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21 September 2026

We all have those relationships that don’t end well – goodness only knows I’ve had more than my share of them. However, there are times when all we want is to tie the bloody stump of the relationship off and get some closure. That, in a nutshell, is what The Breath of Life is all about, originally performed back in 2003 by (now) Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.

Madeline lives on her own in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight – a fitting location given that the Maskers Studio Theatre in Southampton is less than three miles away from the ferry terminal. She is visited by Frances, a writer and the wife of Madeline’s lover, ostensibly looking to talk about a book she’s planning on writing but, in reality, filled with questions and desperately trying to understand what happened.

The characters are a marked contrast between each other. Frances, played by Maria Head, is well dressed, coming into Madeline’s space wearing a silk scarf, a nice dress and heels with hair neatly done. Abi Linnartz’s Madeline, on the other hand, is wearing jeans, a loose-fitting top and is barefoot for the vast majority of the play with her hair in an almost punk-esque style. Their personalities also come across very differently: Madeleine is very much the calm measured one out of the pair of them, confident in herself, whereas Frances starts off nervous, unwilling to bring up the topic that brought her here, and occasionally working herself into bursts of frustrated rage when she doesn’t get the answers she wants. There are, also, some wonderful moments of silence when the characters are pausing, thinking about what’s been said and what needs to be said next, and licking their wounds when one has landed a particularly hard blow against the other.

Frances and Madeline are, in fact, the only people in this play. They are on stage almost constantly, and the continual dialogue between them is incredibly impressive – the sheer amount of lines that each actor has had to learn is truly terrifying to even contemplate, and both Maria and Abi have done a fantastic job of both learning their lines (with no discernible hitches and no prompts needed) and of embodying their characters; they should be very, very proud of themselves.

That being said, there’s a third person here that never appears, namely Martin – Frances’ husband and Madline’s former lover. Indeed, in the programme notes Kenn Hann, the director, likens it to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot where the main character never materialises. Throughout The Breath of Life both the characters move around the set, but it feels like they mainly move around the edges of it – the centre, which they never really enter but only orbit around, seems to represent the man that connects them but who has now moved on to pastures new from both of them.

Speaking of the set, the Maskers Studio Theatre is a small space, but having been fortunate to see the previous couple of productions here I am amazed by its versatility, tonight being configured as a thrust stage with seating around 3 sides of it. The staging is both simple and yet busy – the play is set in a single room in Madeline’s flat over a period of 24 hours, but it feels like a properly lived-in space. There’s clutter and chaos, the detritus of living and working in the same place, but Ken Hann’s direction has the actors making full use of the available space. Indeed, due to this being a thrust stage and my seat being on one of the long sides, following the dialogue occasionally felt a bit like a tennis match as the characters squared off against each other from opposite ends.

All in all, this is a very powerful play, with wonderful acting and great direction. The Breath of Life runs at Maskers Studio Theatre until 26 September and is well worth your time.

- Jon Cockeram