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WHO is the greatest living British actress? Maybe the question is silly, since it makes an infinitely demanding art sound like a steeplechase for mature fillies, and maybe it is meaningless. After all, it is not exactly easy to measure Maggie Smith, with her droll wit and sly timing, against Diana Rigg, who is currently giving a fierce, febrile performance as Racine's Phedre in the West End. Or Dame Maggie against Vanessa Redgrave, who, sadly, seldom brings that wonderful emotional clarity of hers to the stage these days, or Dame Diana against Helen Mirren, of whom more in a moment. But if I were to nominate a woman for top spot at the theater's top table today, it would be Judi Dench. Those Americans who have yet to discover Dame Judi, or know her primarily for her Oscar-nominated Queen Victoria in the movie ''Mrs. Brown,'' will get the chance to fill the gap when she comes to Broadway next spring as the prickly, warm, gullible, shrewd protagonist of David Hare's ''Amy's View.'' Meanwhile, she is giving a performance in London that makes still greater demands on her multiple skills. She plays the title role in Peter Hall's revival of Eduardo de Filippo's ''Filumena'' at the Piccadilly: Filumena is an illiterate Neapolitan ex-prostitute with a steel-plated hide, a canny brain and a maternal heart doughtily thumping away inside. Since ''Filumena'' is a somber comedy, and its author shuns opportunities for hilarity that lesser dramatists would eagerly embrace, we don't observe the trick that gets the action moving. On storms Michael Pennington as the wealthy merchant, Domenico, expostulating so unstoppably that one fears he will send his dapper little mustache spinning into the stalls; he is followed by an eerily unimpressed figure with strings of black hair straggling down a white nightgown. This is Dame Judi's Filumena, quietly celebrating an improbable triumph over her aging lover. She has decided that 25 years is long enough to wait for a marriage proposal, especially as Domenico is now displaying a taste for younger flesh, so she has staged a deathbed scene and conned him into making a respectable wife of her. Nor is this the last of Filumena's surprises. It emerges that long ago she bore three sons and had them secretly adopted. How can Domenico try to annul their marriage when, as she proceeds to reveal, one of the boys is his own? There is some gorgeous comedy as Mr. Pennington quizzes the three young men about their mating and musical habits, and can't decide if his son is the cheery plumber, the supercilious shirt maker or the poetically inclined clerk. De Filippo, who died in 1984, set the play in his native Naples in 1946, so the situation is also deeply serious and the stakes high. Wedlock, blood and paternity all matter far more than in the London or New York of 1998. For de Filippo this is a dramatic advantage, but for actors in Europe's chilly northwest it's a challenge. I've seen British productions of the great Neapolitan's work that have left me feeling I was watching parody, Italian waiters flinging about feelings like overcooked lasagna. Can Peter Hall's cast resist spaghetti-house accents and rococo gestures and still create the intensity and tension that all this Mediterranean bonding requires? The answer is yes it can, thanks largely to Mr. Pennington, who successfully engineers Domenico's transition from arrogance through unease to a touching humility, and overwhelmingly to Judi Dench. Hers is a squat, rough-voiced Filumena who has been toughened by life and who still has a sort of slum truculence about her. A rasping cackle of glee gives way to a big triumphant smile as she reveals to the outraged Domenico that she has been robbing him blind to finance her sons' upbringing; and when she announces in a blunt, matter-of-fact way that she will kill him if he ever tells the boys that one of them is his son, one feels he would be most unwise to disbelieve her. But if the character demanded nothing but aggressive unsentimentality from an actress, the play would be less interesting and the role less tricky to perform. There comes a point when Filumena must admit to Domenico that, despite his neglect and his womanizing, she loves him, maybe more than ever. Eventually, there comes another when a woman who claims never to have wept finds that (to quote Timberlake Wertenbaker's full-blooded translation of one of de Filippo's stage directions) ''tears are running down her face like pure water from a polished rock.'' By some marvel of human geology, Dame Judi gives us the granite, gives us the purity of emotion trapped inside, and makes the mixture more than merely plausible. In its unpretentious way it is a heart-splintering performance, one that could only have been created by a major actress in total command of her protean strength.
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