LONDON -- Over six London days in early March, my theatrical haul was three classics, three new plays and two new musicals, with, in the star column, Dame Judi Dench and Michael Gambon.

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Experienced London hands will realize that total means that on Sunday, when the West End theaters are dark, I didn't push myself to scour the fringe. After all, London has some museums and street life, too.

The Post-Gazette Critic's Choice tour saw three of those shows, a mix of musical, classic comedy and sophisticated entertainment. Unfortunately, the musical turned out to be a clunker. You'd think the drama critic who picked the shows would have seen that in the cards, but I figured "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" would make a nice diversion on our first night, a noisy show to help beat jet lag. Actually, it didn't even keep us awake.

But the other two shows we shared were great, and we scattered to see others of our own choosing. Here are my choices, in rough order of their success. Yesterday in the PG, I dealt with the most interestingly controversial, "Jerry Springer -- The Opera."

"All's Well That Ends Well"

Dame Judi and the Bard make a pretty unbeatable pair. But you wouldn't say it's a sure thing, not with "All's Well That Ends Well," a difficult comedy that often runs aground on the unlikability of its young hero, Bertram.

He's the lordling who contemptuously rejects the heroine, Helena, as too far beneath him socially. She has loved him from her position as gentlewoman to his mother, the Countess of Rossillion; now he is commanded to wed her by the King of France in gratitude for her magical cure of the king's mortal disease. Bertram goes through with the ceremony but tells her it will never be consummated until she shows up with his family ring on her finger and his baby at her side. Then he flees for the Italian wars.

He takes with him a braggart soldier, Parolles, so we know his judgment isn't very good in that realm, either. Helena follows and pulls off the miracle, forcing him at the end to acknowledge her his wife, with whatever grace the actor can summon, since Shakespeare gives him few words to say. That's the problem: We root for Helena but regret her choice.

Astonishingly, in this Royal Shakespeare Company staging directed by Gregory Doran, it doesn't much matter. Curly-haired Jamie Glover proves as appealing a Bertram as the text allows, but this production centers not on Helena and Bertram but Helena and the countess -- played, of course, by Dench.

It's one of Shakespeare's juicy supporting roles, important at the start, since the countess' affection supports Helena's pretensions, but intermittent thereafter. It doesn't usually seem so central, but Dench's calm, focused-intensity performance rivets attention: I think Dench's celebrity is only a small part of this, but the skill that has fed her celebrity is key: She is totally relaxed, totally there. This countess' love is stern and deep. It's not acting, but some higher form of being.

The result is harvested in the final scene. After throwing off her disguise and being united with Bertram, Helena turns to the silent countess, and in a long, long, expectant pause, our eyes fill with tears. They embrace, and it's suddenly clear that this is a play about an orphan girl gaining a mother! Well, not just that, but that's certainly what the "well" of the title means.

There's also a big cast, always competent, occasionally better than that, but never as good in its other aspects as the total experience seems in the glow Dench radiates. Claudie Blakley aptly shares focus with her feeling, throaty-voiced Helena, who triumphs less through magical grace than persistence and spunk -- a people's heroine. Charles Kay adds moral authority as the wise Lafew. Guy Henry is a scraggly, angular Parolles, closer to pathos than comedy; Gary Wildhorn is a capable King with little charisma; Mark Lambert is a veteran Irish jester; and Shelley Conn's Diana would tempt a sterner man than Bertram.

Stephen Brimson Lewis' set features reflective panels that hint of woods, with flags and drums for the soldier scenes. Deirdre Clancy's costumes are sober black in France, with a touch of Three Musketeers at the Italian front.

I'd say the whole of this interesting dark comedy that starts in tears and ends in muted joy is greater than the sum of its parts, but only because one part is Judi Dench.

At the Gielgud Theatre through May 8.

"Play Without Words"

Among my list of stars, I should include Matthew Bourne, the choreographer as genius. Americans know him best for the intense, gender-bent "Swan Lake" that startled Broadway in 1998-99, and I've reported on his funky, funny "The Car Men," which wittily transposed that opera's tale of passion to a Southern garage and adjacent diner.

Here, in a dance drama subtitled "The Housewarming," Bourne adapts the 1963 Joseph Losey movie "The Servant," into a comedy noir, a deliciously elegant series of sexy variations on dominance and submission, connivance and escape, set to a varied, original, jazzy, bluesy score by Terry Davies.

We start with a wealthy young man, Anthony, renting a flat and hiring a manservant (sort of Dirk Bogarde), who employs a sexy maid. Anthony has a comparably elegant fiancee (very Sarah Miles), but not much seems to be cooking between them -- he's much more turned on by the maid, while the fiancee is drawn to a tough guy she meets at a club. Plotting and dalliance and their darker versions ensue, with the manservant seemingly masterminding it all.

That's Losey, roughly. Then Bourne triples the stakes: Each of the five characters is played simultaneously in identical costumes by three dancers, except the maid, by two. So we see three manservants dressing three Anthonys, three toughs seducing three fiancees -- except they aren't identical, sometimes seeming to play differing aspects of one character or at least bringing their own performing personalities (not to mention bodies) to the roles.

Bourne gradually plays with all the variables available, including the sexual ones, as when he has one manservant dressing his Anthony while another undresses his, with hinted homoeroticism rising like an additional musical motif. The women are gorgeous, the men handsome, the story carefully articulated and the whole 110 minutes (intermission included) as purely pleasurable as anything I've seen in some time.

It's also subliminally disturbing, which is pleasurable, too. The program sets the whole firmly in the London of "Room at the Top," "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning," Christine Keeler, Kim Philby and The Beatles. Davies' score re-creates an epoch, and there's plenty more to be said about dance style and intimations of suppressed desire. But mainly I wonder when we might get to see Bourne's work here in Pittsburgh.

At the National Theatre; currently out of the repertory; may transfer.

"Endgame"

While "Waiting for Godot" is Samuel Beckett's improbable comedy of the daily journey, his steely "Endgame" is wry tragedy in a world dwindling toward dark. At its heart is an immobile tyrant, Hamm, ruling his barren universe from a wheelchair throne, tended only by a feckless servant, Clov.

And ruling this scrupulous revival, directed by the very busy Matthew Warchus, is Michael Gambon, with his lion-like head, rumbling voice and long, mesmerizing hands. In a taut 90 minutes, he and Lee Evans' bird-like Clov act out Beckett's primal parable of failed majesty and co-dependence, set in some gray, post-apocalyptic world.

The set is just as Beckett specifies, an echoing room on the edge of the world, two windows high up like blank eyes, with Hamm as the skull's empty mouth. For specificity, there's a tattered show curtain to start, and behind it the sound of vaudeville laughter. Irish accents remind us of Beckett's origins, and a long staff could be a fish gaff, scepter of state, bishop's crozier -- or theatrical hook.

But the specific gives way to the universal. Gambon rules with his voice, a subtle vehicle of fury, pain, contempt and resignation, turning on a dime from bellow to wheedle. Evans, a former stand-up comic who is going to play Leo in London's "The Producers" this fall, has a lopsided, whited, Alfred E. Neuman face.

"Me to play" roars the old, blind monster, while Clov teeters about in grimly comic servitude. "The old questions, the old answers"; "the whole place stinks of corpses"; "he's crying ... then he's living." Off to the side, stored in trash barrels, Hamm's parents live cheerily enough: "What is it, pet? Time for love?"

Night falls.

At the Albery Theatre, booking through May 1.

"Dinner"

The dinner party from hell is a motif as old as the Greeks or Shakespeare, and indeed the coolly, cruelly elegant Harriet Walter could be a modern Clytemnestra or Lady Macbeth, with her red robe and crimson mouth, presiding over a bitchy, funny feast with grim end in view.

Sardonic comedy is the mode of this taut, sour parable by young English comer Moira Buffini. Walter's Paige is hosting a dinner, ostensibly to honor the publication of her husband's book, a self-important philosophy of hedonism which she gleefully admits she hasn't read. Their well-to-do, irritatingly superficial guests include a scientist, his news-babe girlfriend, a hapless artist and someone totally unexpected who adds proletarian grit.

Paige's ingenious and disgusting menu, served on the best china, moves from Primordial Soup, bubbling with algae and sulfur, to Apocalypse of Lobster, presented live, giving you the choice to plunge it into the boiling water yourself or set it free in the garden pond. For this unpleasant crew's "just dessert," there's Frozen Waste, an iced selection of kitchen garbage. It's a suitably contemptuous accompaniment for Paige's icy games of revelation, played as liquor flows and wit flashes. And there's a grim mystery in the form of the saturnine, silent waiter, whom we have seen Paige pay a huge amount of money, so we know he's there to do more than simply serve.

The production by the playwright's sister, Fiona Buffini ("don't let these women invite you to dinner," warned one reviewer), is very portentous. Call it a ship of fools comedy. You feel dirty afterward, but fascinated, even invigorated by its scathing survey of the contemporary moral wasteland.

I want to see it staged in New York with Stockard Channing, and I can already imagine who would fight to play it in Pittsburgh.

At Wyndham's Theatre, just closing.

"Journey's End"

With war continuing in Iraq, R.C. Sherriff's quintessential World War I drama is a natural for revival. (When is war ever far from our thoughts?) The scene is a dugout on the German front in 1918, with a group of young English officers waiting for the next suicidal assault. Sherriff's play didn't appear until 1929, at arm's length from the horror; now, of course, we know even more about that war's criminal management and callous disregard of life, giving it an added bitterness.

I attended a matinee with an audience at least half school groups, and however dated the stiff-upper-lip behavior of the class-conscious officers, however familiar the pressures of the trench and the trajectory toward certain death, they responded with rapt silence and huge applause. After all, these combatants aren't much older than they.

Starring Geoffrey Streatfield as the old-before-his time Stanhope and David Haig as the maternal Osborne, David Grindley's production has been much praised. Fine it is, though not obviously better than the 1987 revival at Ontario's Stratford Festival. "Journey's End" is a solid drama of men under pressure, thoroughly familiar and always able to dismay.

At the Comedy Theatre, booking through May 1.

"Democracy"

Michael Frayn's latest is that relative rarity, a big political play full of information and intriguing issues. But mainly it's theatrically inert.

As in his "Copenhagen," Frayn has the courage to tackle seemingly non-dramatic material. Here, it's the latter career of Willy Brandt, once heroic mayor of West Berlin, now the flawed but indispensable Chancellor who moved West Germany far down the road toward rapprochement with its East German sibling. He thus had a defining role in the end of the Cold War and breakup of the Soviet Union -- something Americans are always ready to take credit for, so it's good to be reminded of the limits of our parochial view.

The dramatic core of "Democracy" is Brandt's generally passive relationship with his mousy aide, Gnter Guillaume, who it was later learned was a mole, spying for the East Germans. You'd think Guillaume's unmasking would set off theatrical sparks, but it doesn't, because the play is sodden with backroom maneuvering among Brandt's party colleagues, a gaggle of largely undifferentiated men in suits.

Watching Guillaume's slow growth in access does have interest, enough so that you find yourself rooting for the bland little creep. But Frayn lumbers the play with an awkward device in which Guillaume talks constantly to his Eastern spymaster, seated at the side of the stage. And when he's unmasked and we expect fireworks, Guillaume is banished to that sideline himself, without confrontation with his betrayed boss.

Oddly, the spying had good results, bringing the East Germans to trust Brandt enough to negotiate with him.

Among the play's 10 men in suits, Roger Allam's Brandt towers over the others, though Frayn's Brandt is a Hamlet-like hero, often in suspended animation and lacking Hamlet's gift of gab. Conleth Hill plays the mole with an affecting ordinariness. I feel I learned a lot about modern European history, but I didn't feel the exhilaration of dramatic thrust and parry. On the other hand, I saw "Copenhagen" several times before I came to appreciate it, so we'll see.

At the National Theatre; currently out of the repertory.

"Chitty Chitty Bang Bang"

Loved the flying car.

Liked Adrian Lester, who makes Caractacus Potts as palatable as possible.

Enjoyed Russ Abbot's imitation of Lionel Jeffries, the Grandpa in the movie.

Found Caroline Sheen's Truly scrumptious enough.

Tolerated all those kids.

Found most of the chorus numbers unintelligible, the production numbers blah, the dancing drab, the choreography off the back of some cereal box and the ending limp.

Came to detest that title song, which is drilled into us like endless Novocaine without the welcome numbness.

Was glad to see it end.

And expect to see it soon on Broadway and then on tour.