by Mark Shenton BBC News Online

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.

Dame Judi excels as the defiant wife

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.