By bringing together onstage Judi Dench and Maggie Smith in his new play The Breath of Life, David Hare gives London the biggest conjunction of two home stars since John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson played together in Harold Pinter's No Man's Land more than a quarter of a century ago. Dench and Smith are two of the three West End actors whom I call "the miracle-workers" (the third is the more erratic Vanessa Redgrave): sometimes, miraculously, they can move you profoundly without ever letting you see that they have done the least thing to produce any such effect, while at other times you can see and hear them do extraordinarily moving things without being able to know how on earth they do them. Dench's last appearance in a Hare play, Amy's View, produced several such miracles and was rightly acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic.
But no miracle occurs in The Breath of Life. The play's two women have in the past shared the same man: he has now moved to Seattle. Frances (Judi Dench), his wife, comes to visit Madeleine (Maggie Smith), his mistress. There is much raking over the embers of the past. The two stars behave impeccably to each other throughout; the acting is never less than frightfully fine and sensitive.
Alas, I never quite believed in the play itself. Charmingly though it goes on, with nobody on stage but the two dames for some two hours, it actually feels considerably under-developed. I have listened to enough ex-wives and ex-mistresses to believe that there are invariably more layers to the wife's interest in the mistress and the mistress's in the wife than Hare suggests here. Peter Nichols's psychodrama Passion Play was much too floridly melodramatic for my taste, but it had more sense of the psychological complexities of this classic situation; it went too far where Hare does not go nearly far enough. Meanwhile, Hare's most annoying playwright's trick - his way of introducing central factual information very late on in the play, as a form of suspense (so we think "Oh, that's what they were referring to an hour ago", "Oh, now I finally know what she/ he does for a living") - is much in evidence.
I'm sorry to say that there are points when I also couldn't quite believe in the acting. The role of Frances is a waste of Judi Dench; and though she plays most of it beautifully, there is an artificiality in Hare's writing of her long reported-speech memories that she doesn't quite dissolve. Madeleine is the juicier role, with more punchlines and more strength, and Maggie Smith is riveting, funny, and multi-faceted without ever quite persuading us that Madeleine was once the Sixties free spirit the play sets her up as having been. Howard Davies directs; there are too many moments when the blocking feels choreographed, with one diva turning her back while the other faces front, or facing each other in motionless profile.
The Haymarket Theatre Royal is the West End's most beautiful and prestigious theatre, but all too often it gives us different versions of what we all know as That Play At The Haymarket. It is often laden with memories, charm, humour, tenderness, vulnerability; has one interval, a handsome set, buckets of Englishness, and nothing much happening but talk; and is ultimately both undisturbing and unreal.
This time, That Play at the Haymarket has been written by David Hare. My feeling is that Hare, who still makes much of his political concerns and his angry-young beginnings, has been heading this way for a long time. Anyway, The Breath of Life is exquisite and varied, and unimportant and forgettable.
This review appeared on the Financial Times on October 17,2002.