Since Tuesday, a larger, flatter, beiger Judi Dench has hung in Room 40 at the National Portrait Gallery. Hurled on to canvas by Alessandro Raho, she joins an agonised Harold Pinter (red, with books), a strangulated Jonathan Miller (brown, chin resting on fist) and Gilbert and George, who are yellow, grinning and naked. Dead Hamlets and Lears and Tragic Muses gesticulate; a sculptress is wearing no pants just around the corner. But Judi upstages them all.
She stands 2521mm x 1759mm and stares. She is at least the size of the Incredible Hulk, Steven Segal or Patrick Swayze. She wears a white T-shirt (perhaps Gap), beige trousers (George at Asda, I think) and a cream coat. Grey suede pumps with giant soles (most likely Russell & Bromley) conceal her Oscar-winning feet. Her expression is psychopathically neutral, like Kevin Spacey's. Her ordinariness is marvellous. Her latest, longest role is clear; she is a poster girl for militant normality and the patron saint of Waitrose. The dismal beatification is complete.
Why does Judi pose thus? Why did she do it? It feels like a national treasure has bitten us. She was Cleopatra, Viola and Lady Macbeth ("Out, damned spot, out, I say, from my wool/polyester mix jacket!"); shouldn't she be a goddess, an empress or a fiend? She could even have smiled, just a little. Instead she chose to play Jean from As Time Goes By, again and for ever. As I watched her, I imagined her eating mushrooms and doing something wet with Geoffrey Palmer.
Raho says he conceived the portrait waiting for Judi. He wanted "to trap something I saw in her while she waited in the foyer, unaware of me. I cast her as a wealthy housewife who shops at Jaeger." But Judi didn't have to agree to this dishonour; she could have drowned herself, attacked herself with a snake or cast herself off the Lyric theatre's battlements. Instead, she says she was "thrilled and very flattered".
Was Judi leaned on? Bankers JP Morgan paid for the portrait; perhaps they demanded she impersonate their customers. Perhaps Judi wanted to hurt Joan Collins, whose lips are vermilion for ever in the NPG, or to silently rebuke the costume-drama genre and its obsession with horses and wigs. Perhaps she was afraid to try to out-pout Helen Mirren, suspended nearby. Is it "Blairite"? Satire? A devious type of vanity? A Clarks advert? The enigma is locked.
