DAMES AT SEA.(three plays)

On London's West End this summer, David Hare reprised "Via Dolorosa," his 1998 after-dinner speech in the shape of a one-man show about the Arab-Israeli crisis; he followed it this month with another show about a stalemate, "The Breath of Life" (directed by Howard Davies, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket). But although the participants in "The Breath of Life"--which brings Dame Maggie Smith and Dame Judi Dench together onstage for the first time--lob incendiary devices from opposing entrenched positions, the play reports on an altogether different kind of war. It centers on Martin, a radical English lawyer and philanderer, who has jilted both his wife and his longtime mistress for a new Eden; he lives with a nubile young wife in the distant American Northwest--in a glass house that is transparently free of the architecture and angst of the past. The abandoned women, however, who are staunchly European in their outlook, carry the burden of history. The ex-wife, Frances (Dame Judi), a late-blooming novelist who plans to write a vindictive memoir about her feckless husband, hunts down the mistress, Madeleine (Dame Maggie), a retired curator of Islamic art, and together they stir the pot of grievance and regret.

Hare is a champion of the late John Osborne, and he has followed a similar trajectory from firebrand to boulevardier. He also shares with Osborne a talent for petulance and ridicule. As the sour Madeleine, Dame Maggie is as angular as her speech is barbed, and her nasal drawl is the perfect instrument for Hare's literate bitchiness and bile. Of her radical youth, as a civil-rights activist and self-confessed "enemy of the bourgeois," Madeleine says, "And how did that turn out? The obituary of my generation. We left no loft unconverted. The revolutionary project: to leave the world a little more chic than we found it." A lapsed idealist, Madeleine has been inoculated against life's disappointments by her own skepticism. She has called it quits with meaning; she mocks Frances's desire to write fiction. "You do it to give things significance which don't have significance," she says. Living in isolation on the Isle of Wight, Madeleine claims to use her mouth muscles only rarely, but that doesn't stop her from serving as a mouthpiece for Hare's pandering anti-Americanism:

Even here on the island, you see them in restaurants . . . Americans. . . . "Does this chicken have skin on it?" What's all that about? . . . "No, this chicken never had a skin. This chicken shivered skinless in its coop at night, just pure flesh and feather, terrified it might one day give an American a calorie." . . . At once the most powerful people on earth and now it appears the most fearful. . . . The most risk averse. Life with all the life taken out of it.

Dame Maggie is the showier of the pair, but, with the sense of lingering moral outrage that she conveys, Dame Judi leaves the deepest impression. Dench, who is short, plump, and swift, has a very specific center of gravity. Her husky voice hits every note of brokenhearted love, from torment to resignation. When she reminisces about her arguments with Martin, she gives this sketchily drawn, ever-absent figure a momentary vividness. "Finally, one night, very late, the worst night, up till then the worst night of all, his work papers all over the bed, I threw them out of the window," she recalls. "For hours I'd said the same thing. . . . 'I want something back, I deserve something back.' Him pulling on his dressing gown. As he went out, turning. 'The world is not a court of law.' Just that."

Although these two stellar performers have a sparky chemistry, Hare's play never ignites. He drizzles glib dialogue over their encounter; like coulis on a plate, it makes the dish look more appetizing than it actually is. Beneath the well-turned and often entertaining exchanges, there is no real sense of Martin, or of his family life, or of any deeper spiritual or emotional immanence. Hare, with his suave idiom, substitutes the sound of ...