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The Bard heads London's all-star lineup of actors, playwrights and composers
Sunday, November 01, 1998 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
LONDON -- Dame Judi, Lord Andrew, Sir Peter, Helen Mirren - it's London's West End, more accessible and varied than Broadway, mixing the tatty but endearing glitter of show biz with the creative substance of long careers.
It's also frustrating. In a recent five-day visit, I could see only five shows. They were the new Andrew Lloyd Webber, a Judi Dench-Peter Hall collaboration, a brilliant play by yet another young Irish playwright (do they spawn them in government hatcheries?), one evening of tedium and - pièce de résistance in glamour - the Helen Mirren-Alan Rickman "Antony and Cleopatra," then starting previews at the National Theatre. Just getting a ticket to see Mirren was an achievement: Before the show's first preview, it had sold out all 60,000 seats for the limited run.
And think of the dozen or more other "musts" I missed - Nicole Kidman in "Blue Room," Patrick Marber's prize-winning "Closer," etc., etc., not to mention the two-man National Theatre of Brent performing the entire romance of Prince Charles and Diana "in a single profound and unforgettable night."
I'll save that for the next visit to this ever-renewing feast.
Shakespeare, 'Antony and Cleopatra'
Cut to the chase: How are the two great lovers of legend?
As pure actress, Helen Mirren is dream casting for Cleopatra - earthy and elegant, voluptuous and articulate, with a wash of age and doom over her striking beauty. There's no feel of the exotic, nor does she believably express Cleopatra's kittenish side, and a lower vocal register might serve. But Mirren's very imperfections are part of the appeal of her powerfully English Cleopatra, a woman who feels explosively and deeply. When she rises in contempt, passion and tragic loss, stripping naked to don her golden robes of immortality, she soars.
Alan Rickman makes a perfect figure of an Antony, imposingly handsome but with a compromising softness. His voice rumbles warmly, its elegiac note never absent. You hear tremulous cellos but no trumpets - he seemed under wraps in early preview, still feeling toward Antony's core passion. It is difficult to imagine him a successful war leader, but that fits Shakespeare's ambiguous hero just fine.
The National Theatre production is directed by young Sean Mathias, who has directed on the massive, difficult Olivier stage before. But Tim Hatley's impressive, unwieldy set creates pacing problems not fully solved in the second preview. A huge revolving stage and matching vertical backdrop together suggest the globe for which Rome contends, both moving and opening in multiple ways to give variety to Shakespeare's several dozen, ever-shifting scenes. Rugs, pillows, candles and a large multiethnic cast suggest the color and sprawl of the wide Mediterranean world. The scale is appropriately grand, but it needs to move more smoothly to get the running time down from a daunting three hours and 50 minutes.
Samuel West is as sympathetic as the calculating Octavius could ever be, while Finbar Lynch is a sinewy, cool Enobarbus. Trevyn McDowell is a fetching (and untraditionally young) Charmian. But a cast of 30-some mainly dresses the stage for the two stars - Shakespeare's stars, I mean, two of the greatest ever.
Not that Shakespeare makes it easy. Antony and Cleopatra must make their claim on us in spite of being undercut by the play's insistence on pratfall - Antony's botching his suicide, Cleopatra's flattering her conqueror. Rising above even the master playwright's degradations, they repay our eternal fascination.
Conor McPherson, 'The Weir'
Mirren in the flesh is tough competition, but the London play I've been buttonholing people to praise is "The Weir," a simple little five-hander set in a scruffy pub in the Irish back country.
Nothing much happens: Valerie (Michelle Fairley) has moved to town, and Finbar (Dermot Crowley) brings her into the pub to lord it over local yokels Jim (Kieran Ahern) and Jack (Jim Norton), who have their own interest in this new presence. But no one's really a yokel, because each has that gift of word-loving gab - except the bartender (Brendan Coyle), whose reticence is as expressive as words.
What starts as an engaging comic genre painting of showing off and making do gradually deepens. Everyone tells what you might call a ghost story but is really an essay in subtle discovery and transformation. In just 90 minutes, the five have emerged in astonishing fullness and the audience has had its sensitivities heightened as much as the characters have.
Ian Rickson's original Dublin production is in its third run at the Royal Court (temporarily housed at the Duke of York's while its famous old home is completely re-built). The word is that "The Weir" is on its way to Broadway, following last year's hot new Irish play, "Beauty Queen of Leenane." This is a better play. No, McPherson isn't yet a Brian Friel, but he's not even 30.
Andrew Lloyd Webber,'Whistle Down the Wind'
Lurid superstition, magical transformation, faith, lust, hate and lovable, hardscrabble kids - the newest Lloyd Webber musical serves up a very full meal. The problem is that the cooks seem to be working from someone else's recipe. I kept feeling I was hearing about this story, not experiencing it directly.
The story is of a group of rural children who find a fugitive in a barn and believe him to be Jesus. It comes from the 1961 British movie of the same name, starring Alan Bates and Hayley Mills. For some reason, Lloyd Webber (who co-wrote the book with Patricia Knop and director Gale Edwards) has moved it to rural Louisiana at Christmas, 1959. The setting allows the introduction of a James Dean character, black-white tension, Pentecostal snake handlers and more. But it never seems at home: Like the background program essay, the play has a second-hand, translated feel.
Probably the decision to move the story to America had to do with Lloyd Webber's plan to premiere "Whistle" here. Directed by Hal Prince and starring Davis Gaines, it opened two years ago in Washington, stumbled and did not transfer to Broadway. Re-worked and re-directed by Edwards and starring CMU grad Marcus Lovett, it has been doing solid business in London since July and has been extended through 1999.
There are things to admire, starting with the central tantalizing mix of faith and innocence, guilt and redemption. In a sense, the fugitive becomes Jesus, transformed by the Jesus-like clarity and feeling of the children, and experiences a Christ-like temptation and passion.
But if anything, this melodramatic, sentimental morality play is overfull. The often flat lyrics don't help much - on their evidence, Jim Steinman is not the solution to the composer's search for a lyricist who can help galvanize his talent.
Originally described as Lloyd Webber's attempt at a smaller, less epic musical form, "Whistle" developed elephantiasis along the way. Dominating the show is a giant, two-level elevator stage, which allows (say) a highway above to counterpoint the fugitive's barn, below. But like the story, the set is gargantuan without grandeur, dissipating the intense central story of fugitive and young girl.
Lloyd Webber's score is strongest on sweetness and melancholy. It never soars into those anthems he is admired for, which is fine with me. But you don't come out eager to get to know the score better, either.
As the fugitive, Lovett (CMU '86) has a thrillingly sweet, pop hero voice and a brooding presence that almost sucks us past all the distractions. I missed Lottie Mayor as the girl, Swallow, but understudy Vikki Coote was affecting, as were the other featured children. The Dean-like boyfriend is the best of the rest, but his girlfriend, the kids' father and a sympathetic black laborer all suffer from cliché and underdevelopment.
Watching, I wanted to like it more than I could; after a couple of weeks, it has faded quickly.
Eduardo de Filippo, 'Filumena'
After inventing the Royal Shakespeare Company and running it for eight years, Peter Hall spent 15 years as successor to Olivier as head of the National Theatre. For the past decade he has had his own company, generating a profuse stream of West End work, usually revivals with name actors - for example, the "An Ideal Husband" he sent to Broadway in 1997.
Hence this 1946 comedy by the Italian master, famously made into the movie "Marriage Italian Style" in 1964 with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. And hence this revival with Dame Judy Dench and Michael Pennington.
But the key word is "profuse." Spawning so much work, Hall must spread thin. Certainly, he seems to have mailed in his work on "Filumena." Any play translated from a foreign language into a culture not your own - even if you do share a language - will inevitably seem to be more about that host culture than the one in which it is set. Even so, Hall's comically squabbling Neapolitans seem fugitives from a West End sex comedy.
Pennington makes a valiant effort, going so far as to make the sign of the cross a few times. He's a fine and serious actor, but he just doesn't have the effusive breadth the unwilling middle-aged husband requires.
Dench solves the cultural problem by steaming ahead, giving the wronged but scheming Filumena an angry dignity - and she has that in rich supply. A wonderful actress, she is most impressive here as a foursquare weight of integrity and determination.
The result is to leave "Filumena" hung up somewhere between farce (which it is) and Chekhov - which De Filippo also is, in a way. Certainly he is a more probing, somber playwright than is always seen, but he also must have conceived of his play as funnier than this - and more Italian.
Hugh Whitemore, 'Letter of Resignation'
Whitemore is best known for his very literate "Breaking the Code," about math genius Alan Turing. "Letter of Resignation" similarly probes complexity beneath reticence - in this case, aging Prime Minister Harold Macmillan as he learns in summer 1963 that John Profumo, secretary of state for war, has lied to Parliament about a sexual liaison.
Sounds recent, doesn't it? Add that it had admiring reviews, especially for Edward Fox as Macmillan, and was just closing after a tidy year-long run, and it seemed a good bet.
Nope. The reticence of the characters is matched by the reluctance of playwright and director Christopher Morahan (TV's "Jewel in the Crown") to let crass action or drama disturb an unriveting portrait of Macmillan and the deep flaw in his own marriage. The Profumo Affair is just a catalyst for the PM's nattering reminiscence.
What drama there is comes from Macmillan's wife, who, in flashback, reveals her own long-time affair. The PM is reduced to blithering incredulity - sad, yes, but more transfixing to an English audience, no doubt. I was more interested in the class antagonisms. The government spy who brings the news, not himself part of the old-boy Oxbridge aristocracy, suggests a fresh look at the assumptions and rituals of a way of life and government that seem admirable but dated - or, alternately, foolish and out-of-touch.
Some of the best lines have contemporary fizz: The press (not yet promoted to The Media) is characterized as "petty, spiteful and ill-informed," reacting to the sexual scandal with "a barrage of sanctimonious, hypocritical clap-trap." But ultimately, "Letter of Recognition" is like the British Empire, a good idea (maybe) that was over long before it realized as much.
To book London theater tickets, it's cheapest to call the theater direct. For central London, dial 011-44-171, then the following: for "The Weir," 565-5000; "Whistle Down the Wind" (Aldwych Theatre), 416-6000; "Filumena" (Piccadilly Theatre), 369-1734.
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