Arthur Miller, Old Hat at Home, Is a London Hit

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Any new play by Arthur Miller is an important event in American culture. One as theatrically bold and intellectually subtle as The Ride Down Mt. Morgan is reason to shout for joy. Robustly funny, full of fantasy and hallucination yet easy to follow, it is free of the world-weary, elegiac tone of the four slight one-acts that had been Miller's sole stage output in the previous decade. At 76, the playwright has recaptured the vigorous voice and zest of middle age and has found a fresh, indeed engagingly oddball, way to revisit his accustomed theme of how to assess rugged individualism -- as personal integrity or as social irresponsibility. Only one fact jars: this world premiere is delighting audiences not on Broadway but in London's West End. Says Miller: "They have a theater culture here in Britain. I don't think we do in New York City anymore. American commercial theater is dead. Why pretend that it isn't?"

It is the common fate of playwrights to flower early, then fade from fashion long before they die and spend decades enduring agonizing public reappraisal of their early triumphs. That has been Miller's lot in the U.S., where commercial producers mostly write him off as a shopworn social reformer. In Britain Mt. Morgan is his 13th play to be seen in the West End in the past dozen years. Moreover, British critics and audiences accept him as the poetic expressionist he sees in himself, rather than the earnest realist that U.S. productions relentlessly turn him into. "In London," he says, "audiences and critics are not so bound to familiar forms, and I've been able to demonstrate that the works have contemporary validity. I would hope, if this play succeeds here, that people will say, 'Why does he have to go to London?' But I fear the lesson won't be drawn."

Something other than realism is unmistakable from the opening moments of Mt. Morgan. The title refers to an automobile skid in mid-blizzard that has left . the central character, an aging insurance entrepreneur, physically shattered and confined to a hospital bed. Yet this wreckage of a man rises, leaving behind the outline of his slung and plastered body, to pace the stage and engage other characters in conversations he recalls, conversations he imagines, conversations he wants to have, and sometimes conversations he daydreams about in the midst of other conversations.

There is almost no conventional plot. The accident, which may not have been an accident, exposes a tense situation: the businessman has two wives and families. The play ends with that conflict deliberately unresolved. The chief revelations occur in flashback, and the play's hallucinatory nature makes them all a little suspect.

The businessman may lament losing contact with an illegitimate son he may have had by still another woman. Equally, he may have concocted this story just to dissuade his second wife from having an abortion. The man seemingly believes that on safari he once faced down a charging lion, which sniffed and retreated in apparent acknowledgment of a fellow animal presence. But the memory may be a mere metaphor for the kind of masculinity he is trying to keep alive. The facts ultimately matter far less than the moral dilemma: whether to mire oneself in dull decency, like the nice nurse whose family can devote a whole conversation to the merits of new shoes, or succumb to seductive selfishness.

The text abounds in unusually shapely language for Miller, and in jokes. The production is not, alas, quite as polished. Tom Conti looks too young for Miller's antihero (although the script is inconsistent about his history) and seems too ingratiating. Perhaps the idea is to suggest that king-of-the-jungle fantasy persists in the most genial men; even so, Conti evokes intellectual posturing more than yearning. Gemma Jones is suitably antiseptic as his first wife, but Clare Higgins seems a bit stale for the younger second one, and Deirdre Strath just shouts as a grownup daughter.

Miller's drama would be treasure enough by the standards of Broadway, where only six straight plays are on offer at the moment -- three revivals, an Irish import, two holdovers from last season and nothing new. In London, however, it is the centerpiece of a stage scene abruptly aquiver after a couple of years of doldrums. New plays by David Hare, Alan Ayckbourn, Hugh Whitemore and Timberlake Wertenbaker have been running. Still to come this month are a one- act from Harold Pinter and Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III.

As always, the West End is also a showcase for revivals: Our Town with Alan Alda and Robert Sean Leonard; Becket, with Derek Jacobi as the saintly bishop and Robert Lindsay as his carousing King; Tartuffe, with Paul Eddington as the dithery paterfamilias turned acolyte to a charlatan and Felicity Kendal as the saucy, commonsensical maid in a cheerily broad staging, almost willfully devoid of undertone or relevance, by Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The only slowdown in London comes in musicals. The handful of creators who, in various permutations, have brought forth Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon and the like have nothing new or imminent. Still, an irresistibly energetic and shamelessly folksy overgrown cabaret show, Five Guys Named Moe, featuring jazz of the 1930s and '40s and nonstop dancing by an all-black cast, has taken London by storm. It is headed for Broadway next April, complete with group singing of calypso bebop and a whole-audience conga line at intermission.

The most impressive new British play, Hare's Murmuring Judges, starts as a panoramic survey of a criminal-justice system shamefully subverted by careerism and bureaucracy. Gradually the story focuses on a hapless petty burglar, imprisoned almost five years for a first offense. Hare, a left- winger, has a thumb on the scales: his inmate is penitent, as innocent of spirit as Candide. Moreover, the police are widely known to have tainted the evidence, but admitting that would inconvenience powerful people, so injustice prevails. Much of the dialogue is barely digested statistics; the silliest, mouthed by a reformist young black woman, argues that essentially every male under 30 is a criminal, so no one should be prosecuted. Despite such balderdash, the storytelling is intense and the acting splendid, especially by Robert Patterson as the prisoner.

Ayckbourn's new play is actually two: The Revengers' Comedies trace, over two full shows, the misbegotten relationship between a middle-class urban man and a wealthy country maiden who meet while both are attempting suicide. They then agree, he halfheartedly and she ferociously, to avenge the sadness in each other's lives. He is an amiable also-ran. She, it becomes clear, is a psychopath. Ayckbourn, who also directed, fought off all efforts to get him to consolidate the two segments into one long night. He was wrong. There is ! simply not enough of a payoff. But the work is often wickedly funny. It is well acted (especially, in a splendid cameo, by Adam Godley as the psychopath's languid, childlike aristocrat of a brother). And its portrayal of what it is like to be the target of someone truly crazy and obsessed lingers hauntingly, making the play more interesting to remember than to watch.

When the 1991 London theater is recalled in longer memory, however, from a perspective approaching history, neither the Hare nor the Ayckbourn nor even the West End's renewed vitality will rate more than a passing mention. The epochal event will be The Ride Down Mt. Morgan -- and Arthur Miller's stubborn climb back up to the pinnacle of his talent.