1979, Esme Allen (Judi Dench) is a well-known actress at just the moment when the West End is ceasing to offer actors a regular way of life. The visit of her daughter, Amy (Samantha Bond), with her new boy friend, sets in train a series of events which only find their shape eighteen years later. A play about the long-term struggle between a strong mother and her loving daughter, Amy's View mixes love, death and the theatre in a heady and original way. The cast also includes Eoin McCarthy, Ronald Pickup, Joyce Redman and Christopher Staines. This is a transfer from the Royal National Theatre. David Hare's recent plays include Skylight and the award-winning trilogy The Absence of War, Racing Demon and Murmuring Judges - all directed by Richard Eyre.Extracts from the reviews (at the Aldwych Theatre, see bottom of page for RNT's Lyttelton Theatre reviews):
'There's something disquietingly old-fashioned about the theatrical framework and the values of Amy's View. David Hare sympathetically views the travails of a famous actress, who spends her widowhood in a sumptuous Pangbourne pile, supported by a financial adviser and her returns as a Lloyd's underwriter. But Richard Eyre's National theatre production, in its West End transfer, is now infected with urgency and tension. The battle of beliefs, fought by dominating mother and independent daughter, is waged by Judi Dench and Samantha Bond in such a realistic blaze of anguish and anger, that I was riveted...Reduced to starring in television soap opera, ruined when allowing Ronald Pickup's blazered old soak and full-time bore to make a mess of her Lloyd's syndicate, Esme finally suffers a catastrophe in life which gives her the chance to triumph - in fringe theatre - and escape into the haven of creative art. There's a blast of forced, unjustified optimism about this finale. Yet Judi Dench's Esme, whose demeanour here suggests she has been sentenced to long-term grief, disarms criticism. It's a mesmerising performance marrying art and naturalness in one triumphant swoop. Dame Judi's Esme, in absolute rapport with a superlative Samantha Bond as her valiant daughter, is all butterfly impetuousness, arrested by tears, tantrums and sheer fun. Their duelling double act enthralls.' Nicholas de Jongh, London Evening Standard'...Amy's View, which opened at the National last summer, came across as a well-crafted drama which lacked that indefinable quality: inspiration...Hare mounts an eloquent defence of the theatre he loves with this stimulating and at times moving play, which follows a family through four acts and 16 years, from 1979 to 1995. He also delivers some happy hammer-blows to modish cultural commentators. Yet I can't suppress nagging worries about Amy's View. The debate - and I'm always anxious about art about art - sometimes seems schematic. Esme is allowed all the best (and funniest) lines while the odiously trendy Dominic (persuasively performed by Eoin McCarthy) is too obviously set up as the villain. His wife, Amy (Samantha Bond), complains that her mother has never seen Dominic's good side, but Hare doesn't allow the audience to either, at least until the last act. Dench and Bond look like a real mother and daughter, but the writing doesn't always convince that this is the case...As for the unexpected death that occurs between the third and fourth acts, there is the worrying feeling of a writer playing god with his characters to raise the dramatic stakes. There are times when Richard Eyre's production takes real dramatic flight...Dench is on magnificent form as Esme, an apparently scatty woman who is actually blessed with great common sense and unsinkable courage. What I like best about Dench is she that never solicits the audience's sympathy - she is often superbly funny here, but also cruel, selfish, baleful and bloody-minded, yet still you warm to her. Bond is wonderfully touching and vulnerable as her warm and finally broken-hearted daughter. Joyce Redman harrowingly charts the course of Alzheimer's as the grandmother, while Ronald Pickup creates a fascinatingly complex and touching portrait of the boozy businessman who leads Esme to financial ruin. This may not be Hare at the very top of his form, but there's no doubt that Amy's View is a work of real heart and substance.' Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph
'No British playwright is better than Hare at making arguments about social issues lively yet fair. Antithesis follows thesis, retort follows opinion, as deftly as ping follows pong. But this time the bats, the tennis table, or something, have been fixed. In the play's central conflict, which is between the cultural claims of the slick modern media and that antiquated form, the theatre, there is absolutely no doubt where Hare's sympathies lie. Although he makes token efforts to balance their views, Esme the doughty traditionalist wins by furlongs from Dominic, a sort of serial philistine labouring to be real...Why, then, do I still find the play so enjoyable? Well, there are three main reasons: one is that Hare writes with great wit and craftsmanly confidence, turning many a sharp sentence and giving us the best first-act curtain-line in town. Another is the pace and clarity of Richard Eyre's direction. And the third is Dench's wonderful blend of bloodymindedness and warmth. The final scene, which finds Esme grimly enduring her losses yet getting serious solace from the exercise of her art, is as moving as anything Dench, Eyre or Hare have achieved. More than the arguments that have preceded it, it makes Hare's case. The theatre lives. The theatre matters. The theatre is unique.' Benedict Nightingale, The Times
'He's a peculiar case is David Hare. Always, even in his best work, there are patches where you feel you're having your ear bent by someone still compelled to score points in the manner of some cocky little snit of a sixth former and a voice inside you wants to scream, more at the dramatist that at the character speaking, "Oh, for God's sake growup!" And then there are sequences that you'd give almost anything to be able to write yourself, like the masterly and beautiful last scene in Amy's View, now transferred to the West End in Richard Eyre's lucid, deeply felt production. Attendence at this play is compulsory because, in it, Judi Dench excels herself - which must take some doing...' Paul Taylor, The Independent
Extracts from the reviews (at the Lyttelton Theatre, Royal National Theatre):
'Bring on the superlatives. It would be as easy to inscribe the plot and subplots of Lear on a cherry-stone as describe the concerns of David Hare's latest piece for the National. It is about the value of theatre, cultural change and the decline of England. It is about mothers, daughters, the tension between in-laws. It is about loss, grief and the scouring of the soul. It is also . . . but it should already be clear that Amy's View is subtler than the Hare Trilogy, with its earnest thunderings about decaying institutions, and more complex than Skylight, Hare's most recent attempt to give private pain a social coating. Let's sum it up as a diffuse, incisive, funny, moving, difficult, fascinating play. The first half mainly involves the conflict between Judi Dench's robust, assertive Esme and Eoin McCarthy's willowy, deceptively fragile Dominic. When we meet them in 1979, she is a well-known stage actress, he a young nobody who despises the theatre as "irrelevant" and, to compound the offence, has impregnated her daughter, Samantha Bond's warm, decent Amy. Amy is the latest of a longish line of fragrant Hare women, and it is her faith in love, friendship and understanding that gives the play its title. But there seems little chance of her "view" prevailing in her own immediate family. Come 1985, and Dominic is her husband and a big media success, while Esme is on the slide. He makes TV programmes in which everything he regards as arty-farty and elitist is ceremonially flushed down a cartoon loo, and she has been reduced to playing caricature germs in ads for disinfectants. Together, they send you out to your interval drinks feeling that a) the man and dramatist in Hare are both sickened by the slick philistinism of the electronic age; but that b) his case would be stronger if he made it clearer what kind of theatre and art Esme embodies and Dominic hates.There are moments in the second half, too, when you wonder if that late, great reactionary John Osborne, has been reincarnated in the radical Hare. It is the 1990s. Rural Berkshire, where the bulk of the play occurs, is a suburban theme-park in which pubs have become wine-bars selling "wind-dried yak meat". Dominic is achieving world fame by making movies in which skulls are lovingly observed exploding. As for Esme, she has been beguiled by a doting neighbour (in Ronald Pickup's excellent performance, a mix of the sweet, the tweedy and the sottish) into becoming a Lloyd's name and, as a result, has debts too huge to be repaid by her latest career-move, which is playing a doughty nurse in a TV soap. Somewhere during a quarrel between Amy and Esme about the meaning of "taking control" of one's life, I wondered if the play was getting too unfocused, too scattered. But even if that's so, there are compensations. Again and again Richard Eyre's finely honed production wins your respect for Hare's wit and craft. Increasingly, it does the same for his sense of fair play, his willingness to offer a hearing even to the unlovely Dominic. But it is his handling of Esme that gives the evening its depth and, for all the seeming untidiness, its shape and coherence. I don't think I'm spoiling too many surprises if I reveal that during the play she loses pretty well everything, but somehow ends up the gainer. And that allows Dench to give a tough, touching performance. To see her at the end, staring dark-eyed into her dressing-room mirror as she remembers the greatest blow she has suffered, is to feel twice blessed. A major dramatist has written a strong, rich play, and a major actress has done him proud.' Benedict Nightingale, The Times.
'David Hare is no big fan of arts journalists, critics, and cultural arbiters: he once wrote in a Spectator diary column that you had to hate art to work for The Independent. So one of the gifts for which he has been rightly lauded in his later plays - the ability to see things from the other person's perspective - was always likely to be put to a severe test when it came to creating a critic-figure about whom the audience could be validly in two minds. Moving in jumps from 1979 to 1995, Hare's new play, Amy's View, looks at how the close relationship between Esme, a winningly actressy old West End pro (Judi Dench, never better) and Amy, her publisher daughter (Samantha Bond) undergoes mounting strain after the daughter throws in her lot with Dominic (Eoin McCarthy) a young film critic and wannabe director. Esme doubts from the start that he can make her daughter happy and tries to drive the pair apart by betraying Amy's secret that she is pregnant, a fact unlikely to go down well with Dominic whose work axiomatically has to come first.
As it turns out, Esme's hunch proves accurate. By 1985, Dominic has become the repellently arrogant, power mad mastermind of a high-rating TV arts programme that exalts in trashing creative effort on the pious pretext of cutting through elitist hype and sticking up for the ordinary "customer". A grudge is passed off as public spiritedness. With a galumphing lack of tact, given the downward spiral of Esme's fortunes as the West End declines and parts for older women dry up, Dominic also performs the fashionably ritual dance on the supposed grave of theatre.
A third act, set in 1993, brings the revelations - brilliantly paced both in the writing and in Richard Eyre's moving, funny, richly rewarding production - that Esme is now a casualty of the Lloyds insurance disaster, with no end to the money she owes, and that, ironically, in the light of her previous scorn for television and its Dominic-shaped values, she is reduced to playing a nurse in a medical soap. Her position oddly echoes that of her daughter. If Amy cannot bring herself to leave an adulterous husband, Esme refuses to sue or boot out her live-in companion (Ronald Pickup) the man who, as her financial adviser, is the author of her woes. So what right has either woman to criticise the other's arrangements? It is this that sparks off their climatic ding-dong. Amy's view is that you have to give love unconditionally and that one day it will be rewarded. "You never see the man I love," she complains to her mother. Offered insufficient glimpses of a Dominic who might have turned out better, an audience could answer: neither do we.
The excellent, bleakly ambivalent final act, set in 1995, after Amy's premature death, leaves you wondering for a while, however, if her love will bear posthumous fruit. In the stark dressing room where she is preparing to go on in a surprise hit, a withdrawn, sobered Esme, who has lost everything but her work, receives an unexpected visit from Dominic. Having betrayed Amy, is it legitimate for him to want to make something positive from her death by establishing the friendly relations with Esme she had always longed for? To hate him, he says, would be a waste of Esme's life. If the final, magically theatrical sequence suggests that Esme's life will never embrace Dominic, there's also a hint, for the first time, that Amy's view is not entirely cock-eyed.' Paul Taylor, The Independent .
'In the past few years David Hare has given us his epic state-of-the-nation Trilogy and Skylight, a magnificent play that combined a raw and wounding love story with a passionate analysis of the divisions in British society. After these herculean endeavours, it is perhaps not surprising that Amy's View, at the Lyttelton, should turn out to be an anti-climax. The play is never less than absorbing, sometimes bitterly funny and there are some affecting moments. Yet you never feel that Hare has achieved the insight that allows characters to take on a vivid inner life of their own.
There's a revealing moment in the third act, during a row between Esme, a distinguished actress, and her daughter Amy, whose ghastly television personality of a husband has just deserted her. Amy is trying to explain why she loved the man of whom her mother has always disapproved. "I went with Dominic because he was the future. I'm frightened of you because you're the past," she says. In my experience people never talk about those they love in such neat, abstract terms. This isn't an individual describing her own tangled emotions, it's a playwright summing up the theme of his play. Hare's major weakness as a dramatist is his tendency to impose ideas on his characters from without. He rarely does it in his best work - Skylight and Racing Demon spring to mind - but, though he's never as grindingly mechanical as Shaw, he does sometimes use his characters as mouthpieces for debate. This is particularly noticeable in Amy's View, for it concerns one of Hare's major preoccupations. He has long complained of the "fashionable whine of contempt" against the theatre, and the glibness of modish cultural commentary that dismisses the stage as hopelessly old-fashioned.
I agree entirely, but here arguments that might make an excellent newspaper article have been turned into less-than-satisfactory drama.
Amy's View spans 16 years, from 1979 to 1995. There is an undeniable fascination in seeing the effects of passing time and the ravages of age on the characters. But there is also something worryingly predictable about the piece. When Esme entrusts her business affairs to a neighbour, it's only too clear that, it is all going to go horribly wrong. And the joke about Esme appearing as a nurse in a hospital soap is so heavily signalled that it loses most of its humour. What's not in doubt is the excellence of the performances in Richard Eyre's, production, which successfully disguises, if not entirely conceals, the drama's weaknesses. Judi Dench is superb as the ageing actress watching her career and her life fall into sad decline. Apparently scatty, she gradually reveals enormous courage. Her demolition of her. slick and selfish media star son-in-law is devastating. Samantha Bond is equally good as Amy, whose "view", bleakly disproved by the play, is that unconditional love can conquer all. Eoin McCarthy has a harder time as the theatre-loathing cultural guru, who is all too evidently the villain of the piece. But there is a fine sense of dawning humanity at the end, and he delivers his voguish claptrap with trenchant assurance. As well as being a refreshingly old-fashioned saga of family life, Amy's View is a fierce defence of the theatre, which becomes Esme's last refuge. I have an uneasy suspicion, however, that those who despise the theatre will find little here to change their mind.' Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph