It's already impossible to get tickets. This meeting of the dames offered so many enticements. The encounter between Judi Dench and Maggie Smith promised to be more than a meeting of two theatrical styles. Two strands of British character - cavalier and roundhead - were to be displayed. Some observers (would the excitement about rivalry have run so high if male actors had been starring?) hoped for a bitchfest. That all this should occur in a play by one of our most assured dramatists made it irresistible.
But despite its high profile, The Breath of Life is a low-key evening. David Hare's play - in which two sixty-something women who have had a man in common (as the husband of one and the lover of the other) look back on their lives, while resolving not to live in the past - is unfocused and wispy. Every time you think it's going to be about something, it evaporates. Dench is the wife: a novelist deter mined to pop all human life into the maw of her fiction. The question of how people make sense of their own histories - by seeing them as stories or accumulating facts - is floated, but drifts away unexamined. Smith, the independent-minded mistress (she eats take-aways and doesn't clear them up) spent her student years in an America that she has now repudiated. The play approaches the idea that the British love-affair with America is souring - but never goes into it. The only thing really mulled over is the mild fixation ('obsession' would suggest too fiery a state) of two supposedly thoughtful women for a man who never appears and is never made vivid. But whatever male dramatists and directors (Howard Davies) may like to think, a man in himself isn't enough of a subject to set a stage on fire.
There are glimmers of what might have been. At a time when there's a tendency to think that great stage acting means semaphore gestures and obtrusive emphases, Dench and Smith show what can be achieved by barely moving and simply nudging a phrase. Dench (whose part is underwritten, making her little more than a semi-reflective mouse) suggests a lifetime of wary resolution as she tucks her scarf around her. Smith (who has all the most pointed lines, but delivers them lightly without doing her Kenneth Williams impersonation) indicates decades of sardonic impatience by drumming her fingers against a book. And in one brief episode both do something of which few actors are capable within full view of an audience. They age. You're hardly aware of it at first - it's like a slow fading of light - but Smith changes colour, becoming less vivid, more drained and white by the second. And Dench shrinks, crumpling into herself like a ball of tissue paper. These conjuring minutes are almost worth the price of the tickets.
This article appeared in The Observer (UK) on October 20, 2002. Thanks to Emma for the picture from the Breath of Life program.