It is wonderful to have two of our greatest Dames, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, together on stage for the first time since they started together at the Old Vic in the late 1950s. True, it would have been even greater to have had them in a better play, but let us not be ungrateful. David Hare has been, and will again be, the author of much stronger scripts than this one; but what he has constructed here is a wide-ranging, comic and often angry duologue.A novelist who has found late-life success (Dench) travels to the Isle of Wight to confront her ex-husband's mistress. We learn little of their shared lover, other than that he has moved on to Seattle with a third woman: but has his first wife come for revenge, out of curiosity, or just to clear her writer's block?
No matter. During a long night's journey into day, Dench and Smith review their lives and loves and the state of their nation, which, if anything, is Hare's main interest. Their speeches range from nostalgic accounts of early love through some of the bitchiest anti-American diatribes I have recently heard, to a lament that their generation has 'left no loft unconverted' but somehow failed to deliver on the liberal dream of the Sixties.
Dench is rooted, practical, wistful in her sitcom style; Smith is acid, dry as a martini, camp as a row of tents and the flashier of the two, until it emerges, in a long final monologue, that if anything she has been the more betrayed of the pair. Hare has some vitriolically funny attacks on the Isle of Wight and on an England that is now offering old-age pensioners half-price matinee tickets for pornographic movies.
Both women are in search of some kind of spiritual or emotional settlement, but Hare mocks their pseudo-American need for 'closure'. In the end, The Breath of Life is a moral debate and a morality play about our loss of morals. It is also a vicious and viciously funny play about survival amid lost lives and lost loves, as well as the eventual realisation that if you live in the past, at least you always know what is going to happen next.
Howard Davies's production on William Dudley's elegantly cluttered seaside set does its best to persuade us that there is a drama here, when all we really get is a conjuring trick of breathtaking skill: now you see the players, now you don't see the play. Hare only once puts a foot really wrong: in making the Maggie Smith character a former museum curator, he inadvertently reminds us of her appearance in a rather better play by Peter Shaffer, Lettice and Lovage, which gave us a plot as well as two other female dragons. All the same, try to beg a return for the short season at the Haymarket: Smith and Dench are the female, feline, feminist double act of the decade.
Thanks to Cindy Fiorina for sending this article, which appeared in New Statesman (UK) on October 28, 2002.