The prospect of two great actresses Maggie Smith and Judi Dench raising each other's game in the same play was one to drool over. How disappointing then that David Hare provides them with so little to work with. Smith has the better of it. In a fiercely disciplined performance, she is Madeleine, an independent, uncompromising woman, once a '60s protester, now tartly and wittily contemptuous of the world today. She doesn't exactly welcome Frances, the dowdy ex-wife of Madeleine's one-time lover, who arrives at Madeleine's flat on the Isle of Wight because she is considering writing her memoirs. As Dench has little to do as Frances but look glum, it's sometimes hard to tell who is more unhappy, the actress or her character.Hare writes in the programme about how women of 60 today can still have a long future ahead of them.
Martin, a radical lawyer, has left them both and begun his life again with a woman half his age. But the two women invariably talk about the past.
Frances is always on the defensive, both for the popularity of her novels, and for having dwindled into a wife. Hare fails to give any sense that for good or ill her children have played a significant role in her life, beyond being the cause of endless chores.
Because Hare invariably has sparky and witty things to say, the evening is not unenjoyable. But the similarities between this and 'Skylight' only enhance the difference in quality. In the latter, the two protagonists were so much more equal, and emotionally drained by an encounter in which Hare seemed to bring the whole of the world into a tiny attic room.
Here the play is narrow, traditional and designed to appeal to the well-heeled Haymarket audience. No wonder it often seems like a lament for Hare's own idealistic and radical youth. The only thing that could enliven Howard Davies' production would be for the two dames to play both parts in turn.
Thanks to Cindy Fiorina for sending this article, which appeared in Time Out (UK) on October 23, 2002.