The View from London

The Queen has no more devoted subject than the American tourist who plumps into his stalls seat with the indelible conviction that, as advertised, he is in "the theater capital of the world." The choice is wide, and seats, by Broadway standards, are both reasonably priced and easily obtained. When it comes to aesthetic caliber, the argument that all things dramatic are invariably ordered better in London than in New York City seems to contain as much myth as substance. British theater is often more impressive in bounty than in boldness, more remarkable for its solid reliability than for any comet flights of dramatic excitement. Herewith a sampler of the current season:

JUMPERS Tom Stoppard's first full-length drama since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead could have been written by a pixilated Orwell, a tipsy Shaw or a sozzled T.S. Eliot sounding off on metaphysics in a disorderly pub. Jumpers is an intoxicatingly clever absurdist comedy, a philosophical disquisition on the existence of God and the nature of truth, good and evil. It is also monstrously difficult to pin down.

The title stands for logical positivists, linguistic philosophers and their penchant for verbal gymnastics--of which the play itself is perhaps too full. The time is the near future. A rationalist-oriented "Radical Liberal Party" has taken over England and elevated the ex-Minister of Agriculture to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury. In full sight of millions of televiewers, one British astronaut has clobbered another into the moon dust (there is too little fuel for both of them to return to earth).

George (Michael Hordern), an unfashionable middle-aged philosopher, scarcely registers any of this. He is busy dictating lecture notes for a symposium on the subject: "God--good, bad, or indifferent?" His much younger wife Dottie (Diana Rigg), a prematurely retired musical comedy star, is concerned about the sudden obsolescence of moon lyrics and sees "great breakage" ahead. Her own has apparently already occurred. She is receiving questionable mental therapy (and even more questionable physical therapy) from the vice chancellor of George's university. It is to Dottie that Stoppard entrusts what may be his fundamental conviction: that a world without absolutes will shortly breed moral anarchy; witness the behavior of the astronaut. It is the Dostoevskian proposition that in a world that has no God, anything is permissible.

Stoppard pushes this and related theses with antic wordplay, inspired zaniness and crackerjack wit. The evening would sag in spots if it were not for Hordern. What might have been simply a caricature of an absent-minded professor emerges as a warmly affectionate portrait of the last living humanist. And Rigg is lovely to look at, especially in the nude, and to listen to as she delivers her lines with a resolute intelligence that seems to unbend the pretzel twists of thought.

I, CLAUDIUS Hurtling back through history for a couple of millenniums, we encounter the parlous state of Rome in decay as depicted in I, Claudius. Historical plays of this sort are like a cram course with illustrated color slides. The audience can never quite settle down to the entertainment for fear of some impending exam. Knowing the names of the characters does not really help, since their natures change with bewildering rapidity. Click: here is Messalina gamely struggling to protect her virginity from Caligula. Presto: here is Messalina, Empress to Claudius, cuckolding him wholesale in the foulest brothels of Rome.

David Warner's lame, stuttering Claudius is ironical, resilient, self-deprecatingly witty and wistfully sad as he realizes that even an Emperor cannot restore freedom to a people who no longer desire it. This is Playwright John Mortimer's staunch salute to Robert Graves' novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, but as drama it is a sloppy counterfeit.

LLOYD GEORGE KNEW MY FATHER More old parties, though not quite so ancient, take the stage in William Douglas Home's latest play. The title comes from an inane ditty dear to generations past: "Lloyd George knew my father/ My father knew Lloyd George," sung, ad infinitum, to the tune of Onward Christian Soldiers. This play features a potty old retired general (Ralph Richardson), whose thought processes seem to have stopped around World War I, and his spry-spirited wife (Peggy Ashcroft). She is resisting progress in another way by making calm, matter-of-fact preparations to commit suicide if the government bulldozes a throughway across the baronial estate. It doesn't and she doesn't. This asthmatic little item would wheeze its way into oblivion but for the robust first aid continually administered by those seasoned troupers, Richardson and Ashcroft. The nagging question remains: Why do even the finest of British actors bother with this sort of stuff? Can one imagine a Herbert von Karajan conducting No, No, Nanette? COWARDY CUSTARD Age has not withered or custom staled the tunes and lyrics of Noel Coward. This animated musical anthology has been culled from a half-century of his songs and patter. For Coward fanciers, a substantial cult, the only word for the evening is enchanting. Retrospectively, one can see that Coward the lyricist has been the slyly sophisticated offspring of W.S. Gilbert. Satirically, he could spoof the empire's topeeless Englishman who went out in the midday sun because he had a fond underlying assumption that that sun would never set. Temperamentally, Coward is a child of the '20s, that era of wonderfully liberating nonsense. He was one of the first philosophers of "doing your own thing," but lightheartedly and rather gallantly, without the grim puritan ardor of bra burning or the dubious courage of milling about in vast herds.

JOURNEY'S END A feast for worms, a season in hell make up the grim menu and locale of R.C. Sherriffs play. In war. Death never retreats; the fear of it is the one bad dream from which the soldier cannot awaken. The undescribed campaign of every war is the tactical offensive that men improvise against Death. Ostensibly, this play is about British officers in a World War I bunker on the edge of no man's land as they prepare to meet a big German attack. The strength and verity of the work is that these men are being tested not by Germans, but by Death.

Facing that ordeal, some joke and some jeer, some cringe and some cry, some drink and some pray. No man is born brave, but it is a brave sight to see a man acquire courage, and Journey's End shows us that too. This is a spare, sharp, impeccable revival, never quaint, never condescending, never squandering any surplus energy on belaboring the obvious by bad-mouthing war. The entire cast, and especially Peter Egan's taut, tart, nerve-shelled Captain Stanhope, deserves medals at the curtain.

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT It was in the role of Captain Stanhope that an unknown actor named Laurence Olivier astonished London in 1928. The stripling of the West End has become the titan of the modern stage. He excels, yet again, in Long Day's Journey into Night, as the celebrated actor-patriarch of the undisguised O'Neill clan.

If statuary can denote drama, Long Day's Journey may be the Laocooen of plays--a doomed family tragically locked in the serpentine coils of the past. The play seems to grow with each revival, and the present National Theater production is the best ever. Witnessing an Olivier undertake a great role by a great dramatist is like watching a god serve a god. One also watches how an incomparable actor shifts his centers of strength. This time, Olivier's eyes seem dominant--wide, melancholy pools of bruised wisdom, anvils sparked with anger, slits of caustic contempt.

Yet he does not overshadow the other players. They perform together with the intuitive affinity of a fine string quartet. As the wife and mother, Constance Cummings drifts into her morphine reverie like a child dozing off to a bedtime story. Her girlish monologue on how she once yearned to become a nun is such a palpable image of the unburied past that it seems to hover on the stage after she leaves it. The role has never been played more affectingly. As the older brother, Denis Quilley is a sportive charmer with an agile, mocking humor, a man of many-hued gifts, all blurred by drink. Broodingly, brilliantly, Ronald Pickup kindles a raging purpose in the tubercular frame of the younger brother, the playwright-to-be. To cap its triumph, the entire cast speaks American as if born to it, with a slight, finely inflected brogue that enhances the drama's keening Irish sorrow.

Despite the busy sights and sounds of the London theater, one element is missing: the unique vision and inimitable voice of a major playwright. Leading dramatists like Pinter and Osborne no longer seem to have the intense single-minded need for utterance that launched their careers. Playwrights like David Storey, Edward Bond, John Arden, Peter Shaffer and Tom Stoppard form an imposing secondary rank; but until now, at least, they have shown certain limits in scope, authority and theme, rather like pianists employing only the black keys.

The most distinguished drama in London is Long Day's Journey, the finest musical is Company (TIME, May 11, 1970), and the most satisfying participatory experiment is the sensory theater of touch as represented by the Liquid Theater, which had its origins in Los Angeles. Does this suggest that the London theater may need the U.S. for something more than summer audiences? T.E. Kalem

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