Towering Strength

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: SCENES FROM AN EXECUTION

AUTHOR: HOWARD BARKER

WHERE: MARK TAPER FORUM, LOS ANGELES

THE BOTTOM LINE: In her U.S. stage debut, British actress Juliet Stevenson proves she is truly, madly, deeply talented.

EMMA THOMPSON HAS THE OSCAR and Miranda Richardson had a nomination, but as Tinseltown audiences are discovering, the most interesting British stage actress of the under-40 generation has long been a waif-eyed, bassoon-voiced, ironhearted daredevil named Juliet Stevenson. U.S. audiences are apt to know her only from the cult film Truly, Madly, Deeply. But on the boards in London, her range is astonishing, from the hoydenish Rosalind in As You Like It to the nihilistic Hedda Gabler, from the sexually awakening adolescent of Troilus and Cressida to the avenging victim of Death and the Maiden. She approximates the emotional clarity of Vanessa Redgrave, the assertive power of Judi Dench and the braying, spiteful fun of Maggie Smith -- and adds an androgynous beauty suited equally to Shakespeare's pants parts and to the contemporary feminist dialectics of the vehicle she has chosen for her U.S. stage debut, Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution.

Topping off all these assets is a startling capacity to commit herself to the fullest. Stevenson had to skip the show's final preview at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum after being rushed to a doctor with back spasms that rendered her unable to stand up. Yet on opening night, she made her first exit the way she always had, unhesitatingly hurtling herself across the stage, up a flight of stairs and almost colliding with a wall. Pain be damned, the play's the thing.

The play, also in its U.S. debut, opens with Stevenson sitting near a naked male lover, calmly sketching -- and discoursing on the merits of -- his thighs and butt. She plays a Venetian Renaissance painter with a gift for epic scale who is commissioned, despite her gender, to commemorate the city's most glorious naval victory. The city fathers want patriotic myth. She insists on painting the horrors of battle, the pathos of the defeated and the dehumanization of the victorious, and sees this as woman's contribution to culture. "No man," she remarks, "honestly hates murder."

Playwright Barker, one of Britain's premier ideological artists, gives this outspoken woman a subtle, likable enemy in the person of the ruling doge, glitteringly played by Frank Langella. Also arrayed against her are a female critic and, on occasion, her own lover, himself an artist of more modest and domestically inclined talents. While the parallels with contemporary culture wars are obvious -- and reinforced by the use of electronically jazzed-up classical music during scene changes -- the text is short on plot and long on debate, to a degree that makes Shaw look taciturn. In touching on many themes, it embraces none. The excitement comes from Stevenson, flailing in outrage, cosseting a deranged daughter, nibbling her lover's abdomen in tenderness, peering with professional scrutiny at a war victim's ghastly wounds. The role offers an actress everything, and Stevenson is everything one could want in an actress.