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The New York Times
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK Starlight Illuminates the West End, but the Wattage Varies Widely By BEN BRANTLEY LONDON — And there they stand, sternly frozen in facing profile, like pillars in some temple to the histrionic arts. For those who worship at the shrines of theater and celebrity, it is indeed a holy moment. Judi Dench and Maggie Smith — both Dames! both Oscar winners! — are squaring off downstage at the Royal Haymarket Theater in the immortal roles of Wife and Mistress. Is it any wonder that this play, David Hare's "Breath of Life," has become the most sought-after ticket in town? And that furs and Burberrys at the Haymarket outnumber the denim and down jackets more common to the West End these days? Here, after all, is a production that unites two of the world's most celebrated actresses and in a vehicle that recalls the tasty schmaltz of vintage chick flicks with stars like Bette Davis and Mary Astor. Audience members who turn out for the promised package of prestige and prurience probably should not be disappointed. But the miracle of "The Breath of Life," which recently extended its run into January, is that both its leading, uh, dames are giving performances that do not seem cast in bronze, inflated by camp or tarnished with mildew. Even more miraculously, Dame Judi and Dame Maggie actually make you believe — at least while you're watching them — that they are portraying people of substance. "I always felt there was more to me than fiction would allow," Madeleine, Dame Maggie's character, says to Frances, the novelist played by Dame Judi. Madeleine adds, "I go a little deeper." If she does, it is only because Dame Maggie makes the extra effort to dig beneath her lines. A recent visit to London found only vague flickers of inspiration and originality among the latest crop of plays, either from writers as estimable as Mr. Hare and Brian Friel or directors who included Trevor Nunn and Peter Hall. Yet the visit provided an invaluable course in how acting can transform a play, whether by turning paper into flesh or poetry into leaden prose. Certainly this past year has been the starriest in the West End in decades, recalling that distant time when names like Gielgud, Coward, Olivier and Leigh regularly blazed from marquees. Madonna, Eddie Izzard, Jonathan Pryce, Gwyneth Paltrow, Woody Harrelson and Kyle McLachlan have all been seen on West End stages in 2002. The week I was here found a host of other bold-face performers in significant roles, from Glenn Close ("A Streetcar Named Desire") to Brenda Blethyn ("Mrs. Warren's Profession"), from the British film heartthrob Sean Bean ("Macbeth") to the action American television heartthrob Gillian Anderson ("What the Night Is For"). Seeing these performances side by side confirmed that displaced starlight is not in itself enough to illuminate a whole stage (e.g., Ms. Anderson), and that a major actress in a major play is not a winning combination when the part doesn't fit (e.g., Ms. Close). No matter what evidence British television is laying out to the contrary — "Celebrity Big Brother" was much in the news while I was here — it is by no means true that a star is a star is a star. And no matter how eloquent a playwright's words, and all the plays I saw were exceptionally word driven, they don't acquire a full pulse until the right person speaks them in the right way. Mr. Hare's title "The Breath of Life" nicely defines that essential quality. It seems telling that the most rewarding productions I saw were of plays that, with other casts, would have been tedious indeed. That certainly includes "The Breath of Life." This latest drama from the author of "Plenty" and "Skylight" festoons the creakiest of situations, in which a wife confronts her husband's longtime mistress, with conversational volleys about the nature of fiction, the fear of aging and the waning of youthful idealism, a subject especially dear to Mr. Hare. As smartly shaped as the lines often are, there's an inescapable feeling that you are sitting through the dramatic equivalent of a Chinese menu, moving thematically from Column A to Column B. Yet under the direction of Howard Davies, which both fulfills and transcends audience expectations, the actresses manage to invest the air with both a crackle of tension and a particularity of presence without falling back on old tricks. As an acerbic, resolutely independent specialist in Islamic art, Dame Maggie tempers the extravagant eccentricities for which she is famous and as a result has seldom seemed sexier. In a relatively underwritten role, Dame Judi finds a fire in her character's silences that speaks of bewildered anger not just at a husband's betrayal but at all the losses that time brings. If there is an assembly-kit quality to Mr. Hare's script, Ms. Dench and Ms. Smith work with hidden diligence at transforming the generic into the individual. No one could accuse Ms. Close of not working hard in Sir Trevor's athletic interpretation of "A Streetcar Named Desire," which ended its run at the Royal National Theater in November. This radiant star of "Fatal Attraction" and "Sunset Boulevard" discovers uncommon vigor in the neurasthenic Blanche DuBois, annotating lines with the outsize gestures of a charades team captain. While she brings persuasive emotional intensity to Blanche's big speeches, you never for a second think this woman couldn't take care of herself. There is gymnastic strength even in this Blanche's delusions, and when Iain Glen's Stanley wrestles her to the bed, it's hard to understand why she doesn't just deck him. Mr. Glen, of "The Blue Room," is a refined actor who appears to be impersonating coarseness. His inflections sound borrowed from Jack Nicholson, which at least is a change from Marlon Brando. On the other hand, Essie Davis, an Australian woman of captivating freshness, seems to float through the role of Stella in an enchanted and utterly convincing state of sensual hypnosis. There is considerable power, it turns out, in such sexual satisfaction, and this Stella has no problem standing up to her sister, Blanche. With the domineering Ms. Close onstage, such stalwart defiance on Stella's part becomes a simple matter of survival. Another young performer to emerge not only unscarred but also triumphant from acting with a lioness is Rebecca Hall, who plays the forthright daughter to Brenda Blethyn's duplicitous mother in "Mrs. Warren's Profession." Ms. Hall, making her professional debut, is the daughter of Sir Peter, the revival's director. This is the sort of conjunction that usually leads to theatergoers' staring at their shoes in embarrassment. Yet Ms. Hall combines an unworldly dewiness with a daunting authority that perfectly suits her character, one of Shaw's nascent New Women, and that tends to make those around her look two-dimensional. This unfortunately includes Ms. Blethyn, of Mike Leigh's "Secrets and Lies," whose robust, shrill Mrs. Warren somehow shrinks into a supporting role, as if she were a guest star specializing in Cockney bluster. The production, which also features Laurence Fox as Ms. Hall's Bertie Wooster-ish suitor, mostly registers as a bright, perky lecture, an aspect enhanced by the projection of relevant Shavian quotations on the drop curtain at the Strand Theater. Ms. Hall demonstrates that there is indeed bruised human flesh beneath the verbiage. A revival directed by Edward Hall, another of Sir Peter's industrious offspring, suffers from a similar emphasis on political pattern over individual psychology. That's the hapless Fascist-era "Macbeth" at the Albery Theater, in which the devious supporting characters, including a priggish, Machiavellian Malcolm (Adrian Schiller), provide the only frissons. The hunky Mr. Bean seems so much like a soccer star caught up in the throes of the game that one might as well call the show "MacBeckham." Mr. Bean and Samantha Bond, as a high-bred Lady Macbeth, struggle to simulate sexual enthrallment, but it's clear the Thane's thoughts remain on the playing field. A more genial portrait of mindlessness is being offered by Victoria Hamilton in W. Somerset Maugham's "Home and Beauty," a 1918 comedy whose pampered heroine has wound up married to two handsome army officers. Christopher Luscombe has staged the farce with the highly mannered artifice usually reserved for Restoration comedies, and his approach has strongly divided London critics. Still, it's fascinating to see Ms. Hamilton, who gave such a beguilingly natural performance opposite Mr. Izzard in the recent revival of "A Day in the Death of Joe Egg," turn into the yapping rococo poodle she is here. It's definitely worth catching her before she comes to Broadway next year with "Joe Egg," just to get a sense of one actress's exceptional elasticity. Ms. Anderson, best known as Agent Scully on "The X Files," seems anything but elastic in her London debut in Michael Weller's "What the Night Is For," a sort of psychodramatic variation of "Same Time, Next Year." Portraying a high-strung Midwestern matron reunited with a former lover (Roger Allam) in a hotel room, Ms. Anderson seems inhibited and tightly wound even when her character unravels. The night I saw the show an irreverent housefly buzzed the stars in their opening scene, an intrusion to which Ms. Anderson responded with charmingly droll spontaneity. That was by far the evening's high point. "What the Night Is For" is not exceptional at a moment in which so many new plays feel like retreads. Moira Buffini's "Dinner," at the National, is a mildly diverting exercise in skewering the rich and shallow that invokes (to its detriment) classic films like "The Rules of the Game" and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie." Shelagh Stephenson's "Mappa Mundi," also at the National, is a conventional and worthy sit-dram in which a dying middle-class man takes stock of his uneventful life. And Mr. Friel's "Afterplay," which recently closed at the Gielgud, is a melancholy, somewhat mechanical gloss on Chekov, in which Sonya Serebriakova (of "Uncle Vanya") and Andrey Prozorov (of "The Three Sisters") stumble upon each other in a Moscow cafe in the 1920's. These perfunctory descriptions do not account for performances that are anything but perfunctory. As Sonya and Andrey, the sublime Penelope Wilton and John Hurt manage to convey a richness of Chekovian resignation by simply succumbing to silence. Harriet Walter is a riveting embodiment of tartness gone toxic as the sharp-tongued hostess in "Dinner." And Alun Armstrong lucidly and unsentimentally etches the dementia of the aged father of "Mappa Mundi." At one point Mr. Armstrong's character looks at a map of his life, a gift of his children (portrayed by the excellent Lia Williams and Tim McInnerny) and starts to cry. "I thought my life would look like more than that," he says. Mercifully, in the London theater, there is usually an Alun Armstrong — or a Judi Dench or a Maggie Smith or a Rebecca Hall — on hand to turn flat cartography into a multidimensional human landscape.
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Dames
clash in Breath of Life Click
on the above link to find:
Evenings at the theatre do not come much richer, wiser or neater than The Breath of Life, David Hare's dense but compact new play starring Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. In its quietly illuminating way, it paints a rich canvas about the lives of two 60-something women who have shared and lost the same man - Dame Judi plays the wife and Dame Maggie the mistress. They have met only once before, years earlier, but now, in one long evening that slowly turns to daybreak, their paths cross again as they look back in anger, pain and regret at a past that has inexorably linked them. Hare lays out a finely tuned portrait of these two women, confronting their loneliness, stubbornness and mortality, as they seek to make sense of their lives.
The powerful clash of personalities and shared histories is so expertly calibrated that Hare's slightly over-schematic script unfolds with a tragic inevitability. The duo - appearing on stage for the first time together in over 40 years, though they have appeared in such films as Tea with Mussolini and A Room with a View - are both riveting to watch. Dame Judi, as the betrayed wife, is at once defensive and combative as she tries to complete the picture of how her secure married life came to be shattered. The actress, who has previously appeared in Hare's Amy's View, is brilliant at showing the aching vulnerability beneath her character's apparent fortitude. And Dame Maggie, as the former mistress, is by turns wary and guarded, acerbic and self-contained. She gives an utterly transfixing performance that combines the typically crisp, waspish humour that she always plays so well, with a devastating sense of the idealism that has meant she has sacrificed her happiness Undercurrent It is a bruising, coruscating study in isolation, and why she has decided that she is happiest in the company of books, not people: "You can put a book down and you don't hurt its feelings." But Hare's purpose is deeper and darker than to merely observe these personalities at war with each other and themselves. He is also a rigorously political writer, and constantly seeks out the wider politics in the personal. The play duly also encompasses a wider reference, that stretches from the American black civil rights movement of the 60s to a very current contempt for America's self-importance. This element of the play feels at once both a little too neat and earnest. But Howard Davies stages the production with such an unerring sense of psychological and personal detail that its quietly devastating conclusion restores humanity and hope. The Breath of Life is on at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket until 21 December.
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Dames
praised for double act The first appearance on stage together of Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith in 40 years has received a mixed reception from the critics. The eagerly-awaited West End opening night of The Breath of Life saw two of Britain's best-loved actresses play two women who share a common denominator - a man. The pull of the Dames has proved so popular that the play had already almost sold out for its run at London's Haymarket Theatre before it opened. But for some within the press the play overall did not live up to expectations. The Dames were praised for their "consummate skills" but the script and production came in for the harshest criticism. 'Arid rambling remarks' The Independent offered one of the most damning reviews, savaging writer David Hare's script. "What made David Hare think that the two characters' arid rambling remarks amounted to a conversation, much less a play?" it asked.
It is unimpressed by a production which sees Dame Judi Dench play a betrayed wife and Dame Maggie Smith the mistress. The former love rivals confront their past when the wife turns up at the home of the woman whom her husband kept secret from her for 25 years. What they both have in common now is that the man they shared has now moved on to a younger model. But for the Independent the potential of the production is not realised. "Howard Davies' listless production is like a Zen tennis match - there's a player on each side of the play, one serves, the other responds, but where's the ball?" it continued. Rave reviews At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Daily Telegraph loved the play, which features only the two Dames on stage. Critic Charles Spencer said: "Howard Davies directs a flawless production that finds these great actresses at the very top of their game." Dame Maggie was highly praised in many of the press reviews for her portrayal of the "other woman". The Daily Mail said the play's script left Dame Maggie's co-star in the shadows. It said of Dame Judi: "She has star billing as a support act." But even its praise of Dame Maggie was tempered by the disappointment that there is no theatrical "head-to-head" between the pair. And it ultimately found the script lacking in "emotional clout". Again David Hare's script left the Mirror disappointed. It praised the Dames but said it was not David Hare's best play. "Judi and Maggie's consummate skills saved a work that often bordered on the ordinary," it concluded.
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The Times of London October 16, 2002 Long lives stalled by the past by benedict nightingale
Theatre: The Breath of Life Haymarket DAVID HARE specialises in creating strong, interesting women characters, and in his bracing new The Breath of Life he has given us two of them. Not just that. His play brings our two leading dames, Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, into sly, subtle yet sometimes robust conflict. Smith’s Madeleine, a retired museum curator and former idealist, hides her feelings of wariness and hostility behind a wry, cynical facade. Dench’s Frances, an aga- saga novelist and apologist for ordinary family life, is insecure, baffled, needy and — down in her tripes — very angry indeed. So what’s the problem? Why has Frances suddenly appeared at the iron-filigree door — one of many nice touches in William Dudley’s set — of Madeleine’s flat on the Isle of Wight? The answer, as feminists will not want to hear, is a man: Martin. He met Madeleine and was rejected by her when they were on political safari in the 1960s Deep South, married and set up house in London with Frances, re-encountered and had a long affair with Madeleine, and has now scarpered to Seattle with a woman far younger than himself. Martin never appears, which is and is not a pity. If he were onstage, Hare might have to give him some humanising qualities. As it is, the evidence is that he is self- obsessed, arrogant and callous. Smith says in her uniquely droll way that “at least they have earthquakes in Seattle, and tidal waves”; but it is clear from the women’s words, and at times their hunched body-language and hurt faces, that they still care for the wretch. In the programme, Hare says that he wrote the play after realising that many more people, and especially more women, were extending middle age into something that was not quite old age: “I wanted to describe two women with a long past behind them, but the expectation of a considerable future ahead.” And what he seems to be suggesting is that they will stay stuck in that past until (Dench’s impassioned wish) they achieve “closure: some sort of end to the pain”. Both women clearly want this. As Smith says: “It’s boring living in the past; you always know what’s going to happen.” But can “closure” actually come about? The edgy, guarded conversation turns from the failings of America to the culture of narcissism, from the nature of novel-writing to a shallow society’s mania for loft conversion, yet always returns to their joint obsession. Yes, Martin. The piece is elegantly, shrewdly and wittily written, finely directed by Howard Davies and, of course, beautifully played by the dames; but the conclusion is deliberately unclear. Can living ghosts be exorcised and the future begin? Well, maybe.
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Tue Oct 15, 8:22 PM ET By Paul Majendie LONDON (Reuters) - Two of Britain's most famous actresses, Judi Dench (news) and Maggie Smith (news), gave London theater a welcome boost Tuesday, taking to the stage together to star in a new play that is already virtually sold out. The two Oscar winners, who were born within three weeks of each other in 1934 and are close friends, were hailed by the first night audience at "The Breath of Life" by David Hare. London's theater district, which is heavily dependent on tourists, was hard hit by an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the countryside and then the fallout from the Sept. 11 attacks. Long-running musicals like "Cats" and "Starlight Express" closed and the city launched hefty promotions to lure theatergoers back. Dench and Smith have proved a dream combination. "It is looking very good indeed. We are booking until Christmas and we are very nearly sold out already," producer Robert Fox told Reuters. "I would love to take them to Broadway. They are both totally remarkable and wonderful. It has all been very pleasant and enjoyable," he said. Smith plays a curator living alone on the Isle of Wight. One day a popular novelist, played by Dench, comes to her door. Together they expose their shared pain -- they love the same man. Britain's two most bankable actresses were last on screen together in Franco Zeffirelli's "Tea with Mussolini."
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The Telegraph.co.uk Theatrical dames go head to head in a play for two By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent (Filed: 16/10/2002) In a double act that might have been dreamed up in heaven, Britain's two most imperious theatre dames, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, went head to head last night on the West End stage in a two-hander, The Breath of Life, written for them by David Hare. It was the first time that the pair, the most influential British actresses of their generation, have walked the same stage for more than 40 years. Robert Fox, the producer, did not place a single advertisement for the play. Dames Judi and Maggie did not have to suffer a single press interview (an ordeal they both detest).
Pulling power: Judi Dench and Maggie Smith in The Breath of Life The prospect of an opportunity to judge which of the two Oscar winners is our greater national treasure had the tills jingling with no help needed. Tickets for the 10-week run at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, are virtually sold out. The advance box office take of £2 million is said to be a record for a straight West End play. The pair are old friends. Born within three weeks of each other at the end of 1934, they supported one another when they were widowed recently. Beverley Cross, Dame Maggie's second husband, died in 1998 and Michael Williams, Dame Judi's husband of 30 years, died last year. On the billboards, Dame Judi appears first for the simple fact that she comes first in the alphabet. In turn, Dame Maggie has taken Dressing Room No 1 while Dame Judi is upstairs in No 2. "It's all been very amicable," Fox said. Only onstage is there a whiff of grapeshot. Dame Judi plays Frances Beale, a novelist, and Dame Maggie a retired museum curator, Madeleine Palmer, who meet on the Isle of Wight to discuss the man they once shared. The actresses became friends when they appeared together, and shared a dressing room, in two shows at the Old Vic in the 1959/60 season of the embryonic National Theatre. "Jude was playing the ingénue - and I was not," Dame Maggie said at a recent Bafta tribute to Dame Judi. She went on: "What I remember most about that time is that it was the beginning of friendship, and I remember laughter - more than anything in the world." They have since appeared together only in films - in Merchant Ivory's A Room with a View in 1988 and Zeffirelli's Tea With Mussolini in 1999.
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The Breath of Life, Haymarket Theatre, London A dame on each side of the net, and a few rallies - but no sign of the ball By Rhoda Koenig 16 October 2002
Thanks to Cindy Lou F. for sending the photo "What the hell are you doing here," Maggie Smith's Madeline asks Judi Dench's Frances not long before the end of The Breath of Life. By that time, the line is not only a much-belated inquiry about plot and character but an existential question. What made David Hare think that the two characters' arid, rambling remarks amounted to a conversation, much less a play? What are these two great actresses doing in it? And when, oh when, will it end? The casting of this two-character show seemed to promise, if nothing else, an entertaining contrast – or contest – of acting styles and personalities. Who would wipe the floor with whom? Would Smith swan about, trailing clouds of neurotic grandeur? Or would Dench, less showy but more steely, carry off the honours? Alas, this question remained hypothetical. The play withholds information about the characters to a degree that is irritating rather than intriguing, and avoids colourful language as if it were a faux pas. This brings out the worst in both actresses: Dench industriously pegs away at her role while Smith floats above hers with airy disregard. A few flashes – the sardonic little lizard-flick, for instance, that Smith gives a two-word phrase of apparent sympathy – show what they are capable of. But the strain of being mysterious about nothing takes its toll and they aren't given much help by Howard Davies' listless production, which, for most of the time, resembles a Zen tennis match – there's a player on each side of the play, one serves, the other responds, but where's the ball? At dusk one day on the Isle of Wight, Frances, a novelist, calls on Madeline and stays till dawn. She wants to learn the truth, she says, about the 25-year affair that Madeline had with her husband. (If Smith had played the betrayed wife and Dench the mistress, the characterisations might have had some piquancy). Her reason, she is writing her memoirs. One might think this revelation would have Madeline up in arms, but, after a show of mild reluctance – The Breath of Life is as short on plausibility as on everything else – Madeline tells Frances how the affair began. Yet, despite Frances' probing, she has come to tell her story as much as to hear Madeline's. Frances repeats what she said and what Martin, her husband, said during their rows – these speeches are as interesting and as sympathetic as any monologues in which a women demonstrates her moral superiority. Nor does Martin sound like someone anyone would want to meet, much less sleep with. But neither women seems troubled about Martin now. Madeline is happy in her work, and Frances concerned about a larger issue. The irony of Hare's play is that, for all the silly little jibes at Americans, Frances is doing that very American thing – re-evaluating her life. No conclusion is reached, and the journey is a rather dull one. We don't even get the cat-fight such an encounter promises - Francis remains angry at Martin, not Madeline, despite the barbs the latter sends her way. Laughter is as thin on the ground as theatrical sparks. The dialogue is a lot of whining and wheezing and moaning and musing, the observations commonplace - "readers today are interested only in tittle-tattle'' or clearly untrue: "The older you get,'' we're told, "the easier it is to be happy. It must be nature's way of preparing you for death.'' An even better way, one feels, is sitting through The Breath of Life.
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Thanks to Cindy Lou F. for sending this photo
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October 16, 2002, Wednesday A breath-taking night with Hare and two great dames BY: By Charles Spencer The Breath of Life Haymarket Theatre Royal
THE BIG question hanging over The Breath of Life was whether David Hare would come up with the goods. For the first time in more than 40 years, Britain's two greatest actress dames, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, are appearing in the same play, together on stage throughout the evening without any supporting cast. Would Hare provide them with roles rich, deep and varied enough to suit their wonderful and distinctive talents? For those of you who have booked seats and are holding your breath, the answer is an emphatic Yes. The play is one of Hare's finest and, though he claims to have had no particular actresses in mind when he wrote The Breath of Life, the two characters might have been expressly written for Dench and Smith. Both actresses rise magnificently to the occasion in a play that is both bitingly funny and often deeply affecting. The piece also confirms one of my suspicions about Hare. He is best known as a state-of-the-nation chronicler, writing dramas on big public themes. But he is at his best when he gets up close and personal as he does in the two plays that I regard as his masterpieces: Skylight, a great play about adultery, and Racing Demon, a beautifully humane and sympathetic drama about a group of Anglican priests. The Breath of Life can stand comparison with both. Dench plays a popular novelist, Frances Beale, whose barrister husband has recently left her for a much younger woman. She has come to visit her husband's former mistress, Madeleine Palmer, a British Museum curator now living on the Isle of Wight, with whom he conducted a 25-year affair. Baldly stated, the play might sound like exactly the kind of novel the Dench character writes, Joanna Trollope for the stage. That, however, is reckoning without Hare's dramatic skill and moving emotional empathy with his two female characters. He lays bare the details of these women's lives with a cunning and precision that keeps you on the edge of your seat. So too does the prickly tension that crackles between them. Best of all are moments that allow Dench and Smith to look back through a long tunnel of years, to relive moments of pain and betrayal and love that cut to the heart. Smith is devastatingly fine. Although she is the guilty party she goes on the warpath, savagely accusing Dench of plundering their lives merely to get another book out of it. No actor is better at defensive irony than Smith and she turns in a virtuoso performance of witty put-downs and wry one-liners. "The obituary of my generation," she observes in that wonderfully weary nasal twang. "We left no loft unconverted." Yet as Smith vividly describes how she met her lover again, years after their original one-night stand, this apparently strong woman's eyes brim with tears and her voice cracks in a moment that is as moving as anything I have seen on stage all year. Dench's role offers fewer opportunities but she marvelously captures the deep pain of a woman betrayed for 25 years of her marriage and is astonishingly raw and anguished as she relives their bitter rows. What's more her account of her first meeting with her husband has a rapt, poetic intensity that sends shivers down the spine. Howard Davies directs a flawless production that finds these great actresses at the very top of their game. David Hare has done the two great dames proud.
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Dames Raise A Royal Roof Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench proved themselves at the top of their form at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket last night (15th Ocrober) when they opened in David Hares' new play - directed by Howard Davies - The Breath of Life. The press have showered praise on them, with the Times and Telegraph being particularly keen, and all the papers share a pleasure in seeing both stars on such good form delivering acting of a quality rarely seen. Neither actress is a stranger to the Haymarket - Maggie Smith appeared in a revival of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance there a couple of years ago, while Judi Dench was there recently in a revival of Theatre Royal (originally called The Royal Family), a 1920s comedy about an American acting dynasty, modelled on the Barymores. Both actresses are as popular in the States as in England and continue to have film as well as stage careers, but they belong, ultimately, in the West End, and to have them together on stage in a play by one of the country's leading playwrights is a theatre buff's idea of Heaven. You can get your ticket to theatre paradise through Theatrenow, as we have, through our unique contacts, been able to secure some tickets for some weekend performances - check our tickets section for updates.
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16th October 2002
There's an undeniable feeling of excitement sitting in the Theatre Royal Haymarket stalls when the lights come up and you're confronted with Maggie Smith on the stage, joined within moments by Judi Dench. These two grand Dames of British theatre have never appeared together on the West End stage so it's a momentous occasion indeed. And the ladies are, indeed, worth the wait: breathtaking to behold singly and doubly so together. Two 'women of a certain age'- not quite middle age and certainly not old age, as author David Hare writes in the programme notes; rather a point at which they have "a long past behind them, but the expectation of a considerable future in front of them" - who have come into that age with all the grace and power and beauty of lionesses. Smith and Dench bring those qualities and more to their parts in this world premiere of Hare's two-hander. Smith is retired museum curator and free-spirit Madeleine Palmer, at home in her Isle of Wight flat (designer William Dudley's bohemian enclave with tall windows, throw cushions and flaking-paint ceiling, all beautifully lit by Hugh Vanstone in hues of seaside sunsets, sunrises and boardwalk neon) when Dench's Frances Beale, the pulp novelist ex-wife of her ex-lover, turns up unexpectedly. Frances is seeking 'closure', "some sort of end to the pain" of her husband Martin's betrayal and eventual family desertion into the arms of yet another (younger) woman. But Madeleine, still smarting from her own decision to settle for less and "be defined by my need for this man", is in no mood to offer either solace or apology. David Hare is a writer of great intellect and sensitivity. This latest play of his - which he admits, he found tougher to write than any other he can remember - is rich in amusing lines, thought-provoking ideas and full-bodied rants (Americans, be warned), given an elegant treatment at the hands of director Howard Davies. And yet despite Hare and Davies, despite Smith and Dench, despite this incredible assemblage of talent, a subversive thought creeps into my mind half-way through Act One, growing and growing through Act Two until it cannot be denied: this isn't very interesting. The problem is, nothing happens. The women talk a lot - and too much about the awful Martin, with lots of he-said's and I-said's - but never really get anywhere. Certainly, neither woman seems terribly stretched by the material. I found myself repeatedly wondering how Dench would play Madeleine and what Smith's Frances would be like. Perhaps a bit of nightly role-swapping - as Mark Rylance and Mark Rudko did to scintillating effect in Sam Shepard's True West at the Donmar in 1994 - could help to up the ante. Not that any help's needed in selling more tickets to this sell-out event.
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October 16, 2002, Wednesday
LAST NIGHT'S FIRST NIGHT: THERE AIN'T
NOTHING LIKE TWO DAMES!
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By Alastair Macaulay Financial Times; Oct 17, 2002 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.
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The Evening Standard
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Judi may be starring, but the stirring role goes to
Maggie
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By MATT WOLF, Associated Press Writer
LONDON (AP) - You might argue about some aspects of David Hare's new play, "The Breath of Life," but no one can deny the history-making charge generated by its two stars, Maggie Smith (news) and Judi Dench (news). It has been 43 years since the longtime friends, born within three weeks of each other in 1934, last shared a stage as budding members of the Old Vic theater ensemble, where they acted Shakespeare and Congreve in classical repertory. Now, Smith and Dench have collaborated at London's Theater Royal, Haymarket to create the sort of theatrical excitement not seen since the late actors John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson last co-starred on the West End stage more than a quarter-century ago. Is the play great? Not to the extent that Smith and Dench are. But who cares? Even reading the phone book, these actors would be riveting. "The Breath of Life," thankfully, contains considerably more dramatic juice than a telephone directory, though a cursory description of it suggests a pulpy love triangle with one-third of the equation absent from the stage. Madeleine Palmer (Smith) was the longtime mistress of the radical lawyer, the unseen Martin, who was once married to Dench — until Martin abandoned both women for a new life in America with a young wife. Madeleine, we learn, has spent a lot of time in the United States — she met Martin working in the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Ala. Since reaching middle age, though, she has chosen to live out her life in relative isolation on England's Isle of Wight. It is a locale so sleepy, even deathly, she remarks, that it could just as well be called "the Isle of black." Frances arrives at Madeleine's seafront flat for the first proper meeting between the two women. She is ripe for a reckoning, and wants to know the details of Madeleine's years with Martin. Madeleine reacts warily to the celebrated novelist that Frances has become: Her affair, Madeleine argues, didn't take place to provide fodder for someone else's fiction. Hare — author of such London and Broadway hits as "Skylight," "Racing Demon" and "Plenty" — has always thrived on argument and debate, and he gives the two apparent adversaries plenty over which to chew in his new play, which opened Tuesday night. The efficacy of writing gets a real workout, with Frances opting first to do a memoir, not a novel, but in the end dropping her literary project altogether. So, too, do the mores of the America that Madeleine has somewhat regretfully left behind. But as the conversation continues through the night and into the next morning, Hare fields a surprise or two. How can the two women find a way forward? By both acknowledging and burying the past. Only then, as Madeleine casually suggests near the end, can they enjoy "the breath of life." Hare is blessed to have two stars who breathe life into whatever they do. Smith is nowhere better than at the very beginning, reacting to the arrival of her lover's forsaken wife with an unspoken mixture of panic, apprehension and expectation that is quite amazing to watch. Though no one flings a peppery aspersion like Smith can, she tempers her vinegary vocals with an element of regret: Madeleine is a woman who once wanted everything and who has settled for next to nothing. In the harder, more humorless role, Dench rips into Frances' desire for knowledge and, by extension, vengeance. But just as Smith is at her most commanding in the silent opening of the play, so Dench makes an unforgettable listener in a long sequence near the end in which Frances reacts to a near-confessional from Madeleine. Smith and Dench are led by Howard Davies' characteristically acute direction. William Dudley's set, a gorgeous image of entrenched bohemianism, is itself worth the price of a ticket.
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By Glenn Frankel Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, October 19, 2002
LONDON -- "It's boring living in the past," Madeleine tells her old rival Frances during one of their many verbal volleys in David Hare's new play, "The Breath of Life." "You always know what's going to happen." Perhaps for her, but for two hours we're happy to watch and listen as these two women of a certain age sift through the ruins of their love for the same man -- and his betrayal of them both. For Madeleine is played by Maggie Smith and Frances by Judi Dench, and Hare has written a two-woman play that allows them to compete and commiserate, mourn and moan, and display some of the range that has made them perhaps the dominant actresses of their generation on the British stage. The play, which opened this week, marks the first time Smith and Dench have performed together onstage in 43 years. And they're just part of what's shaping up to be an Autumn of the Divas in London. Down the road apiece, 77-year-old Elaine Stritch is packing them in for her one-woman musical-confessional, "Elaine Stritch at Liberty." Brenda Blethyn is getting mixed reviews for her role in a revival of George Bernard Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession," Emily Watson is winning polite praise for her performance in Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," and Glenn Close is sprinkling Southern syllables and sexual fantasy in a new production of Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire" that was both loved and hated by the critics. But Smith and Dench are the hottest draw. With three Oscars, a couple of Tonys and a wheelbarrowful of British Film Academy, Oliviers and other acting awards between them, either would attract big audiences. But together they've sold out the Theatre Royal Haymarket for a three-month run -- without a single advertisement and without either of them having granted a single pre-opening interview. There's already talk of bringing them to Broadway next year. Smith's Madeleine is a proud, tart, acerbic and vulnerable academic researcher, a 1960s radical who has never quite recovered from her political defeats or her longtime extramarital affair with a radical lawyer named Martin. She's been living a life of monastic semi-retirement on the Isle of Wight, minding her own business, quite literally, when Frances, Martin's estranged wife, arrives unannounced one day for -- well, for what is not quite clear. Dench's Frances announces at the outset that Martin has left her and moved to Seattle with a much younger woman. "Well, at least they have earthquakes in Seattle, and huge tidal waves," Madeleine points out helpfully. "All in all, it seems quite a hopeful environment." Frances is a popular novelist, and at first it seems she has come in search of information for a vengeful memoir she is planning to write about her life with Martin. But it quickly becomes clear that she wants something else -- a chance to vent her anger yet also to gain some true insight into what went wrong, both for her and for the rival she never knew. Madeleine is wary -- but gradually Frances wears down her defenses. The women spar and spat and take turns gently skewering each other and, of course, the much-hated Martin. There are occasional cease-fires and moments of poignant reflection. "Maybe you aren't a thoroughgoing bitch," Frances concedes to Madeleine at one point. "I'm your enemy," Madeleine replies. "Don't lose sight of that." Smith and Dench get equal time to emote onstage. There are some shared moments of double-heated passion, but more often they trade active and passive: When one is on the offense, stalking Madeleine's elaborately simple living room, the other sits or stands quietly. In an interview in the playbill, Hare says he didn't write "The Breath of Life" with either actress in mind. Writing for a specific actor would cramp his imagination and besides, "it also means you write to the idea you already have of an actor's identity. One of the joys of watching both actresses in rehearsal has been to see them rise to the challenge of playing the kind of people they have never played before." The critics were mostly kind. Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph called the play "one of Hare's finest" and considered the two actresses "at the top of their game." Benedict Nightingale of the Times said it was "elegantly, shrewdly and wittily written." But the Independent's Rhoda Koenig was unsparing, saying the "listless production is like a Zen tennis match -- there's a player on each side of the play, one serves, the other responds, but where's the ball?" Smith and Dench, both of whom turn 68 in December, first appeared together as part of the Old Vic ensemble in the 1959-60 season, even sharing a dressing room. They've also shared two movies: "A Room With a View" (1986) and "Tea With Mussolini" (1999). Smith has won two Oscars -- for "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1969) and "California Suite" (1978). Dench was a regular for years on the British stage and in a pair of soggy British sitcoms memorable mostly for her presence. But she has become famous across the ocean for recent film parts, winning an Oscar for her eight-minute walk-on as Queen Elizabeth in "Shakespeare in Love" (1998) and Oscar nominations for "Mrs. Brown," "Chocolat" and "Iris." Spencer compares Dench to Matisse ("fleshy, welcoming, instinctive, warm") and Smith to Picasso ("angular, challenging, manifestly intelligent, difficult"). More controversial has been an American import, Glenn Close. Her performance as Blanche DuBois in Trevor Nunn's revival of "Streetcar" won both ringing praise and vituperation from the critics. Nightingale called it "incisive yet passionate, intelligent yet deeply moving." Michael Billington of the Guardian said it was nothing less than "magnificent." But Sheridan Morley in the International Herald Tribune was scathing, saying Close had mistaken Blanche for Norma Desmond, the blustery fallen movie queen she played in the musical version of "Sunset Boulevard." "Blanche is a damaged butterfly, not a vulture on speed," ... he wrote. "Blanche is an accident waiting to happen: sensuous, borderline crazy, destroyed by her past and unable to face her future. Close gets near .to none of this: She is controlled, controlling and about as vulnerable as .a Sherman tank." © 2002 The Washington Post Company
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Theatre: The Breath of Life Maggie Smith and Judi Dench are splendid. Too good for David Hare’s bitter little play, says John Peter 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.
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The Guardian / Observer
Dames Judi and Maggie are a class
double act ...
Thanks to Hil for sending this photo But despite its high profile, The Breath of Life is a low-key evening. David Hare's play - in which two sixty-something women who have had a man in common (as the husband of one and the lover of the other) look back on their lives, while resolving not to live in the past - is unfocused and wispy. Every time you think it's going to be about something, it evaporates. Dench is the wife: a novelist deter mined to pop all human life into the maw of her fiction. The question of how people make sense of their own histories - by seeing them as stories or accumulating facts - is floated, but drifts away unexamined. Smith, the independent-minded mistress (she eats take-aways and doesn't clear them up) spent her student years in an America that she has now repudiated. The play approaches the idea that the British love-affair with America is souring - but never goes into it. The only thing really mulled over is the mild fixation ('obsession' would suggest too fiery a state) of two supposedly thoughtful women for a man who never appears and is never made vivid. But whatever male dramatists and directors (Howard Davies) may like to think, a man in himself isn't enough of a subject to set a stage on fire. There are glimmers of what might have been. At a time when there's a tendency to think that great stage acting means semaphore gestures and obtrusive emphases, Dench and Smith show what can be achieved by barely moving and simply nudging a phrase. Dench (whose part is underwritten, making her little more than a semi-reflective mouse) suggests a lifetime of wary resolution as she tucks her scarf around her. Smith (who has all the most pointed lines, but delivers them lightly without doing her Kenneth Williams impersonation) indicates decades of sardonic impatience by drumming her fingers against a book. And in one brief episode both do something of which few actors are capable within full view of an audience. They age. You're hardly aware of it at first - it's like a slow fading of light - but Smith changes colour, becoming less vivid, more drained and white by the second. And Dench shrinks, crumpling into herself like a ball of tissue paper. These conjuring minutes are almost worth the price of the tickets.
Thanks to Jan M.
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By: John Gross The Breath of Life The prospect of seeing Maggie Smith and Judi Dench together was enough in itself to create an unusual sense of excitement about David Hare's new play The Breath of Life, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. If you hire a pair of Rolls-Royces for the evening, you are bound to make an effect. But if you are going to get anywhere, you still need fuel. Madeleine, the character played by Smith, is an expert on Islamic art who once ran her own department in a big museum. Now she lives in retirement on the Isle of Wight. Frances, the character played by Dench, is a popular novelist. She is writing a memoir, and she has shown up because there are things she wants to get straight about the long affair Madeleine had with her husband, Martin (he's a QC). She also brings news that she has been deserted. Martin has decamped to Seattle with a much younger woman. Madeleine is prickly and sarcastic, but she is still willing to open up, and the two women talk their way deep into the night. Topic A on the agenda is Martin. He sounds an absolute horror. Their preoccupation is understandable - talking about their involvement with him is why Frances is there - but it is still surprising that we should learn so little about the rest of their lives. We hear almost nothing about their respective careers, for instance. Frances doesn't even rise to the bait when Madeleine launches an attack on novelists in general: it is inane, but you would have thought it would have warranted some kind of reaction. One must differentiate, however. Frances is passive, Madeleine is aggressive. Frances scarcely exists, except in bare outline. Madeleine is an undoubted presence. There's no contest between them. The best moments are when Madeleine speaks about growing older and refusing to give up - on the contrary, finding new solace in her work. (She is now a freelance.) But it can't be said that in other respects she shows any great signs of maturity. She preens herself on her sub-sophisticated wisecracks. (The Isle of Wight is where people "crawl south and expire".) She launches into some dismayingly crude anti-American diatribes. And for the rest, it is back to memories of Martin. Perhaps by the end we are meant to feel that the two women are finally getting the wretched man out of their systems. Perhaps we are meant to conclude that they have better days stretching ahead. It is hard to tell, and harder still to care: for that to happen, we would have to feel far more in touch with their inner lives. The actors still lend the evening a certain distinction. Judi Dench projects a noble anguish and makes the most of the fine moment when she recalls seeing Martin for the first time. Maggie Smith, who naturally has no trouble with the sarcasms, proves equally good at conveying a sense of loss. These are considerable achievements. But there is only so much that even the best actor can do to transform a play, and the sense of hollowness persists.
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By Claire Allfree, Metro It's rare enough to see a two-hander featuring just women, let alone Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. Shame then that David Hare has defined and linked the two characters by their relationships with the same (absent) man. Madeleine (Smith) has retired to the Isle Of Wight where Frances (Dench) visits her - for the first time - discovering the truth about Madeleine's 25-year affair with her husband. He is now living with another, younger woman; the affair and marriage - the past - form most of the conversation. As is often the case with Hare, this play is about how to live. Both women have followed different paths: Frances into domesticity; Madeleine maintaining the independence and sexual liberation of the 1960s. Frances ruminates at length on what makes a life, yet both women have perhaps ended somewhere similar, regretful and alone. Throughout, both pace around each other, as wary and antagonistic as cats; not until the end do they recognise something of themselves in each other, arguably the play's only real moment. Hare's writing is graceful, slippery, true and witty, but his crudely announced themes - ageing, reality versus fiction, the modern culture of feelings versus 1960s radicalism - are sti | ||||||||||||
Theatre Royal Haymarket, London
