of a play in two acts
by David Hare.
Directed by Howard Davies.
Frances Beale -- Judi Dench
Madeleine Palmer -- Maggie Smith
Toward the end of "The Breath of Life," the new David Hare play that makes legit history for bringing together Britain's most formidable thespian dames, Madeleine Palmer (Maggie Smith) says she's chosen to live on the Isle of Wight to have a place where the rest of her life would "go as slowly as possible." By that point, who among the audience won't be wishing the same of the evening? Not since the pairing of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson has London hosted such a concentration of star power from two senior performers, in this case Smith and her longtime friend Judi Dench, two women who are trophy carriers (they have five Oscars and Tonys between them) but are first and foremost supreme artists.
I'm not sure what Hare's drama -- which at first resembles the stuff of pulp fiction but enlarges in meaning and impact as it digs into the women's selves -- might look like in a lesser production (though its producer-friendly nature virtually guarantees the play a broad reach over time). For now, auds will be happy to watch two separate but equal acting master classes of the sort that the stage simply doesn't often offer any more, under the guidance of a director, Howard Davies, whose sure, skilled hand never once slips up.
Smith's bravura is on view from the start. Playing the longtime mistress of a radical English lawyer who has since absconded to Seattle with his new, young American wife, Smith's Madeleine is awaiting a visit from Martin's ex-wife, successful London novelist Frances Beale (Dench). The doorbell to her seafront flat rings, and Smith gives you the entire play in microcosm as she goes to answer it. The mere turn of her head signals surprise, apprehension, and expectation without the actress even saying a word -- and before you know it, Dench has entered the room, preceded (in Hugh Vanstone's clever lighting scheme) by her own shadow.
The mistress vs. the ex-wife: the terrain couldn't sound more time-honored, even shopworn, a fact Hare acknowledges before long. "What's it to be?" snaps Madeleine, interrogating Frances about the memoir of Martin that she has ostensibly come to research -- "a familiar story of a woman betrayed?" And just as "The Breath of Life" looks as if it may be settling for precisely that (this isn't the only time that the play flirts with deconstructing itself), Hare thickens the texture of a plotless scenario that is instead dependent on an accretion of moods and emotional shards pressed into a present-day reckoning with the past.
Hare's theme is what Madeleine in act two calls "the wreck of memory," coupled with the retreats, large and small, physical and emotional, that all of us make.
Who is the braver of the two women, or the most heartsick or foolish? It's a tribute to "Breath of Life" that the answers remain up for grabs, all the way through to a climactic speech of self-revelation from one actress that is almost as moving as our sustained view of the other sitting silently, in anguished repose.
In some ways, both women are cast against type, though that might not be apparent as Smith lets fly with one aspish quip after another, many of them aimed at Americans and America -- the country, in fact, where Madeleine and Martin first met. (Their affair, we learn, didn't begin in earnest until a chance encounter many years later back in London.)
Smith could not be more in her element as Madeleine casts droll aspersions on her chosen locale (the deathly Isle of Wight, she says, would be more properly termed "the Isle of black"), while no other actress could make an innocent word like "korma," as in the Indian dish, seem so comically charged.
It's the softness behind her saber-toothed attack, however, that distinguishes this performance from the already exalted Smith norm. As Madeleine elaborates on her past as a radical revved up for change who in middle age has closed herself off, the actress opens an enormously affecting window onto a woman who has surprised herself by asking for -- and accepting -- nothing.
In an extraordinary way, this quintessentially English perf is every bit as bluesy and rich as the mournful songs from Nina Simone ("Take Me To the Water") and Billie Holiday ("Solitude") that punctuate the four scenes. And watch the contrast between that smiling mouth and those sad eyes that have seen civil disobedience and social discontent but never known a properly reciprocated love.
Dench has the harder and clearly supporting part -- if such a phrase could ever apply to so singular a talent. A vengeful woman who spends much of the play stalking William Dudley's sublime essay in scenic bohemianism (the set itself should be put on display), Frances isn't allowed Madeleine's corrective humor, and one can easily imagine the role in other hands becoming a boring scold.
But Dench is far too savvy to play a stooge, instead presenting Frances as a woman of Ibsenesque intensity who wants what she calls "an end to the pain." Indeed, as the two ladies parry and thrust over a man in an attempt to give their lonely lives meaning, "Breath" suggests itself as a modern-day "John Gabriel Borkman," the Ibsen text that contains a comparable face-off (though with that play's fought-over man, for most of the time anyway, very much around).
Frances may have fewer colors in her, but that's to deny Dench's limitless capacity for shading. Suffice it to say that she is as riveting from the sidelines as Smith is center-stage -- and, for what it's worth, one could far more readily imagine Dench stepping into Smith's part than the other way round.
Does the play merit such massive star presences? Some will chafe at Hare's glib and smart-alecky detours (Madeleine's encomium to orgies doesn't ring true for a moment), while it's a bit rich to mock Americans for the same emphasis on "closure" on which the play so heavily depends. But in its distillation of mood and excavation of pain, "Breath" finds the writer once again in "Skylight" mode, this time with a compressed morning-into-day narrative that echoes Albee and O'Neill. And as the sun comes up, the shadow of Martin clearing with it, Hare dares to suggest a way forward in a production that wisely sends its two luminous players walking into the light.
Set, William Dudley; costumes, Jenny Beavan; lighting, Hugh Vanstone; sound, John Leonard. Opened, reviewed Oct. 16, 2002. Running time: 2 HOURS, 10 MIN.
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending this review, which appeared in Variety on October 17, 2002.