YOU would pay any price - and thousands have; the run is sold out - to see Judi Dench and Maggie Smith acting together for the first time on a London stage in more than 40 years.
But Judi must have been up to her old trick of not reading the script before accepting the part.
Because she hardly gets a look in. She has star billing as a support act.
This is Maggie Smith's evening, always on the front foot, setting the pace, asserting her supremacy, as Madeleine Palmer, the triumphant mistress of an unseen radical lawyer, Martin Beale, QC.
Martin has has gone off to Seattle with a younger, American model.
Madeleine, a retired museum curator specialising in Islamic art (nothing is made of this), is visited on her Isle of Wight hideaway by Judi as Frances Beale, the lawyer's wife.
Frances is a novelist planning a memoir. David Hare is keen on taking pot- shots at novelists, mostly because our most applauded novelists despise the theatre. And he is even keener on examining the so-called truth of fiction and the real, warped truth of journalism, or its fictionalised soulmate, biography.
Frances's motives for the visit are quickly obliterated when Madeleine accuses her of seeking closure on their entwined story preceded by newspaper serialisation.
In some ways Sir David's play is utterly conventional. It takes place in continuous action over 24 hours.
And it unravels the truth of 'what happened' in much the same way as any old thriller.
Disappointingly, it does not ignite a theatrical 'head-to-head' in the way one was expecting.
Hare goes to great lengths in the programme note to say he wrote the play with no actresses in mind.
He should have had them much more in mind, and more about Judi and a little less about Maggie.
The script sticks to its agenda of investigating a new alliance between two wronged women without giving it the emotional clout demanded.
Dench has to sit and, well, writhe, with a hint of tears, for most of the play. The detail is fascinating and funny, archly written in that familiar, confident Hare manner of amused sarcasm.
Madeleine has moved south because the pace is slower: All people do there is gardening and expiring.
She met Martin in the civil rights activity of the 1960s, in Alabama.
He took her to orgies, and later a Test Match. We have no idea whatsoever-of the marriage she has not destroyed, exactly, but retrospectively undermined, with her 25-year affair.
The attack of the play is all with Madeleine, and Smith discharges her duty with ferocious technical glee, wiping the floor with her old soulmate who is left bewildered on the sidelines, looking crumpled and bemused.
This article appeared in The Daily Mail on October 16, 2002. Thanks to Maree Wilson for sending the photo.