Name your ideal leads for an important British play. If male actors came into the equation there might be some debate - Jacobi and Holm, or maybe Wood and McKellen - but if we were talking of women we would quickly come to a conclusion.Now that Vanessa Redgrave has let her halo and her career slip a bit, it would have to be Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. There's nothing like those Dames.
I would call David Hare lucky to have earned their services for his new play, The Breath of Life, if he didn't so obviously deserve what is probably the two women's first joint appearance since Dench played the peasant Phebe and Smith the gooseberry Celia in As You Like It at the Old Vic 40-odd years ago.
Other dramatists have their virtues - Stoppard is intellectually curious and witty, Ayckbourn rueful and funny, Pinter sinister and disturbing - but Hare is the playwright who always seems not only to have a finger on the pulse of a changing Britain, but the sense of civic responsibility to express what he sees.
We have admired his quality in everything from Plenty, about the political disillusionment that eroded the nation after victory over Hitler, to the recent My Zinc Bed, which involved bewilderment, frustration, loss of faith and the lure of alcohol.
The Breath of Life derives from Hare's perception: "There's a new phenomenon: the emotional vitality of women of a certain age. When you go into your sixties, you're looking forward as well as back at a great experience of life."
He is keeping mum about the plot, but Smith is a retired museum curator living on the Isle of Wight and Dench a popular novelist who spends an evening in her house. Expect sharp observation, serious content, humour - and terrific acting.
This article appeared in The Times (UK) on October 9, 2002.