Her cutting words were written by William Shakespeare but the withering stare the straight-talking Paulina focuses on co-star Kenneth Branagh’s insanely jealous King Leontes in a new production of The Winter’s Tale is pure Judi Dench.
Dench’s stare, at the end of the first half, has had audiences sitting on the edge of their seats since the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company’s production of Shakespeare’s late-life portrait of the wreckage wrought by jealousy opened this month.
It is a “moment I shall long remember”, Guardian critic Michael Billington wrote.
The play will be broadcast live to cinemas in Britain and Europe today, with a delayed broadcast to the US on Monday. It will be seen in Australia, Hong Kong, South Africa, China and Japan in January, publicists said.
“We’re excited, there’s a lot of excitement in the building about this live broadcast,” Branagh, 54, said in an interview.
The Belfast-born Branagh says it is not so difficult as it might appear to make the transition between the movie world, where he also directed the action adventure Thor and filmed versions of Shakespeare, to the stage. In the movies, he said, when a director heads to the set he may see 15 key people in one room and 200 in another but, he said: “You can find a human centre to it all.”
That said, he acknowledged that the talent he is able to draw to the Garrick owes much to his long association with the London stage.
He attributes his ability to enlist Dench, and the way she plays the part of the hectoring but ultimately forgiving Paulina, to “a 30-year conversation”, off and on, with her.
Our challenge is to give the audience in the cinema a feeling of being in the theatre
“Judi Dench both provides that emotional trigger and has the mastery of the language, so it’s the most comprehensive demolition of a foolish human being that one might imagine,” Branagh said of the scene in which she berates Leontes for the jealous rage that has provoked his son’s death, caused his wife to fall into a death swoon and made him banish his newborn daughter .
“When it’s... embodied by someone like Judi Dench you know you have a wonderful piece of dramatic writing embodied by a great performer and you hit the jackpot.”
Director Ben Caron will use seven cameras to broadcast the show from what he regards as an ideal place to film a psychological play because the Garrick is small and intimate.
“Our challenge is to give the audience in the cinema a feeling of being in the theatre but also give them that bit extra – that’s the sort of fine balance,” he said.
• A Winter’s Tale is being broadcast live today and on January 2 at St James Cavalier in Valletta. For more information and tickets, visit www.sjcav.org.