London's Dry Season

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Broadway has long spoken in English accents, at first because audiences admired Britain's elegant actors and urbane playwrights, then because producers came to prefer works that had been pretested in London, where costs are cheaper and audiences perhaps more forgiving. In the early '80s, dramas by Tom Stoppard and Peter Shaffer dominated the Tony Awards for plays; while in the past few years, Trevor Nunn's staging and Andrew Lloyd Webber's melodies have provided the very definition of hit musicals. This year, though, a clog is developing in the transatlantic pipeline. While London offers the customary array of starry revivals, there are just two new plays of consequence -- by, as it happens, Stoppard and Shaffer -- and no worthy musicals.

The season's main song-and-dance items, Ziegfeld and Winnie, are biographies with vapid books and recycled songs. The portrait of Showman Flo is slack and bland, the glimpse of Churchill in wartime likely to appeal only to those with nostalgia for buzz bombs. In the wings: mostly revivals, including Can-Can and Brigadoon. Bemoans Producer Cameron Mackintosh (The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables): "It's Mausoleum Alley here." In part, the West End is the ironic victim of its own past successes. Fourteen shows now running in London have been playing for a year or more, and ten of those have already been seen on Broadway. Cuts in government funding have made even the two big subsidized troupes, the National Theater and Royal Shakespeare Company, more eager to spin off shows into long West End and perhaps Broadway runs. Says Labor Member of Parliament Gwyneth Dunwoody: "Anything in the arts that is experimental and potentially unpopular is now much less likely to get done."

Yet if the pickings are slim for would-be U.S. producers, the diet is considerably more nourishing for audiences. Stargazers can see Eartha Kitt in a revamped version of Stephen Sondheim's musical Follies, Wendy Hiller aglow in the American comedy Driving Miss Daisy and, starting next month, Rex Harrison in a revival of The Admirable Crichton. Those with a taste for undeservedly obscure classics can see two sprightly, acerbic Restoration comedies at R.S.C. headquarters in Stratford-upon-Avon, George Farquhar's The Constant Couple and William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer, plus Noel Coward's Easy Virtue, ably done in the West End. At the National, Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun, a 19th century Irish separatist tract masquerading as a farcical melodrama, proves its author a deft orchestrator of tone and plot.

The finest revival on any London stage is an Uncle Vanya (translated by Michael Frayn, directed by Michael Blakemore) that does justice to both Chekhov's hearty humor and his compassionate sadness at the waste of frustrated lives. It perceives the play's dominant tone not as lethargy but as furious, tragically misdirected energy. As Vanya, Michael Gambon demonstrates anew why he has come to be regarded as perhaps Britain's foremost stage actor. Alternately raging and lapsing into bathos, bubbling with kindness as he worsens the lives of those he most means to help, he embodies the tragedy of a common man. Just as powerful are Imelda Staunton as Vanya's homely niece and Jonathan Pryce as the destructive doctor whom she loves.

Shakespeare is admirably served at the R.S.C. by an unstintingly gory Titus Andronicus, a Twelfth Night that underscores the play's dialectic between religious piety and hedonism and a Merchant of Venice that stars Anthony Sher as an unabashedly Levantine Shylock. Sher's lilting cadence, bushy beard, flowing robes and sinuously Oriental gestures bespeak his status as an outsider in a world, much like our own, where economic imperatives bring diverse peoples into close contact without necessarily allowing them to understand one another.

At the National, Sir Peter Hall is concluding his 15-year tenure as artistic director with productions of three of Shakespeare's final plays, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest and Cymbeline. The plays, which Hall sees as Shakespeare's collective valedictory, are performed on much the same set by the same actors. The high point is Cymbeline, with its Spielbergian supernatural touches (ghosts appearing in dreams, Jupiter descending from the heavens) and robust battles. In one chilling scene, two panels of the back wall bang open to reveal opposing armies about to pour onto the stage. The most impressive coup de theatre, however, belongs to Star Tim Pigott-Smith, a specialist in complex villains. He invades the bedroom of a sleeping princess, robs and molests her while voicing a cascading confusion of emotions -- first pride, then shame, then lust, then greed -- with the naked horror of a man facing his true nature for the first time.

Many of Shakespeare's plays, including Cymbeline, present history almost as fractured fairy tales. Does it matter? No, emphatically not, would be the response of the dottily romanticizing tour guide Lettice, played by Maggie Smith in Lettice and Lovage, Shaffer's rambling but zesty comedy. The first act takes place in a dreary stately home, adorned chiefly by her fanciful tales. The last rings in the movement against modern architecture, a campaign / that, thanks in part to the patronage of Prince Charles, enjoys far fiercer support in Britain than in the U.S. To Lettice, modernism scorns the past and its romance. Yet what lingers from the play's three sprawling hours is Smith's one-woman parade of fussy antics and arch-nasalities to the dumb-struck wonderment of Margaret Tyzack as the horrified boss turned sly collaborator. Shaffer needs to edit and focus. Lettice's architectural views notwithstanding, less can be more.

Stoppard, whose plays at minimum offer glorious wordplay and the shimmering surface of what seems to be Big Ideas, is at his funniest and saddest in Hapgood. This one is about physics, espionage, thriller novels, superpower paranoia, Star Wars technology, defectors, conflicts between work and homelife, and the possibilities for flimflammery in employing three sets of twins. The author's ardent anti-Communism seems to have evolved into a world- weariness reminiscent of John le Carre, in which the two camps of the cold war are morally equivalent players of a pointless, deadly game.

The problem, as always with Stoppard, is plot. Hapgood is either too much a thriller narrative -- replete with an elaborate opening chase sequence that deliberately recalls bedroom farce in its slamming of doors and dropping of trousers -- or not enough of one to offer any real surprises. Stoppard radiates ambivalence about the genre he has chosen. Again, as with Shaffer, redemption comes from the marvelous acting of Felicity Kendal as an intelligence agent painfully aware of her shortcomings as a mother, Nigel Hawthorne as a wise colleague and, above all, Roger Rees as the defector, who is also the secret father of Kendal's schoolboy son. The spellbound joy and agony on his face as he listens mutely on the telephone to the voice of the boy he can never claim as his, can scarcely even see, is the finest moment of performance in London. It makes this sere season well worth the trip.