Tarnished by Tinseltown

Judi Dench famously does not bother to read scripts before accepting roles written by tried and trusted talents. One wonders whether she has now reconsidered this habit after finding herself stuck in the terminal tedium of The Breath of Life, the most recent David Hare play – known in our house as "The Kiss of Death". "Neither character is remotely convincing as a woman," remarked my wife of the novelist spouse and the curator mistress who rabbit on about a man who sounds about as worthy of their attention as they are of ours.

Because I was abroad on opening night, we saw the play with an audience of real people and were in a position to overhear, during the interval, how many of them were disgruntled that two of our greatest acting talents (Dench and Maggie Smith) were wasting what could have been a sizzling stage partnership on such a feeble play.

Sir David is up for an Oscar next Sunday for his screen adaptation of The Hours, the Michael Cunningham novel that purports to link a trio of women from three different periods though a shared connection with Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Also shortlisted is the film's director, Stephen Daldry, who previously collaborated with Hare on Via Dolorosa, the writer's solo show about the Arab-Israeli conflict. A joint summit of achievement, then, for this high-profile pair? Rather the reverse, I would argue. Oscar nomination by no means constitutes a clean bill of health for the creative soul of the nominees. That fact is demonstrated here by the genteel, gilded tosh that has been perpetrated in The Hours by one of the most distinguished English dramatists of the post-war period and a theatre director of electric flair and charm.

I would not be troubling to write this piece if Hare weren't also the author of Racing Demon, his 1990 play which, in its heartfelt understanding of the dubieties of the liberal conscience and of the quiet, heroically muddling-through kind of middle-class people that Hare presumably grew up with in Bexhill-on-Sea, will surely live as long as there is a theatrical repertoire. Nor would I be bothering to address this topic if Stephen Daldry did not have a string of achievements to his credit that are of lasting value. These range from his brilliant socialist-Expressionist take on the JB Priestley warhorse An Inspector Calls to his masterminding of the wonderfully imaginative refurbishment of the Royal Court – a refit that manages both to retain the original spirit of this hallowed venue and simultaneously to boost it into the 21st century.

So what has gone wrong with the two of them, then – and can one speculate as to the reasons? The Breath of Life and The Hours are both dire, the former more so than the latter. Hare's deluded and sanctimonious programme note to his play and several sequences in the movie made me laugh out loud at their unwitting absurdity. It's crass to start The Hours by giving us a ringside seat at Virginia Woolf's suicide. There is some risibly portentous cross-cutting between her present-tense act of marching off to the river and wading into the river and her recent neurasthenic penning of the suicide note to husband, Leonard. The trickling triplet piano music that underscores intensifies the banality of a sequence where, in order to honour the flagrant falsities of rhythm, gesture, and tone that have been imposed on the material here, Leonard is imagined rooted to the spot on discovering his wife's final letter and perusing it as though proof-reading it for the Hogarth Press. This portrayal gives you the strong impression that the man was incapable of reading and reacting at the same time. One half expects to hear him in voice-over murmuring: "She's a lovely little writer. Or was, by the sound of it."

With The Breath of Life and The Hours, Hare and Daldry have managed to get themselves into a false position. What is the point of soaring to a stratospheric commercial level if it means that you can no longer cast the actors who would do your material the richest justice? One of Stephen Daldry's great successes was his production at the National of Machinal, the Sophie Treadwell play in which Fiona Shaw made an indelible impression as the nerve-jangled husband-murderer. In any fair world, Shaw would have been Stephen's first port of call for The Hours. But no, Daldry has reached an altitude where she is not bankable enough. So the part goes to Nicole Kidman – a performer who, given the prosthetic conk, seems to have been literally putty in Stephen's hands. Kidman is, inevitably, up for an Oscar too, having already won the Bafta and Golden Globe. The New York Times raved that when you watched her "wrestle with the demon of depression", it was as if that torment had never been seen on screen before. Clearly the newspaper knows nothing about either depression or the history of film.

Both public schoolboys from unswanky backgrounds, Hare and Daldry have an ambivalent relationship with power and money. It's much more important to have a happy marriage than it is to write plays, and to that extent one is glad for Hare that he has found his soulmate in the wealthy fashion designer Nicole Farhi. But some feel that she has been the Yoko Ono to his John Lennon, a woman uniquely placed to sing "I'm gonna wash that Hare right out of my man." Certainly, Hare is unlikely to produce a great dramatised dissection of the fashion industry – a neck of the woods that can be every bit as troubled, troubling and pernicious as the institutions he has written about so acutely.

Let's end, though, by sounding a note of hope. Stephen Daldry continues to make fabulous forays into theatre direction, as witness his superb recent production of Caryl Churchill's A Number. But he's also a natural and inspiring leader. When he ran the Royal Court he used to make wonderful imaginative leaps. One wishes that he would once again lead a theatre, not just lead himself into temptation in the movie industry.

Matters are more heartening on the Hare front. He is currently at work on an epic about the decline of the English railway system, a project prompted and directed (for Out of Joint and the National Theatre) by Max Stafford-Clark, with whom Hare collaborated some 30 years ago on his excellent Chinese Revolution play, Fanshen. Stafford-Clark has never sold out, just like Richard Eyre who, having been Hare's chief creative crony, seems to have been airbrushed out of his plans. Hare needs these people. If he wins the Oscar for his Hours screenplay, it will be an example of that perennial predicament: a man who deserves an award receiving one for the wrong thing. He should leave menopausal fluff such as this behind and concentrate on getting back on track. Imagine it – a left-wing, thinking person's Starlight Express.