TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070389/07038900.011

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.5 KB | 110 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 73

A Trio of Triumphs in London


Britain's best gets better -- with a little help from Americans

By William A. Henry III


    Where does Dustin Hoffman, Hollywood's hottest leading
actor, go to try his hand at Shakespeare? Where does composer
Andrew Lloyd Webber, who has had six megamusicals on Broadway in
the '80s, launch his latest? Where does American playwright
Martin Sherman (Bent) debut a work about his countrymen in
exile?

    The answer in each case: London. As a result, the city's
ever thriving stage scene has hit its high point of the past
few years. The leading trio of shows is better than anything --
revival, new musical or new play -- offered in New York City
this past season, and London's other offerings far exceed
Broadway's current roster in both quality and quantity. More
shows are running in the West End this week than appeared on
Broadway during the entire past season.

    The most eagerly anticipated arrival, Lloyd Webber's Aspects
of Love, is also the best. Adapted from a 1955 novel by
Britain's David Garnett, it is a rueful and autumnal meditation
on romance as a process of teaching, almost of parenting. Five
characters of widely varying ages entwine, sort themselves out
and entwine in new pairings over decades. This sophisticated
material is handled with cunning naivete. Lloyd Webber's score,
characteristically, consists mostly of a few much repeated
tunes: Love Changes Everything, Seeing Is Believing and Life
Goes On, Love Goes Free. All three rank among the prettiest he
has written, and this time they are in the service of a
coherent, deftly handled narrative.

    Whose narrative is hard to say. No one is credited with
writing the book. The wry and suave lyrics are attributed to
Don Black, who was Lloyd Webber's main collaborator on Song and
Dance, and to Charles Hart, whose words were the weakest part of
Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera. Major contributions were
surely made by the composer and by director Trevor Nunn, and
the storytelling is also enhanced by Maria Bjornson's dreamlike
designs. They shift fluidly from a naturalistic mansion
courtyard to a mountain range at sunset conveyed by just a
jagged line of reddish purple across a backdrop of black. The
performers all act as ably as they sing, notably Michael Ball as
the doomed boyish hero who ages into embittered manhood, Ann
Crumb as the woman with whom everyone falls in love but who
loves herself more than any of them, Kathleen Rowe McAllen as a
pansexual avant-garde sculptor, and Kevin Colson, an
eleventh-hour replacement for Roger Moore as an urbane older man
much valued for his money.

    Playwright Sherman, who has not made much of a splash in the
decade since Bent, provides in A Madhouse in Goa the best new
play of a fecund London year that has already brought new
efforts from half-a-dozen top dramatists. Structurally,
Sherman's show is two one-acts, but they are linked by one of
the cleverest devices in memory. The first piece, A Table for a
King, is an exquisitely painful tale of betrayals involving a
pathetically dignified Mississippi matron, a sweetly awkward
American college boy recovering from a thwarted homosexual
infatuation, a casually seductive waiter and the sly,
implacable owner of a Greek-island hotel where all the
characters are living.

    Having enlisted the audience's sympathies, and its knowing
nods that the first playlet shows what life is really like,
Sherman reveals in the second half that Table is not reality
but invention -- the plot, in fact, of a famous '60s novel that
a Hollywood producer proposes to contort into an MTV-influenced
musical. Sherman's sprawling, ambitious piece has any number of
themes, most powerfully the idea that art comforts us by
letting us focus on microcosmic disasters so that we can ignore
the global ones. Dominating an exceptional cast are Rupert
Graves as the young artist of the first half and the
producer-despoiler of the second, Ian Sears as the misleadingly
lighthearted waiter, and Vanessa Redgrave, managing an
impeccable pair of American accents as the Mississippi woman and
then a free-spirited New Yorker.

    The prospect of seeing Hoffman on stage as Shylock -- or
perhaps as anything at all -- prompted Londoners to buy out
essentially the entire four-month run of The Merchant of Venice,
giving the play the largest advance sale of any nonmusical show
in West End history. For once the actual event is no
disappointment, although in director Peter Hall's shrewd reading
the play is more comedy than tragedy and focuses more on Portia
(played by Geraldine James of TV's The Jewel in the Crown) than
on Shylock.

    Hoffman carefully modulates his five scenes, using familiar
but effective gestures: the shy grin, the hunch of the
shoulders, the sudden stare, the deliberate monotonous thud to
denote anger. His performance, anything but a star turn, is
intelligent, confident and touching. Hoffman brings to mind his
ingratiating Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman or, even more
strongly, his film work in Straw Dogs as a quiet man driven
beyond endurance into mayhem. The show never stints on the
virulent anti-Semitism of Shakespeare's world, although Hall
employs subtle staging and lighting cues to mollify modern
spectators' disquiet at the injustice of the ending. The
production is under discussion for transfer to the U.S. As with
London's other pair of current triumphs, it cannot come too
soon.