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Life's a Cabaret for Judi
By Luke Leitch Last updated at 00:00am on 24.03.03
Dame Judi gets it off her chest
Thousands of miles from the front lines in the desert some of Britain's best actors gathered at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane to voice their concern at the war in Iraq.
A 1,200-strong audience was treated to a never-to be repeated West End performance last night - the London Concert For Peace.
Dame Judi Dench stole the show, belting out a rip-roaring rendition of Cabaret 35 years after she first acted the role of Sally Bowles. Dressed in a black satin gown Dame Judi, 68, shimmied her way across the stage as she sung the bittersweet ode and won roars of approval from the crowd.
So too did Sir Ian McKellen - but with a very different performance. The actor read Suicide in the Trenches by First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon - a dark poem about the difference between watching war and being in the midst of war. Evening Standard Best Actor winner Alex Jennings read extracts from Fergal Keane's Letter to Daniel - a lament for children wounded and killed in wars.
His reading was followed by a song from 30 children from the Fox School in Notting Hill.
It was the singing that stopped the evening falling too much into melancholy. The cast of Anything Goes, led by Sally Ann Triplett, opened the night with a high-kicking routine.
Joanna Riding, whose run in My Fair Lady has just ended, returned to the Theatre Royal one last time to sing Eliza Doolittle's song I Could Have Danced All Night. She said: "It may seem a strange choice, but this is a song about joy in life, and that's something worth seizing."
There was also a stirring performance from the cast of new musical Ragtime, led by Maria Friedman, as well as performances from Les Miserables, The Beautiful Game, Company and Blood Brothers.
Adrian Lester and Samantha Bond appeared to read from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, and Mark Rylance gave a stirring soliloquy from Henry V. There were then words from the Stop The War Coalition, but more effective were a series of quotes on war read out by five actors.
One quote, from US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had the audience lost in despairing laughter.
Taken from a press conference last year at Nato about the "war against terrorism", Rumsfeld said: "The message is that there are no 'knowns'. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns.
"That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."
Speaking about the war after the show, Dame Judi told the Standard: "I feel very strongly about it. I think there are other ways of going about things.
"I suppose my generation is the last that remembers the Second World War. And I am so happy that so many people came out tonight."
Last night's concert, the brainchild of actress Janie Dee, showed that concerns about this war spread all across Britain's artistic community.
