A Trio of Triumphs in London

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Where does Dustin Hoffman, Hollywood's hottest leading actor, go to try his hand at Shakespeare? Where does composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who has had six megamusicals on Broadway in the '80s, launch his latest? Where does American playwright Martin Sherman (Bent) debut a work about his countrymen in exile?

The answer in each case: London. As a result, the city's ever thriving stage scene has hit its high point of the past few years. The leading trio of shows is better than anything -- revival, new musical or new play -- offered in New York City this past season, and London's other offerings far exceed Broadway's current roster in both quality and quantity. More shows are running in the West End this week than appeared on Broadway during the entire past season.

The most eagerly anticipated arrival, Lloyd Webber's Aspects of Love, is also the best. Adapted from a 1955 novel by Britain's David Garnett, it is a rueful and autumnal meditation on romance as a process of teaching, almost of parenting. Five characters of widely varying ages entwine, sort themselves out and entwine in new pairings over decades. This sophisticated material is handled with cunning naivete. Lloyd Webber's score, characteristically, consists mostly of a few much repeated tunes: Love Changes Everything, Seeing Is Believing and Life Goes On, Love Goes Free. All three rank among the prettiest he has written, and this time they are in the service of a coherent, deftly handled narrative.

Whose narrative is hard to say. No one is credited with writing the book. The wry and suave lyrics are attributed to Don Black, who was Lloyd Webber's main collaborator on Song and Dance, and to Charles Hart, whose words were the weakest part of Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera. Major contributions were surely made by the composer and by director Trevor Nunn, and the storytelling is also enhanced by Maria Bjornson's dreamlike designs. They shift fluidly from a naturalistic mansion courtyard to a mountain range at sunset conveyed by just a jagged line of reddish purple across a backdrop of black. The performers all act as ably as they sing, notably Michael Ball as the doomed boyish hero who ages into embittered manhood, Ann Crumb as the woman with whom everyone falls in love but who loves herself more than any of them, Kathleen Rowe McAllen as a pansexual avant-garde sculptor, and Kevin Colson, an eleventh-hour replacement for Roger Moore as an urbane older man much valued for his money.

Playwright Sherman, who has not made much of a splash in the decade since Bent, provides in A Madhouse in Goa the best new play of a fecund London year that has already brought new efforts from half-a-dozen top dramatists. Structurally, Sherman's show is two one-acts, but they are linked by one of the cleverest devices in memory. The first piece, A Table for a King, is an exquisitely painful tale of betrayals involving a pathetically dignified Mississippi matron, a sweetly awkward American college boy recovering from a thwarted homosexual infatuation, a casually seductive waiter and the sly, implacable owner of a Greek-island hotel where all the characters are living.

Having enlisted the audience's sympathies, and its knowing nods that the first playlet shows what life is really like, Sherman reveals in the second half that Table is not reality but invention -- the plot, in fact, of a famous '60s novel that a Hollywood producer proposes to contort into an MTV- influenced musical. Sherman's sprawling, ambitious piece has any number of themes, most powerfully the idea that art comforts us by letting us focus on microcosmic disasters so that we can ignore the global ones. Dominating an exceptional cast are Rupert Graves as the young artist of the first half and the producer-despoiler of the second, Ian Sears as the misleadingly lighthearted waiter, and Vanessa Redgrave, managing an impeccable pair of American accents as the Mississippi woman and then a free-spirited New Yorker.

The prospect of seeing Hoffman on stage as Shylock -- or perhaps as anything at all -- prompted Londoners to buy out essentially the entire four-month run of The Merchant of Venice, giving the play the largest advance sale of any nonmusical show in West End history. For once the actual event is no disappointment, although in director Peter Hall's shrewd reading the play is more comedy than tragedy and focuses more on Portia (played by Geraldine James of TV's The Jewel in the Crown) than on Shylock.

Hoffman carefully modulates his five scenes, using familiar but effective gestures: the shy grin, the hunch of the shoulders, the sudden stare, the deliberate monotonous thud to denote anger. His performance, anything but a star turn, is intelligent, confident and touching. Hoffman brings to mind his ingratiating Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman or, even more strongly, his film work in Straw Dogs as a quiet man driven beyond endurance into mayhem. The show never stints on the virulent anti-Semitism of Shakespeare's world, although Hall employs subtle staging and lighting cues to mollify modern spectators' disquiet at the injustice of the ending. The production is under discussion for transfer to the U.S. As with London's other pair of current triumphs, it cannot come too soon.