London theater roundup— II

This is a summer of revivals in London; it's also odd how many of these productions require American accents. (Dialect coaches must be busy). The result is to miss the very thing I go to London for: English actors speaking English in new English plays.

The big revivals include big names: O'Neill's Anna Christie (starring Jude Law), Pinter's Betrayal (starring Kristin Scott Thomas), Gray's Butley (starring Dominic West of TV's "The Wire") plus Albee's A Delicate Balance, Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and a bunch more.

But some rare birds brighten this revival flock, and I can never resist a chance to see one:

A political family

Chicken Soup with Barley, by Arnold Wesker. Directed by Dominic Cooke. Royal Court Theatre.

Arnold Wesker's 1958 drama is about trying to sustain belief in humanity and thus in Communism in a world increasingly without values or meaning. The first scene takes place in 1938 and establishes the polemics and the personalities. Friends drink tea, rush outdoors to anti-fascist demonstrations and agonize over decisions about going to fight in the Spanish Civil War; politics dominates everyone's lives except that of Harry, Sarah's feckless, unemployed, disengaged husband.

The play moves through scenes as time passes— the end of World War II, the news of Stalin's atrocities, the Hungarian revolution—all filtered through the central family as the children grow up and the parents grow older and then old.

Friends and family abandon the Party until finally Sarah is the only true believer left standing. Just as idealism disintegrates, so does the family. "Were we cheated, or did we cheat ourselves?" is the great question of the play.

Dominic Cooke's direction is remarkably courageous, toughing out long silences and petty quarrels to create a naturalism that's painfully vivid. Ultimately what started out sounding like a creaky preachy drama becomes a deeply engrossing portrait of a family, then goes beyond that to a portrait of an era, and then transcends that to portray our own world, where the triumph of existential despair and ruthless capitalism threatens us: In Sarah's final words, "If you don't care, you'll die."
Another Wesker play, The Kitchen, will open at the National Theatre at the end of August.

Perfectly, happily in love, until…

Luise Miller, by Friedrich Schiller, in a new version by Mike Poulton. Directed by Michael Grandage at the Donmar Warehouse.

Michael Grandage (who directed the recent much-admired New York productions of King Lear and Red) directs this stunning production of Schiller's 18th-Century tragedy. In the title role, Felicity Jones, who made a recent splash at Sundance in Doremus's Like Crazy, certainly proves her stage abilities here, surrounded by an impressive cast.

The plot involves two young people, perfectly, happily in love, who are crushed first by their class difference (Ferdinand is the chancellor's son, while she is a musician's daughter) as well by the devious maneuverings of the aristocrats (Alex Kingston and Ben Daniels are terrific) and their ambitious, ruthless lackeys (John Light is excellently evil).
Innocence is destroyed by wickedness: sturm und drang to the max.

Just short of parody

Rocket to the Moon, by Clifford Odets. Directed by Angus Jackson at the National Theatre.

Clifford Odets's scarcely-ever seen 1938 work is an old-timey melodrama, where all the characters articulate their thoughts and feelings with literary precision. It would almost look like parody if the superb cast didn't bring such passion to their roles.

Rocket takes place in New York near the end of the Great Depression: Everyone's worried about money and suffering from a general disappointment with life, a gnawing sadness. Our current recessionary depression is probably the hook that supposedly gives the play contemporary relevance.

The dentist in question, Dr. Ben Stark, falls in love with his young assistant, resulting in thrills, guilt and bumbling yearning. She lies, she manipulates, she's catnip to every man around, partly because she's so naÓ¯ve and pretty and needy. The dentist's wife is brittle, bossy and deeply disappointed in her weak, sad husband.

Odets's Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! are American classics of a particular era; Rocket is just as grim and intense, and much heavier-handed; it's really just a museum piece.

A Mamet double bill

Mr. Happiness and The Water Engine, by David Mamet. Directed by Kate McGregor for the Old Vic Theatre Company at The Old Vic Tunnels.

This Mamet double revival bill offers yet another cast of English actors trying, often unsuccessfully, to use convincing American accents.

The most dramatic thing about this production is its location: The Old Vic's new venue is The Tunnels under Waterloo Station—damp, gloomy, vast, rumbling and hard to find.

These plays are rarely performed for good reason. They're tricky in tone and nature, since they were originally written as radio plays and probably should stay that way.

The curtain raiser, Mr. Happiness, is a one-man show about an advice-giver who reads letters from listeners on his weekly radio show. David Burt cannot manage an American accent and swallows the second half of nearly every line. He plays his character so straight that his cruel, caustic advice is lost completely, and the play's comment on the misery of the letter-writers disappears.

The longer drama is an odd piece about a man who invents an engine that runs on water; the ruthless powers that be (i.e., big business, the law, the police) crush the little guy who doesn't stand a chance against the Establishment, and so once again the world is not saved. It's odd to see this 1989 protest play in light of Mamet's latest book in which he avows right-wing, pro-capitalist views.

The audience loses it

One Man, Two Guvnors, by Richard Bean. Directed by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre.

Another kind of old-timey-ness is one of the National Theatre's hits of the summer season: Richard Bean's One Man, Two Guvnors is based on Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters, an 18th-Century Commedia del-Arte classic. Nicholas Hytner (director of the National Theatre) directs with gusto, and the audience responds in kind: You can hear various people in the theater simply lose it at various times, laughing helplessly and mopping their eyes.

You have to be English to get some of the jokes, but pratfalls and door slams and misunderstandings are universal. Rambunctious James Corden (one of the History Boys) plays the Servant whose two masters (Oliver Chris and Jemima Rooper) provide the plot complications. Between scenes, a Buddy Holly-style band (which isn't much good) provides original songs (which aren't much good), so there's never a lull in the proceedings.

A comedy that's not funny

American Trade, by Tarell Alvin McCraney. Directed by Jamie Lloyd for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Hampstead Theatre

This is the only brand new play, and it's American. Tarell Alvin McCraney's Brother/Sister trilogy and his Run Mourner Run were so dazzling (I was among the dazzled) that he was awarded a playwright residency at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

His newest play, American Trade, premiered in London on June 8 to my undazzled disappointment (the London critics savaged it). Unlike McCraney's profoundly thoughtful and moving earlier plays, with their radical stylization (rhymed lines, characters speaking the stage directions), American Trade is a comedy that's not funny.

Taking as its premise that show business people and their agents are whores, McCraney literalizes this notion with his central character, Pharus, a hooker in trouble with a blinged-up hip-hop boss. To escape serious harm, he moves to London to work for his aunt, who runs the London showbiz PR firm. His job is to launch the firm's new model agency. Well, what a shock: Everybody's interested in sex, preferably kinky and on the downlow.

Pharus acquires a slew of illegal immigrants as part of his model/prostitute crew, and the idea of national displacement is, I assume, one of the reasons the play is subtitled "a part of the Identity Plays." There are so many characters and so little plot development and so much flash in this colorful but essentially empty production that, even at 90 minutes, it feels long and repetitive.

McCraney is clearly working under his own cultural displacement as an African American in a company of Shakespearean actors (all of whom seem to be having fun with the accents, as in "Yo, bro"); one of the most amusing lines (to this American) was Pharus's aunt's objecting to his interrupting her: "I know it's frustrating and all/But I'm older and English. Means/We're allowed more time and space to speak."♦


To read other London reviews by Toby Zinman, click here.