THE BATTLE OF LONDON

By RICHARD CORLISS/LONDON

The theatrical question of the moment: Why Martin Guerre? The tale is flimsy, even for a true legend from 16th century France. A young man deserts his wife and is not heard from for several years; a man returns and becomes a loving husband; this man may not be the real Martin Guerre. That's the story that has inspired an opera, two hit movies (the French The Return of Martin Guerre in 1982 and the U.S. Sommersby in 1993) and a trio of Broadway-style musicals. The biggest of these is the $5.7 million production, from the creators of Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, that opened last week in London.

Martin Guerre is the big news and the big disappointment in a London season filled with intimate epics (all of War and Peace in 4 1/2 affecting hours!), incandescent stars (a ragged but potent revival of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman with Paul Scofield and Vanessa Redgrave), one thrilling biodrama (Pam Gems' Stanley, on English painter Stanley Spencer) and lots of musicals about dead pop singers (Buddy, Elvis and, for Pete's sake, Jolson).

Stripping the Guerre story of its suspense, composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and lyricist Alain Boublil establish from the start that the new, improved Martin is a fraud--and a godsend to the virgin wife Bertrande. That's fine; we want to know why she connives in the deception. But the plot is hoked up with religious pieties (Huguenots are the new Bosnians) and a psycho villain desperate to take any Martin's place in Bertrande's bed. It's Romeo and Juliet without the poetry, or an Oklahoma! that ain't O.K.

Next question: Why do serious musicals have to be so darn brown? As in Les Miz, earth tones predominate here--except in the peasants' garb, nicely creased and Rinso white. One thing about these villagers: they've all seen Riverdance; Bob Avian's choreography has the heavy-footed agility of that hit Irish dance show. The choral harmonies do have a vaulting magnificence, as 30 or so voices pump out Schonberg's anthems. But director Declan Donnellan (who, for his own Cheek by Jowl troupe, staged a superb As You Like It) can't make the drama sing. Guerre is big; it should have been grand.

One last question: Who has learned that size doesn't count as much as insouciance? Why, Andrew Lloyd Webber. His By Jeeves, a radical overhaul of his 1975 flop show, is a delight in miniature. Based on P.G. Wodehouse's tales of the supreme upper-class twit Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves, a Zen master of irony, By Jeeves has a blitheness that makes the audience feel as if it's on a holiday from the huffery and puffery of the Boublil-Schonberg musicals (and of Sir Andrew's overblown Sunset Blvd.).

Alan Ayckbourn's book builds, with deft comic logic, from a tangle of mistaken identities to the climactic remark, "There's a cat-burgling pig in my bedroom!" Lloyd Webber's tunes are inventive and sweetly chipper. The effect is of two precocious lads putting on a genial public-school charade. By Jeeves may not be lighter than air, but it's surely lighter than Guerre.

--By Richard Corliss/London