Judi Dench has spent decades as one of Shakespeare’s great modern interpreters, but she still recoils at one role from 1971. Asked about playing Portia in The Merchant of Venice, she said she “loathed” it, called the play “bloody awful,” and said she used to dread going to the theatre every night.
The comments land now because they come from an actor whose name is tied so closely to Shakespeare that even her harshest judgment carries weight. Dench’s first major Shakespeare association began with Hamlet in 1957, and she was still appearing in the canon as late as 2015, when she took a run in The Winter’s Tale. That long arc makes her disdain for one specific production stand out even more.
She did not volunteer for the 1971 show. Trevor Nunn talked Dench into doing it, and Michael Williams was also in the cast. Dench played Portia opposite Williams as Bassanio, but the pairing did not soften her view of the play. She said she expected it might grow on her. “But it didn’t,” she said, adding that she would spend the day thinking, “God, I’ve got to do that bloody awful show again tonight.”
Her complaint was not a passing aside. Dench said flatly, “I think it’s a horrible play,” and went further, saying Shakespeare “must’ve been having a funny turn when he wrote it.” She called the whole thing “very below par,” a striking line from an actor who has returned over the years in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night.
More than 50 years after that production, Dench’s reaction still cuts against the image of the endlessly forgiving classical star. She did the part because Nunn persuaded her to, but she never made peace with it, and nothing in her account suggests the play ever earned a second chance.
