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.

Box-office: 0870-901 3356