Amy's View

The Dame who played a Queen (and won the Academy Award for it), now reigns over Broadway. The incomparable Dame Judi Dench is recreating her London Award-winning performance in David Hare's Amy's View. There is nothing, even in her most recent and exceptional screen portrayals ("Mrs. Brown," "Shakespeare in Love," to say nothing of the BBC-TV comedy series "As Time Goes By"), this actor does on the screen to compare with the visceral life she brings with her on the stage. Even Amy's View, filled as it is with Hare's penchant for politicizing every event and character, and as beautifully directed as it is by Richard Eyre, is most generously fueled by Dench's dazzling performance. Her Esme is an invigoratingly tempestuous, self-absorbed London stage actor in conflict with the direction of her waning career, and the bad (in her view) romantic choice made by her daughter Amy (Samantha Bond).

The play, which progresses chronologically over 26 years, begins in 1979 at Esme's London suburb home. Here Amy prepares her lover Dominic (Tate Donovan), an eager young film journalist and aspiring media-critic, for Esme's return after the theater. Also in the home is Evelyn (Anne Pitoniak), Esme's aging mother-in-law who keeps warmed-over pub dinners in a stage of eternal readiness.

With Esme's star-quality arrival also comes her instant disapproval of Dominic and of Amy's commitment to him. Amy's view, as it is referred to more than once, is one of eternal optimism and the belief that love conquers all. However, when the outspoken, aggressively defensive Esme feels it is right for her to not only challenge the baiting Dominic's condescending views on art and theater, but to betray Amy's trust (I won't divulge how), she creates an irreparable breach in their heretofore loving and close relationship.

The years that follow trace the fall and somewhat amusing resurrection of Esme's career, as it also follows the painful course of Amy's deteriorating marriage that includes children. It takes a fourth wheel, Frank (Ronald Pickup), as a neighboring investment broker and widower, who has become Esme's occasional lover, to get this vehicle hurtling into another nightmare, a financial one. This involves Frank's well-meaning, if ill-advised counsel to place all of Esme's money into the infamous and disastrous Lloyd of London "Names" program, a bankruptcy-creating situation that significantly alters Esme's lifestyle (as it did scores of unwittingly seduced investors).

If Hare doesn't spare us characters with a bent for long-winded, often too slickly postured, diatribes, Dench makes her prideful retaliations exquisitely passionate. Bond makes us feel the heartbreak of a daughter caught between a mother she adores and the man she has chosen. Pitoniak deteriorates gracefully into senility as convincingly as Frank gently falls from grace. The play's two final scenes, including a nice bit by Maduka Steady, as a young actor, and a brief, but spectacular, moment of almost transcendent healing and redemption, make much of the talk that preceded it seem almost worthwhile.