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To have one stellar
Oscar-winning theatrical dame in the West End can make a producer
a fortune; to have two is a license to print money.
And though the
producer Robert Fox, who has lined up Judi Dench and
Maggie Smith to appear onstage together for the first time
in over 40 years, might just as well have had them recite the yellow
pages, he's actually gone considerably further and provided one
of the best new plays of the year for them to appear in.
David Hare's
The Breath of Life arrives in the West End like a breath of
fresh but salty seaside air - which is where the play is set, and
Howard Davies's beautiful production, heartstoppingly well
acted by the two Dames, frequently takes your breath away.
 But
it does so entirely by stealth, for this is a deceptively simple
but multi-layered portrait of two human beings with a painful shared
past that they are trying to make sense of.
Dench and Smith
play two sixty-something women who have both loved the same unseen
man, Martin. Now he's left both of them and started a new life with
a young American woman in Seattle.
In this aching
portrait of the emotional desolation both have suffered, Hare observes
them across a long day's journey into night and the following day,
as they confront their mutual loneliness and loss.
Hare - who sometimes
seems like a modern-day George Bernard Shaw - also uses them
as mouthpieces for contrasting attitudes to finding their places
in the world.
Both actresses
are extraordinary in charting the flickering changes of emotions
that pass between them in four highly charged scenes, as they wrestle
to find peace and the truth of what actually happened.
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