Word: breath
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...women are the wife of a man who has just left her for a younger woman and the man's long-time mistress. Had anyone put this trope on stage before David Hare? A small, pretty, witty play given snap and stature by the presence of its stars, "The Breath of Life" reveals a major playwright in the narrowing career journey from the political epics of his early years to the intimate, no-less-barbed confrontations of "Amy's View" and this two-hander. Some theatergoers wanted to follow this trajectory; most wanted to see the two Dames dish. Even...
...Coast of Utopia" was part of a trifecta of new works by top English playwrights. London this fall also has on offer "A Number" by Caryl Churchill - of "Cloud Nine" and "Top Girls" glory -and David Hare's "The Breath of Life," a star vehicle for Maggie Smith and Judi Dench. (Would you import the Irishman Brian Friel to join this exalted company? I wouldn't, quite, but Friel had a new piece too: "Afterplay," a slight memory-play with old charmers John Hurt and Penelope Wilton as characters from Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" and "Three Sisters...
...Movies show what's going on; plays discuss what went on. "A Breath of Life" (smartly staged by Howard Davies) is about understanding the past without surrendering to it. As Frances tells Madeleine: "The worst thing about living in the past, I'd have thought, is that you always know what's going to happen. ... He's going to leave you." We've all done it: the perverse parsing of a doomed love affair, the endless replaying of a favorite movie with an unhappy ending. I'm grateful that Hare lived in these women's past long enough to report...
...Washington sought to keep up the pressure on Baghdad, last Monday by citing Iraq's firing on U.S. aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone as a violation of Resolution 1441. Almost in the same breath, U.S. officials made clear they would not claim this as grounds to reconvene the Security Council and demand military action - for the simple reason that most Council members don't share the U.S. interpretation, because the "no-fly zones" are not specifically mandated by any UN resolution. Of course, if one of Saddam's ack-ack gunners succeeds - improbably, after more than five years...
...Bush Administration insists its policy is zero tolerance of Iraqi violations of the latest UN Security Council resolution. Administration officials announced Monday that Iraq had violated that resolution by firing on coalition planes patrolling the "no-fly" zone over northern Iraq. But, in the same breath, they said the U.S. would not take the matter up at the UN Security Council, where any move to punish Iraqi violations would have to begin. What's going...