For One Knight Only, review: theatrical superheroes assembled, and the spirits soared
For One Knight Only was a theatrical superheroes convention that only the Covid crisis could warrant. On Sunday, Sir Kenneth Branagh Zoom-hosted a convivial confab involving Dame Judi Dench, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Maggie Smith. Or Jude, Derek, Ian and Mags, as Ken (who has worked a lot with Jude and Derek) familiarly called them.
The global audience was around 7,000, raising approx £300,000 for the charity Acting for Others, impressive amounts that still paled beside the totted-up figures Branagh presented at the start to summarise his guests’ careers: an overall film box-office take of $30bn, 233 awards between them, some 21,000 separate live appearances. Combined age? He was too polite to say – but it’s 333; rising – with him included – to 392. That almost takes you back to the days of Shakespeare, which was the historical period Derek, Jude and Ian revealed they’d most like to visit, could they time-travel.
Such was the whimsical line of questioning (much of it supplied by the audience) that characterised this once-in-a-lifetime digital hook-up. Those hoping for high-minded insights into performance techniques, verse-speaking or the future of theatre were left none the wiser, and the jigsaw of how their careers had intersected was only left partially completed too.
The tone was less encyclopaedic, more early onset Christmassy, accentuated by a mini-quiz inviting them to guess the meaning of now-obsolete festive words and tell customised cracker jokes. “What does I, Claudius use to wrap his Christmas present? A pair of Caesars,” proffered a bespectacled Jacobi.
McKellen was knight gallant enough to enter into the spirit of these trivial pursuits too. Dench (enthroned in a cosy armchair) warmly crackled like a cottage fireside. Even Smith – whose domestic interior was the most palatial and whose nonplussed looks attained full Countess of Grantham-esque disdain at points – succumbed to the merriment, reliving dread days as an usherette in Oxford and the time in Manchester her dress fell down mid-show.
What did we learn? That McKellen’s favourite role is Gandalf (“I love Gandi”), that he once stole (and guiltily returned) a drinks mat from the Rovers Return while appearing in Corrie and that he has taken to painting during lockdown. That Jacobi hasn’t read a review since a critical hatchet-job on his Cyrano de Bergerac and would be happy to haunt the Old Vic. That Dench gave the kiss of life to a dying goldfish and renamed it Lazarus. That Smith has done nothing constructive in lockdown. “It’s been absolutely appalling. I’ve watched a lot of murders and terrible things like that on the box”.
Much ado about nothing, and some might bewail the fact that these giants traded so much in small talk – though why not marvel at the lack of grandiosity? Some might sneer that this was the ultimate luvvie-in, but it was in fact like a séance aimed at spiriting up better times. At the end, there was a reminder of why they have held the world in awe for so long: a few Christmas-orientated lines from Act I of Hamlet (“Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes…”), matchlessly, stirringly spoken.
