It is wonderful to have two of our greatest Dames, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, together on stage for the first time since they started together at the Old Vic in the late 1950s. True, it would have been even greater to have had them in a better play, but let us not be ungrateful. David Hare has been, and will again be, the author of much stronger scripts than this one; but what he has constructed here is a wide-ranging, comic and often angry duologue.
A novelist who has found late-life success (Dench) travels to the Isle of Wight to confront her ex-husband's mistress. We learn little of their shared lover, other than that he has moved on to Seattle with a third woman: but has his first wife come for revenge, out of curiosity, or just to clear her writer's block?
No matter. During a long night's journey into day, Dench and Smith review their lives and loves and the state of their nation, which, if anything, is Hare's main interest. Their speeches range from nostalgic accounts of early love through some of the bitchiest anti-American diatribes I have recently heard, to a lament that their generation has "left no loft unconverted" but somehow failed to deliver on the liberal dream of the Sixties.
Dench is rooted, practical, wistful in her sitcom style; Smith is acid, dry as a martini, camp as a row of tents and the flashier of the two, until it emerges, in a long final monologue, that if anything she has been the more betrayed of the pair. Hare has some vitriolically funny attacks on the Isle of Wight and on an England that is now offering old-age pensioners half-price matinee tickets for pornographic movies.
Both women are in search of some kind of spiritual or emotional settlement, but Hare mocks their pseudo-American need for "closure". In the end, The Breath of Life is a moral debate and a morality play about our loss of morals. It is also a vicious and viciously funny play about survival amid lost lives and lost loves, as well as the eventual realisation that if you live in the past, at least you always know what is going to happen next.
Howard Davies's production on William Dudley's elegantly cluttered seaside set does its best to persuade us that there is a drama here, when all we really get is a conjuring trick of breathtaking skill: now you see the players, now you don't see the play. Hare only once puts a foot really wrong: in making the Maggie Smith character a former museum curator, he inadvertently reminds us of her appearance in a rather better play by Peter Shaffer, Lettice and Lovage, which gave us a plot as well as two other female dragons. All the same, try to beg a return for the short season at the Haymarket: Smith and Dench are the female, feline, feminist double act of the decade.
It has been almost 20 years since Mrs Warren's Profession, Bernard Shaw's 1893 feminist drama, was last seen in the West End, and almost 40 since Coral Browne and Sarah Badel made their National Theatre debuts in a production that remains definitive, even though the new version by Peter Hall runs it a very close second.
The current production stars Brenda Blethyn as the redoubtable Mrs Warren, a lady who has made a fortune by running a chain of European brothels and only now faces the loss of her beloved daughter Vivie, who retreats into a life of loveless legality rather than get emotionally involved with the men she has come to despise, not least because her mother has made the family fortune off them.
Vivie, the daughter, and Frank Gardner, the rather aimless but oddly endearing young man who tries to woo her, are played by Rebecca Hall and Laurence Fox - who have never before appeared on any professional stage. Richard Johnson and James Saxon play the old buffers, with Peter Blythe as the infinitely elegant bystander. But after a faintly underpowered start, Blethyn takes over the last act and runs with it into the despair that only an ungrateful daughter can initiate.
Shaw's messages here are subtle and complex: nobody is perfect because life isn't perfect, and we all have to make our own compromises with the devil. His point about the hypocrisy of polite society, and the double standard by which women were judged and found wanting for "crimes" of which their menfolk were allowed to boast, was only reinforced by the fact that his play was banned for three decades by precisely the men who here come under most attack. No wonder they were frightened by the sheer authority of the Shavian debate, and the suffragettes were only just around the corner.
The Breath of Life is at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London SW1 (0870 901 3356) until 21 December
Mrs Warren's Profession is at the Strand, WC2 (020 7930 8800) until 18 January
