughtfully) Yes. As actor and understudy.
SU: It's harder nowadays, JD agreed. Repertory season is so expensive to put on, such as the present RSC.

SU: (broached the subject of teaching)
JD: Teaching? I don't like to teach. Not consciously teach. I can't teach. Masterclass frightens the hell out of me.
JD: I could (assist with?) an audition speech but I can't promise you'll get in (laughter)

SU: You directed. SU interjected: "Directing is hard" (I concur! directing is tiring okay, peeps! try it and you'll know!)
JD: Directing, is very hard (Hear! Hear! hehe...)
JD: I couldn't believe how transparent we (actors) are. She knew when one of her actors didn't spend time memorizing lines. "Why don't you spend, ahem, two hours learning the lines" (her posture changed, acting out her role as director, saw a glimpse of how she was as a director- I try to remember it, next time use it on you, 'transparent' actors, bwahaha)

JD directed Much Ado About Nothing, Kenneth Branagh was Benedick.
One day,she wanted to give notes to Ken- apparently straight after show, Branagh ran off (in his costume!) to avoid her!
And he copied all her ideas in his film of 'Much Ado' (She looks like joking but vestiges of indignation still there- I sense) (laughter from audience, of course)

SU: Tips to teach Shakes?
JD: As Trevor Nunn, Peter Hall always say, "Obey the verse". Now Derek Jacobi would say this is all rubbish. And he is a very good actor.
JD: You would run out of breath if you do not follow the verse
(To be continued in Part 2)

New Statesman critcism of 'Consolations of Philosophy' by Alain de Botton

Comforting, but meaningless. In seeking to popularise philosophy, Alain de Botton has merely trivialised it, smoothing the discipline into a series of silly sound bites. By Edward Skidelsky
Edward Skidelsky
Published 27 March 2000
The Consolations of Philosophy Alain de Botton Hamish Hamilton, 320pp, £14.99 ISBN 0241140099
I don't want to be accused of intellectual snobbery when I say that The Consolations of Philosophy is a very bad book. It is bad not because it makes unsupported generalisations, fails to define its terms, or any of the other conventional academic failings. All these are perfectly legitimate in a work of popular philosophy. It is bad because the conception of philosophy that it promotes is a decadent one, and can only mislead readers as to the true nature of the discipline.
This is all the more dangerous because the decadent notion of philosophy as "consolation" is actually very close to the true conception of philosophy. Philosophy - and to this extent Alain de Botton is correct - is not something that can be separated from life itself. It is not something that you do between nine o'clock and five o'clock, after which point "life" - dinner parties and flirtation - resumes. Life is continually thrusting philosophical questions upon us, and our answers to those questions make demands upon life. What carries on in universities under the name of philosophy has only an accidental relation to philosophy itself, just as what carries on in church has only an accidental relation to religion.
Socrates is commonly revered as someone who took philosophy seriously, who lived and died according to its demands. He is to philosophy what Christ is to Christianity. Like Christ, Socrates was completely misunderstood by his contemporaries. They viewed his endless questions about the nature of justice and beauty as a kind of childish game, unconnected to the serious business of life. (This is how most people still see philosophy.) The truth, as Socrates said again and again, is precisely the opposite. These are the most serious and practical questions that anyone can ask; compared to them, the "serious business of life" is a childish game. Christ made a similar point when he described the Pharisees as men who "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel". The things that most people take seriously are in fact ludicrously trivial. In moments of lucidity or remorse, they perceive this but find it hard to keep the perception in mind. Hardest of all is to live according to this sense of what really matters, as the biographies of Socrates and Christ demonstrate.
This austere conception of philosophy is inverted by de Botton. For Socrates, philosophy makes demands on life; for de Botton, life makes demands on philosophy. Philosophical theories are no more than ointments that we apply to soothe our various ailments. A remark by Epicurus, on the back cover of the book, sums it up: "Any philosopher's argument which does not therapeutically treat human suffering is worthless, for just as there is no profit in medicine when it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy when it does not expel the diseases of the mind."
Not only is this conception of philosophy decadent in the popular sense of being effete, but it is also decadent in the precise sense of belonging to a period of cultural decline. The Epicurean view of philosophy as therapy was shared by all the main schools of late antiquity. This was a period in which the material and spiritual resources of classical civilisation were running dry. Barbarians harassed the frontiers, while a swollen administration stifled civic life. Unemployed mobs congregated in the imperial capitals, and were pacified with bread and circuses. Creative literature gave way to rhetoric and pastiche, and the official religion declined into an empty cult. Frustrated and dispirited, the educated retired to their libraries and found consolation in philosophy.
If you rewrite the above description, substituting "welfare and football" for "bread and circuses", and "psychotherapy" for "philosophy", you gain an approximate portrait of the modern west. The idea of philosophy as therapy appeals today for the same reason it appealed in late antiquity: it promises respite from insoluble problems. Even within "serious" philosophy, the therapeutic paradigm has proved seductive. Wittgenstein saw an analogy between his method, in which philosophical problems are "dissolved" into linguistic misunderstandings, and Freudian psychoanalysis. And relativism is often commended on the grounds that it encourages a tolerant, chilled-out attitude to life - an argument that can be traced back to ancient scepticism.
This conception of philosophy is not only distasteful; it falsifies its object. The first virtue of a philosophical theory is truth, just as the first virtue of a law is justice. Truth and justice cannot be traded for anything less. If a philosophical theory is false, it must be rejected, no matter how many therapeutic benefits derive from believing it. If a law is unjust, it should be re- pealed, however salutary its political or economic consequences.
De Botton ignores this obvious truth. He recommends Schopenhauer's misanthropic theory of sexual love - the theory, in brief, that all sexual love is a delusion created by the biological imperative of reproduction - for no better reason than that it can help cheer you up after a failed seduction attempt. It is true that misanthropy can be cheering - Schopenhauer himself was essentially a cheerful person - but that is not a reason to espouse it. The function of philosophy is not to pander to wounded vanity.
De Botton attributes his therapeutic conception of philosophy to thinkers who would themselves have rejected it. Apart from Schopenhauer, he deals with Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne and Nietzsche. Of these six, only Epicurus and Seneca would have endorsed the notion that philosophy is therapy. Socrates would never have suggested philosophy as a "consolation for unpopularity", because he did not think of unpopularity as something for which one needed to be consoled. Philosophy does not console one for popularity: it makes one indifferent to it. Similarly, Nietzsche's philosophy is not a "consolation for difficulties"; it is, rather, an injunction to seek out and triumph over difficulties. In both cases, de Botton is using philosophical ideas in ways for which they were never originally intended.
But it is Montaigne who suffers the greatest indignity at the hands of de Botton. Montaigne's remark, "If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness in his life", is glossed as "Only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding". Not only is this a miserable conception of intellectual endeavour, it is quite clearly a misinterpretation of Montaigne. Something may be useful or appropriate in your life without necessarily making you feel better. Once again, philosophy has been surreptitiously corrupted into flattery.
The medical analogy is misleading in another way. Different medicines may be incompatible in their effects, but they cannot strictly be said to contradict one another. This is because medicine refers to nothing outside itself. Philosophical theories, on the other hand, make claims about the world, and these claims can come into conflict. By treating philosophical theories as medicines, you abolish any sense of conflict between them. A little Epicurus for your money worries goes quite nicely with a bit of Seneca for your frustrations; that Epicurus and Seneca disagree with one another hardly matters. Ultimately, you lose the sense that philosophy refers to anything beyond the human psyche and its needs. It is transformed into a series of sound bites, all equally comforting and equally meaningless.
Perhaps some readers will find de Botton endearing, with his cocoa, holiday snaps and sexual hang-ups. But I failed to be charmed by these autobiographical touches, because they seemed like a calculated attempt at ingratiation. Philosophy has clearly not helped de Botton overcome the "indiscriminate desire for affection" he admits to in the opening chapter. But perhaps it has provided consolation for it.
Edward Skidelsky's reviews appear monthly in the "NS"

New Montaigne Book by Sarah Bakewell (from Literay Review)

taken from Literary Review article

Frederic Raphael
MAN FOR ALL SEASONS
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
By Sarah Bakewell (Chatto & Windus 370pp £16.99)
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in 1533 and died (following an attack of kidney stones, like his father) in 1592. His mother was of Marrano descent; her family had been Sephardic Jews, forced into Catholicism. Montaigne himself was always formally obedient to the Church. 'Otherwise', he wrote, 'I could not keep myself from rolling about incessantly. Thus I have kept myself intact, without agitation or disturbance of conscience.' In this respect, he was somewhat the precursor of Evelyn Waugh, who said that, had he not been a Catholic, he would scarcely have been human. Montaigne, however, was a genial man of no officious piety; a dutiful mayor of Bordeaux, unaggressive lord of his modest Périgordin manor, and a courtier without grand ambition.

His essays advocated good-humoured acceptance of the vagaries of human life. For all his formal orthodoxy, he was a manifest sceptic: 'There is', he observed, 'no hostility that exceeds Christian hostility.' In practice, he preferred the Stoic amor fati to religious absolutism and abominated the righteous cruelty of those with undoubting convictions: 'It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.' Sarah Bakewell takes this to be an allusion to the spate of witch-hunting which accompanied the religious wars, but it is no great stretch to see in it a reference to the ongoing series of autos-da-fé on the other side of the Pyrenees. For those who choose to read him so, Montaigne was a bit of a crypto-Jew.

Fearing 'chimeras and fantastic monstrosities', he recruited reason, wryness and literacy to allay their hold on him. He declined to be engaged on either savage side in the religious wars which were the contemporary signs of that France 'divisée en deux' that first split Catholics from Huguenots, later Jacobins from Girondins, and then Socialists from the Droite classique. He played a key, but diffident, part in bringing the Protestant Henri of Navarre to the French throne and, one guesses, encouraged the king's view that Paris was worth a Mass. At the same time, Montaigne observed that, however lofty the throne, 'we are still sitting only on our own rump'.

If, in his mature years, he was happy to withdraw to the tower room - what he called his 'arrière-boutique' - in his chateau (the lintel of its doorway only a forbidding five feet from the floor), he was never aloof from the world's dangers nor reluctant to savour its pleasures. It is said that, as a young blade, he practised debauchery, but refrained from it with his beautiful wife, Françoise, whose naked breasts were never revealed to him: he saw only her hands and face uncovered. He made love to her, he dares to concede, 'with only one buttock'. Like his mother, Françoise outlived him, by many years. He gives neither woman a flattering press, but for Sarah Bakewell to say that they somehow drove him to his death is unworthy.

Montaigne's father, Pierre, played a key part in his formation. An opinionated, perhaps somewhat abrupt man, he insisted that 'Micheau' learn Latin as his first language and had small faith in formal schooling. While Ovid's Metamorphoses chimed with Montaigne's mutability and primed his imagination, Bakewell thinks him 'cheeky' for saying that Virgil's Aeneid 'might have been brushed up a bit'. In fact, Virgil himself (and not a few critics) thought the same thing; hence his wish for the poem to be destroyed after his death.

Pierre Montaigne triggered his son's literary life when, probably in 1567, he handed Micheau a 500-page Latin manuscript, the Theologia Naturalis, sive liber creaturarum, written over a century earlier by the Catalan Catholic apologist Raymond Sebond, and said (in Bakewell's words), 'Translate this into French for me when you get a moment, will you, son?'

Montaigne's almost book-length assessment of Sebond's work became the centrepiece of the second volume of his Essais. Sainte-Beuve regarded this seemingly deferential analysis as a covert attack on Christianity. As Joseph Epstein reminds us, in an elegant and succinct essay, Montaigne had a prescient word to say about such deconstruction: 'Once you start digging down into a piece of writing, there is simply no slant or meaning ... which the human mind cannot find there.' In our own time, as the Janus-faced Paul de Man would prove, bad faith and critical ingenuity often go hunting together.

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer is a lively, well-sourced account of the man and the work. Bakewell is tellingly accurate when she comes to the savage instability of sixteenth-century provincial life. Catholics and Huguenots, neighbours and friends, were inspired to slaughter each other with pitiless self-righteousness. Bordeaux was the scene of exemplary massacres and vindictive repressions, in which Montaigne strove, with no little courage and some success, to play a reconciling role.

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Courageous but never pugnacious, except in self-advocacy, his sense of his own fragility and his innate tolerance warned him against what Byron (a somewhat kindred spirit, who also pampered his own inner divisions) called 'enthusymusy': over-keen religious partisanship. Two centuries later, Talleyrand (another Périgordin grandee) would counsel young diplomats to avoid 'trop de zèle' and played the Bishop of Bray, so to speak, with similar, but much more cynical, versatility.

Montaigne's want of dogmatic rigour, his willingness to settle for a good life this side of the grave, earned him the ardent reproaches of both Pascal and Descartes and, in time, the anathemas of the Church (once on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the essays were not reprieved until the mid-nineteenth century). He always did his duty, in pious and political terms, but his abiding pleasures were mundane and country-gentlemanly. His contemporary, Justus Lipsius, called him 'the French Thales'; but Montaigne would never, I suspect, have fallen into a well, as Thales supposedly did, while staring at the heavens. Micheau always watched his step with some care.

His eccentric schooling allowed him to pillage Latin literature with facility (if not always with precision) and to embrace Plutarch and Greek philosophy, although not in the language in which they were written. He indulged his cacoethes scribendi without restraint, but said that he would 'hate a reputation for being clever at writing, but stupid at everything else'. His essays were a reminiscential ramble around the estate of literature, issuing in what he termed 'des excréments d'un vieil esprit'. Self-portraiture and self-caricature regularly punctured his own seigneurial complacency.

Bakewell's well-sourced, spritely and anecdotal book does not benefit from being dressed as some sort of self-help manual. She gets off to a trendy start by recommending Theodore Zeldin's website The Oxford Muse (oh dear!), which invites self-revelation from 'all and sundry' as a means towards 'replacing national stereotypes with real people'. The site, we are promised (or should that be 'threatened'?), contains essays with 'titles like' - meaning, I suppose, such as - 'Why an educated Russian works as a cleaner in Oxford'. This preliminary digression may pay tribute to Bakewell's mentor, but it has little to do with Montaigne. I doubt if the exploratory self-centredness at the heart of his genius would choose to be associated with Zeldin's collation of brief lives.

Montaigne's shortest answer to the question 'how to live?' would probably be the banal recommendation to take it easy. His meandering answers are much more interesting and more diverting than any sound-bitten moral nostrum. Carpe diem, the Epicurean motto, is best honoured by caressing the quotidian details and appreciating the ordinary. Montaigne responded, prophylactically, to Heidegger's vision of man as living 'towards death' by advising against thinking too much about it. The variety of life on earth (not least that of the domestic animals with whom we play and who, Montaigne suspected, play with us) was an advertisement for unaffected pursuits, as against 'super-celestial' apprehensions or apocalyptic hopes.

Bakewell does not mention that he also said that, in the final confrontation with death, there was no sense in feigning. In extremis, Montaigne insisted, 'Il faut parler français.' The punning implication being that when it came to honest expression (franchise), the vernacular alone could provide a specific against cant. There is a sly hint here that the consolations of religion, which he received on his pain-filled deathbed, were not entirely to his taste.

Bakewell is properly dubious about the too clever notion that Etienne de la Boétie's precocious 'Discours de la servitude volontaire' was actually written by Montaigne himself and subsequently wished on his beloved friend (who died young, of the plague, with Micheau in close attendance), because he feared being taken for a dangerous revolutionary. La Boétie, under whose statue in Sarlat we often park our car, had a clear, brave voice of his own. His attack on tyranny and its spineless apparatchiks is a classic of virile provincial outspokenness.

Montaigne is, in truth, an entertaining companion rather than a therapist or a prototypical Miss Lonelyhearts. When Sarah Bakewell frees herself from the formulaic frame into which she has elected (or agreed) to be compressed, she is a generous, well-informed guide, not least to the afterlife of Montaigne's Essays, which leaked into Shakespeare, thanks to John Florio's English translation, and later inspired William Hazlitt. Montaigne's admirer Nietzsche's title 'human, all too human' is one that Micheau might have been happy to adopt. He (rather than the self-important Sir Thomas More) was, and remains, my man for all seasons.

Frederic Raphael is finishing a novel called 'Final Demands' (the third in his 'The Glittering Prizes' trilogy), to be published in the spring.