Maggie Smith and Judi Dench are splendid. Too good for David Hare’s bitter little play...
This is clearly going to be the no-hope decade, and David Hare’s new play is a fitting accompaniment. I do not mean this as a compliment. I do not know whose idea it was to reproduce Gauguin’s Women of Tahiti in the programme; but if Hare thinks that it illustrates or sums up this rancid, embittered two-hander, he is quite wrong. Gauguin’s women sit together in companionable silence, young but wise, looking like part of the surrounding nature. Innocence holds hands with experience. The Breath of Life (Haymarket), by contrast, is a resentful play about deception, deprivation and resentment.
Madeleine (Maggie Smith) is a retired museum curator, an expert on Islamic art, living on the Isle of Wight in a splendid house, possibly regency, both crowded and spacious. Madeleine is witty but humourless: a dangerous type. She knows she’s difficult, and well she might. Way back in the 1960s she drifted off to the States, where she met Martin, a young English lawyer, at the Alabama civil rights marches. They had a one-night fling that ended with a row because she “refused to be defined”. A picture emerges of a self-righteous, cerebral person, who tends to watch herself having experiences rather than just having them.
Enter Frances (Judi Dench), a novelist. She clearly isn’t welcome. She is morose, hostile, watchful, bitter. Two bitter women, then. What they have in common is Martin. When, years later, Madeleine returned from America, she met him again. By then he had married Frances and had two children. They began an affair that lasted, unknown to Frances, for 25 years until Martin, now a famous radical QC, acquired a younger model and took off for Seattle.
Frances has come because she wants to find out about the affair, to understand more about Martin; but also because she wants to write a novel about it, or perhaps a memoir. Gradually, with great expertise, Hare reveals a portrait of a shallow, slogan-spouting, self-regarding, noncommittal man and a shit of the first order. Frances recalls a conversation between Martin and the local vicar, with Martin inquiring whether it was true that we were all born in sin, doomed and so forth. You get the picture: the trendy lawyer slumming it a bit, flaunting his intellect, asking questions he doesn’t care two hoots about.
But I think Hare is also dropping a heavy hint about his own grim Weltanschauung: a cheerful world-view that we are all shits of the first order. Maybe so; but the play is too slight to justify this or to make you think seriously about it. The writing is dense and packed, and the jokes are, as you would expect, elegantly vitriolic, but the play carries these literary decorations rather like exotic flowers on a bad-tempered woman’s expensive hat. And when I call the writing dense and packed, I have to add that there is also a good deal of flaccid padding. “Is that what he said?” “And what did you say?” “In those words?” “And what did he say?” So, not so dense and packed after all. Hare is also interested in the ethics of writing. Is it a form of therapy? A form of escape? Self-justification? It is not that there is no answer: but the question comes across only as one woman bitching at another, a trick of character rather than a theme.
The two great actresses have no difficulty shouldering all this. Both deploy a miraculous but unshowy sensitivity and spontaneity that make you feel no acting is going on, only life. There are few higher compliments than that. Dench creates a strong, resentful character in whom integrity and moral strength fight a losing battle with inquisitiveness and anger. Smith plays Madeleine as a bird of prey, safe in her eyrie, but not as imperturbable as she thinks. Their final reconciliation, if that is what it is, is as contrived as their hostility.
The play is clearly destined for Broadway, which is where it belongs: it creates the impression of tough reality and serious thought without the demands of either. It also has some hilarious jokes about Americans, but they are almost flattering. Madeleine grumbles at one point about people being star-struck, so that they watch Monroe, but not the film she is in. Oh dear. Talk of giving hostages to fortune. That precisely is the best way to watch this play. Look at the stars: they almost make it real.
This article appeared in theTimes (UK) on October 20, 2002. Thanks to Emma for the photo of Judi, which appeared in a short blurb about the London Premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest, in the October, 2002 issue of Theatregoer Magazine.