Judi Dench tells firsthand how stage stars such as Richard Burton, John Neville and later Anthony Hopkins, were the rock stars of the theater in the postwar years in the UK.
The likes of Burton and Neville, in particular, were treated like gods. “That was before the Beatles,” Dame Judi remarks in Into the Breach, the enthralling documentary co-created by Freddie Fox with Richard Fullerton and produced by Kenneth Branagh and his Kenneth Branagh Company. The movie has its world premiere screenings at the Telluride Film Festival beginning Sunday with showings at the Sheridan Opera House and the Backlot.
It was, as Dame Judi puts it, a “pre-Beatles fever that the two of them [Burton and Neville] created at the Vic.”
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For her part, she got to perform opposite John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft in The Cherry Orchard, which led to her being cast as Juliet in director Franco Zeffirelli’s 1960 Old Vic production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Dench says winning the role was all down to Gielgud choosing her for The Cherry Orchard.
“It was like putting a stake in a wilting plant,” Dame Judi says during a moment in Into the Breach, adding that she was the plant while Gielgud was the stake.
Forever after, she was “at his feet.”
That idolatry also was down to the fact that Gielgud “obeyed the verse and lines, and he did everything that I believe should be done in Shakespeare.”
Hopkins, another member of the Old Vic company, says in the film that he was lucky to have acted alongside Gielgud and Laurence Olivier on stage.
Hopkins and Gielgud also appeared in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man starring John Hurt.
Impishly, Hopkins recalls that Gielgud was growing weary after doing “take after take” of one scene. “Sir John said, ‘”’When do we finish? I haven’t got long to live.’”
However, Into the Breach does speak of the theater’s importance to cinema. After all, Hopkins was cast as Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs after director Jonathan Demme saw him in landmark play Pravda at the National Theatre in 1985.
In Pravda, Hopkins plays a reptilian-like newspaper magnate modeled by playwrights David Hare and Howard Brenton on Rupert Murdoch. (Go see Danny Boyle’s searing movie Ink, based on James Graham’s stage play, which is also playing up in the Colorado mountains this weekend.)
Hare relishes telling the documentary’s filmmakers that it was Demme “coming to see Tony playing Lambert Le Roux that made him cast him as Hannibal Lector.”
I remember seeing Hopkins as La Roux, unfurling his tongue and flicking it at other characters on the Olivier stage. Gary Oldman rightly hails Hopkins’ performance in Pravda as “one of the greatest of the 20th century.”
In Into the Breach, Oldman is assembled with Dame Judi, Hopkins, director Richard Eyre and National Theatre artistic chief Indhu Rubasingham on a roundtable panel, hosted by Branagh, set up on the Old Vic’s stage where Dame Judi and Hopkins forged their careers. It’s marvelous watching their faces; it’s as if both are seeing ghosts of performances from decades ago.
The anecdotes certainly are fun, but I was struck by the meat at the heart of it with its discussions of the politics — past and present — and on sexuality and race, and on the sometimes ruthless nature of building a national theater.
There are particularly deeply moving scenes involving a quite magnificent Ian McKellen where he recounts how he rallied the most powerful politicians in the land in the name of gay rights.
For his part, when Fox reached out to Branagh suggesting that he collaborate on the documentary along with Fullerton, Branagh says he was struck by their vision for the film particularly about “why the theater sometimes creates profound change. Why it sometimes is that change that it expresses, either in political areas away from the theater, like gay rights ,and the political situation in difficult parts of the world.”
Branagh, speaking to Deadline recently, adds that sometimes theater is the “reflection of the volatility itself,“ and this comes through in the story the film tells of the formation of the National Theatre, where Laurence Olivier and later Peter Hall had to battle political and artistic headwinds to get the National on its feet on London’s Southbank.
Fox, speaking on behalf of himself and Fullerton, says that the period in the 1950s and early 1960s with the formation of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court “is such a great kind of touchstone moment that exemplifies” their vision.
It was a moment, Fox observes, “where the theater is leading the conversation on social change. It gets there before the Beatles. You know, while Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are still dressed up in their nice little blazers, you know, doing stuff that other people want them to sing. You’ve got Richard Burton, you’ve got John Neville, you’ve got John Osborne, you’ve got Albert Finney, you’ve got Tom Courtenay, Peter O’Toole doing things that were so countercultural that and so not, I think, what most people think of the theater as being.”
Theater, says Fox, was now “at an inflection point” where the future of human creativity “is in the hands of who knows what, whether it be AI or social media. We’ve got an opportunity now to reflect on the real work done in the past and have a moment to say to ourselves, “Well, what can we do next, and what comes next” and how can the theater be an ignition key, if you like, to to something bold like that again.”
Branagh has known Fox for years, having directed him opposite Lily James in a production of Romeo & Juliet a decade ago. Fox arrived on the production at the eleventh hour after the production’s original Romeo, Richard Madden, and then his understudy were indisposed.
Also, Branagh had gotten to know the Fox family well when Freddie’s uncle, Robert Fox, was the producer of Branagh’s first foray into the West End in Another Country in 1982 — which was, I should note, five years before before Freddie, son of Edward Fox, was born.
During our conversation, Branagh says that he was impressed how Fox and Fullerton already had acquired a vast amount of eye-popping archive footage that features the likes of Olivier, Burton and Gielgud along with Dench, Maggie Smith, Claire Bloom, Eileen Atkins, Helen Mirren, Joan Plowright, Derek Jacobi and many others. The archival videos are dynamite, a visual experience that Branagh rightfully describes as being charged with “magnetism.”
The magic of the film is that it goes back further to the 1930s empathized, in Branagh’s words, “magnificently and magnetically” by Paul Robeson, the great bass-baritone and thespian artist “and to hear him talking about his stellar appearance as Othello with Dame Peggy Ashoff and Dame Sybil Thorndike” and seeing film of one of his many trips to perform for coal miners in South Wales and in Yorkshire.
Jenni Carvell
There’s also a sense, Branagh observes, of “the wary and you might say wounded or at least complex attitude to what he did, and when he talks about playing Othello in the South for the first time in America, — and although he is as at all times brilliant and dignified and respectful and polite — you sense the danger that he put himself in.”
The film takes us through the permissive nature of the late ’50s and into the ’60s and the vital importance of the work with Lilian Baylis “really creating the possibility of populist theater,” says Branagh. But they also were “exploding the possibilities of what theater could do, and frankly, in those individuals and in those movements, they often made it sexy.”
Fox tells us that it was important the three key collaborators — Fox, Branagh and Fullerton — “to have a roundtable at the center of this, where you’ve got the head of the National Theatre, you’ve got previous heads of the National Theatre. We interview the heads of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the head of the Royal Court Theatre — the people who are responsible for making those social decisions about where theater is going next — and hearing what they have to say,” Fox explains as he spoke with Deadline ahead of Telluride.
Although, like many others, Fox is “nervous and trepidatious about what the theater is going to do and where it’s going to go. Is it going to become more important to us than it ever has been before, or is it going to vanish … I don’t think there’s any chance of it vanishing. I think it’s only going to become more important as the digital age grows on us, you know, like a rash.”
But is the “fever” still there? You know, the pre-Beatles fever that Dame Judi describes in the film.
“Where is the current iteration of how we make the world listen to legitimate shouts for attention that we think the theater deserves?” Branagh muses.
“On one level,” he continues, “I think that a recognition from all of us who do it that the unusual nature of being in a room, small or large, with people at a communal event. As Helen Mirren puts it very simply in our film, someone walks on, and the equivalent of, you know, an ancient storyteller in a cave, not unlike Mr. [Christopher] Nolan’s Odyssey, and a stick is banged on the floor — ‘Attend!’ — and a tale is told. That necessity seems to compel human beings. The way in which we want to do it has changed, but at the moment, each time I’m in a production, each time I watch one, I’m aware of the audience in a way that you can tangibly feel. It was certainly the case at the beginning of The Tempest [for the RSC at Stratford]. Here, I came on, the lights were up, and you saw every one of the 1,000 people. They saw it was me. I saw it was them. We could all see the whites of our eyes. And the beginning of Richard Eyre’s brilliant production involved me simply taking an inhalation of breath. And I found that a quarter of the way through that inhalation, the other 1,000 people were doing it with me. And they all knew there was nothing planned.”
Branagh adds: “If we feel as though we can get their attention in that way, and they feel it’s an appropriate way to spend their hard-earned cash and away from their devices, then we have an opportunity, and this film sort of starts to just bang the drum for. OK, well, we’re here now. Look at the heroes that went before. Look what we’ve got. Look where the future, scary though it is, may be leading. What can we do with this crazy, volatile,medium?”
As a coda, Fox adds that “the title is Into the Breach. Theater has always finally pushed itself forward into the breach at times of crisis, national crisis, times of national social change. I don’t know what that next moment, that next great 1950s moment at the Royal Court, is going to be. All I know is is that it happens, and that we as theater people have to have the scale of ambition that Laurence Olivier had, that Peter Hall had, that Joan Littlewood had, to be able to go when that moment comes, “We’re there and we’re ready, and we’re going to lead the conversation in the way that the Royal Court people did, that Joan Littlewood did. We’re not just going to react to it. Reacting is fine. Reacting is important, but it’s also about leading.”
Into the Breach is mouthwatering, whether or not you’re a theater fan. It’s jam-packed with interviews with the great and the good of British theater.
I’ve tried not to give too much away, but Oldman is priceless in this film. We sort of grew up together in the sense that I covered him from the beginning of his career, although I’m sad to have missed his debut season when he played the Theatre Royal in York way back in the day where he was cast as the cat in a Dick Whittington pantomime. He still remembers the little ditty that he and his castmates sang, and he performs it once more for our pleasure:
“We’re all at sea, we’re all at seas and kicking up a rumpus.
Yesterday we lost our way and now we’ve lost the compass! Yo-ho-ho…”
Branagh and Fox are in Telluride and will be participating in Q&As on Sunday and Monday.
Give yourselves a treat.
