Everyone knows there ain’t nothing like a dame. Which is why the prospect of two of Britain’s greatest theatrical dames sharing a stage for the first time for more than 40 years ensured that the entire run of a new play sold out before it had even opened.
If Mickey Mouse had written a play for Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, my guess is that it would have made little difference. That David Hare has done the honours, however, is icing on the cake.
No one who forked out for The Breath Of Life will be disappointed. Maggie Smith plays Madeleine, an expert in Asian artefacts who lives on the Isle of Wight, partly, one suspects, because it’s not on the way to anywhere so no one has the excuse of dropping in.
Judi Dench plays Frances, a successful novelist, who has very little in common with Madeleine except for one thing. Madeleine was, for 25 years, her husband Martin’s lover. A once radical lawyer with, it seems, little genuine conscience, he has left them both and gone off with a younger woman to live in Seattle. Frances wants to write a memoir of Martin, and she wants Madeleine’s co-operation.
Hare’s rich, beautifully written play has an extraordinarily narrow focus -- just a single meeting between two sixtysomething women over one evening and the following morning.
His achievement is to contain two whole lives within this single meeting, two lives which still have some 20 years yet to be lived, the nature of which will be coloured by their ability to finally resolve their relationships with Martin and with one another.
They are not simply rivals, however. Though mutually hostile -- they snap at each other like terriers -- they are both victims, losers in love, heartbroken for very different reasons, which Hare teases out with the skill of a cardiovascular surgeon.
The acting in Howard Davies’s production is flawless.
Maggie Smith has the sharpest, funniest lines, and a particularly waspish streak of anti-Americanism which she delivers with her customary sting. (She wonders aloud what a waiter in a restaurant is supposed to answer when an American asks if the chicken has skin on it. ‘No, this chicken never had a skin. This chicken shivered in its coop all night terrified it might one day give an American a calorie.’)
She is also the more complicated character, preferring facts to fiction, dead artefacts to living people, or so it seems until she finally reveals herself at the end as having settled for less than she meant to. Smith’s performance is more restrained, less mannered, more subtle and more moving than any I’ve ever seen her do before.
Judi Dench’s bruised and wounded Frances has a more difficult task, gradually letting go of the pain, anger and bewilderment she has dammed up for decades. She does it beautifully.
Despite filling this piece with the breath of life as these two remarkable actresses do, the play doesn’t have the dramatic vitality of the magnificent Skylight, Hare’s earlier vivisection of betrayal.
Towards the end it goes on a bit and, in doing so, goes off a bit, but not until it has had a well targeted stab or two at the nature of fiction versus truth and about a writer’s attitude to his or her material. Familjar Hare territory, but handled with wit and wisdom.
Years ago, way back in 1935, and many decades before they were knighted, two of the greatest actors of an earlier generation, Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, shared the stage in a production of Romeo And Juliet.
For some weeks, Olivier was a virile, impetuous Romeo, full of animal magnetism, Gielgud a spirited Mercutio. After six weeks, they switched roles.
Apparently Gielgud’s Romeo was more thoughtful and romantic, while Olivier brought more dash and swagger to the part of Mercutio. By all accounts it was more than a fascinating exercise; it illuminated the play and provided a master class in the art of acting.
I would love to see Dames Maggie and Judi changing places in The Breath Of Life. I suspect, should they do so, that this play may prove even more penetrating.
Thanks to Maree Wilson for sending this article which appeared in the Sunday Mail (UK) on October 20, 2002.