In terms of stage successes, many of the tributes to her will surely allude to plays by Edward Albee – Three Tall Women (1994), A Delicate Balance (1997), The Lady from Dubuque (2007); in the former she garnered particular praise, and an Evening Standard award, for playing an elderly woman who, beset by enraging infirmity and senility, is surreally revealed in a freer, more empathetic light after a stroke. But for me the most archetypally brilliant Smith performance was in the middle-brow Peter Shaffer hit, Lettice and Lovage (1987).
It was written as a West End vehicle for her, and, indeed, her anti-heroine Lettice Douffet used her guided tours of a Tudor stately home as a vehicle for cranky idiosyncrasy. It was a performance that was itself much ado about performance.
In the opening scene – potentially irksome but, in her fluttering hands, theatrically inspired – we saw her repeatedly embroider historical trivia about a staircase, the better to engage visitors, until it became a great aria of asserted baloney. When she reprised that bit at Shaffer’s memorial celebration at the NT, Smith held the audience in raptures, delivering a tour de force, seemingly extemporising each pronouncement, every detail harnessed to the whole.
The play could have been too parochial, niche and cosy but it travelled, happily, to the States, avid for her star quality. The New York Times’s Frank Rich, known as the “butcher” of Broadway, laid down his carving knives and marvelled: “Her long arms are in windmill motion, as if she were directing traffic at a rush-hour intersection. Her voice, the only good argument yet advanced for the existence of sinus passages, tucks an extra syllable or two into words already as chewy as ‘escrutcheon’.” It was a conjuring trick – you couldn’t quite see how she did it, her technique and instinct magically allied.