Theatre is all `angel hair and fancy talk'. Theatre is `just wank time'. Virulent denunciations of the stage are made both in a new version of Corneille's L'Illusion comique and in David Hare's Amy's View, which opened last week at the National Theatre's Lyttelton. No dramatist is going to set out to prove these denunciations right: the characters who utter them are in both cases the villains of the piece. But the theatre for which each play argues is hugely different.You are never in any doubt about where you are in Amy's View. The scene is familiar from decades of theatrical performances: there are standard lamps, coffee tables and drinks on a tray; there are middle-class people heatedly talking about how they get on with each other. The case for the theatre is clearly and unfairly made, with Judi Dench as a sometimes dizzy, but always charming, actress pitted against a loutish director of violent movies and bad television arts programmes who wears suspect dark glasses. The struggle which underlies this argument the painful, affectionate tussle between Dench and Samantha Bond as her daughter Amy is lucidly staged and too much spelt out: `I went with Dominic because he was the future. I'm frightened of you because you're the past,' Amy superfluously informs her mother. The view which gives the play its title is that human beings should love one another unconditionally: it is more wishful thinking than opinion. Amy's View does not make its case: it will not convert anyone who thinks the theatre frumpy. But it has its own ease of form and expression. Hare's journalistic panache gives bite to his attack on critical carping about the theatre. His enthusiasm about writing for women is tinged by too much reverence for them as nurturing beings, but he gives them big parts, and he always provokes substantial performances. On this occasion, Judi Dench is by turns breathy, beguiling, histrionic and subdued. She is also funny. Physical wit is her most undervalued talent as an actor: she will often point a line with a flick or a flounce; when she explains that she is the sort of actress who specialises in undercurrents, in `layers', she gently waves her arms as if she were smoothing the frills of a dress. Samantha Bond, who manages to assume something of her stage mother's looks and to accentuate the similar catch in her voice, is bleakly convincing as, over the course of 14 years, she hardens and fades with disappointment.
And Hare is as usual well-served by Richard Eyre's direction and Bob Crowley's design. Amy's View moves briskly using a set which is nicely even-handed in paying tribute both to theatre and to film. A big picture window, looking on to leafiness, mirrors the Lyttelton's own proscenium arch. Evocative colour photographs of a rooftop seen through branches, of a London street, of a scruffy stage door serve as curtains at the end of each act and as announcements of the next: these are not so much lifted as peeled away from the corner, in the manner of a camera shutter slowly opening its eye.