DIRECTOR STEPHEN FREARS AND AWARD-WINNING ACTRESS DAME JUDI DENCH TEAM UP FOR A TALE OF CLASS, SNOBBERY AND NAKED GIRLS SET IN LONDON BEFORE AND DURING WORLD WAR II. JO FLETCHER PULLS BACK THE CURTAIN ON MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS.

It was inspired by the French and became a national institution because it defied the Germans, but there can be few things more quintessentially British than the Windmill Theatre, a Soho institution for over half a century and able to boast that, during the dark days of the World War II blitz, alone among the capital’s theatres, “We Never Closed” (see box on page 59).

Equally British is the team that has brought the remarkable story of the theatre’s heyday to the screen in Mrs Henderson Presents: veteran director Stephen Frears who, from My Beautiful Laundrette through to Dirty Pretty Things, has provided many of the most striking snapshots of British life over the past 20 years; Oscar and BAFTA Award-winning actress Judi Dench, who plays the title role; and Bob Hoskins, who doubles as executive producer and as Dench’s co-star in the role of Vivian Van Damm, the man brought in by Mrs Henderson to manage the Windmill.

A widow in her 60s and not yet ready to settle back into her armchair, the real Mrs Henderson was a formidable woman who clashed with Van Damm as much as she collaborated. But, between them, they came up with a unique theatrical concept for the theatre she bought as a ‘hobby’, when needlepoint didn’t prove demanding enough. The Windmill started with vaudeville then, when the competition got too much, switched to the all-nude tableaux vivants for which it became famous. That these were allowed at all is a miracle for a London in which, even 20 years later, the prosecuting council in the censorship trial of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover could ask a witness whether this was a “book you would wish your wife or servants to read?”

That unique mixture of prudery, chauvinism and snobbishness which characterised Britain until (at least) the sixties both accounted for the appeal of the Windmill and explained how Mrs Henderson got away with it. She knew the chief censor, Lord Cromer - played in the film by US-based British actor Christopher Guest, himself an aristocrat (he is the fifth Baron Haden-Guest of Saling) - socially and simply had a word with him, convincing him the tableaux would be ‘artistic’. The only proviso was that none of the girls was allowed to move a muscle. Between them, Mrs Henderson and Mr Van Damm had struck gold.