From “The Player Queen,” in The New Yorker, January 21, 2002, by John Lahr:

For Dench, “the crack” – the Irish term for fun – is riding the exhilarating uncertainty of the moment. To that end, she is famous (some would say notorious ) for not having read many of the parts she accepts. Instead, she has someone else paraphrase the script for her . . . . 

“It often seems absurd to me that a woman as intelligent as Judi could roll up at the beginning of the rehearsal not having read the play;” says Branagh, who directed Dench in his films of “Hamlet” and “Henry V” . . .  this method allows Dench to arrive at rehearsals with, as Branagh puts it, “the right kind of blank page to start writing on,” . . . “I don’t know what it is in me, this kind of perversity,” Dench told me when I visited her at home last July.  “I don’t understand it myself.   I think some people think it’s an affectation. It’s thrilling, though, isn’t it? You don’t know what’s coming.”

I’ve been thinking about this habit of Dench’s, and I am struck by how similar it is to the “Cover Up the Page” exercise we do here. If an Actor literally does not know what is coming next in the Script, it forces them to figure out, moment by moment, what their character’s thoughts are about what was just said or done. This is what creates real listening, and I wonder if that is why Dench never reads the scripts before rehearsals. As she said, “You don’t know what’s coming.” In life, we don’t know what’s coming, so we listen, we have a thought about what was just said or done, and we react. But unfortunately, as actors, we typically read a script and get into the mindset of “OK, this is their line, and this is my line,” and that kills real listening.

Think about the formulaic scene that you have seen a thousand times in comedies: someone is alone, trying to pre-plan an uncomfortable Conversation (asking someone out on a date, asking their boss for a raise, etc.). What always happens? Of course, the conversation never goes as they had planned. That is because, in life, it is simply impossible to pre-plan the present moment, and the present moment is always the time in which a real conversation or interaction takes place. And as actors, our job is to take a pre-planned script (a series of pre-planned moments), and make them seem as if they are taking place for the very first time, in the present moment.

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