TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111191/1111410.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.0 KB | 168 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 100

Arthur Miller, Old Hat at Home, Is a London Hit


A bold new work by the playwright, 76, is one of several shows
that are revitalizing the West End

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III


    Any new play by Arthur Miller is an important event in
American culture. One as theatrically bold and intellectually
subtle as The Ride Down Mt. Morgan is reason to shout for joy.
Robustly funny, full of fantasy and hallucination yet easy to
follow, it is free of the world-weary, elegiac tone of the four
slight one-acts that had been Miller's sole stage output in the
previous decade. At 76, the playwright has recaptured the
vigorous voice and zest of middle age and has found a fresh,
indeed engagingly oddball, way to revisit his accustomed theme
of how to assess rugged individualism -- as personal integrity
or as social irresponsibility. Only one fact jars: this world
premiere is delighting audiences not on Broadway but in London's
West End. Says Miller: "They have a theater culture here in
Britain. I don't think we do in New York City anymore. American
commercial theater is dead. Why pretend that it isn't?"

    It is the common fate of playwrights to flower early, then
fade from fashion long before they die and spend decades
enduring agonizing public reappraisal of their early triumphs.
That has been Miller's lot in the U.S., where commercial
producers mostly write him off as a shopworn social reformer.
In Britain Mt. Morgan is his 13th play to be seen in the West
End in the past dozen years. Moreover, British critics and
audiences accept him as the poetic expressionist he sees in
himself, rather than the earnest realist that U.S. productions
relentlessly turn him into. "In London," he says, "audiences and
critics are not so bound to familiar forms, and I've been able
to demonstrate that the works have contemporary validity. I
would hope, if this play succeeds here, that people will say,
`Why does he have to go to London?' But I fear the lesson won't
be drawn."

    Something other than realism is unmistakable from the
opening moments of Mt. Morgan. The title refers to an automobile
skid in mid-blizzard that has left the central character, an
aging insurance entrepreneur, physically shattered and confined
to a hospital bed. Yet this wreckage of a man rises, leaving
behind the outline of his slung and plastered body, to pace the
stage and engage other characters in conversations he recalls,
conversations he imagines, conversations he wants to have, and
sometimes conversations he daydreams about in the midst of other
conversations.

    There is almost no conventional plot. The accident, which
may not have been an accident, exposes a tense situation: the
businessman has two wives and families. The play ends with that
conflict deliberately unresolved. The chief revelations occur
in flashback, and the play's hallucinatory nature makes them all
a little suspect.

    The businessman may lament losing contact with an
illegitimate son he may have had by still another woman.
Equally, he may have concocted this story just to dissuade his
second wife from having an abortion. The man seemingly believes
that on safari he once faced down a charging lion, which sniffed
and retreated in apparent acknowledgment of a fellow animal
presence. But the memory may be a mere metaphor for the kind of
masculinity he is trying to keep alive. The facts ultimately
matter far less than the moral dilemma: whether to mire oneself
in dull decency, like the nice nurse whose family can devote a
whole conversation to the merits of new shoes, or succumb to
seductive selfishness.

    The text abounds in unusually shapely language for Miller,
and in jokes. The production is not, alas, quite as polished.
Tom Conti looks too young for Miller's antihero (although the
script is inconsistent about his history) and seems too
ingratiating. Perhaps the idea is to suggest that king-of-the-
jungle fantasy persists in the most genial men; even so, Conti
evokes intellectual posturing more than yearning. Gemma Jones
is suitably antiseptic as his first wife, but Clare Higgins
seems a bit stale for the younger second one, and Deirdre Strath
just shouts as a grownup daughter.

    Miller's drama would be treasure enough by the standards
of Broadway, where only six straight plays are on offer at the
moment -- three revivals, an Irish import, two holdovers from
last season and nothing new. In London, however, it is the
centerpiece of a stage scene abruptly aquiver after a couple of
years of doldrums. New plays by David Hare, Alan Ayckbourn, Hugh
Whitemore and Timberlake Wertenbaker have been running. Still
to come this month are a one-act from Harold Pinter and Alan
Bennett's The Madness of George III.

    As always, the West End is also a showcase for revivals:
Our Town with Alan Alda and Robert Sean Leonard; Becket, with
Derek Jacobi as the saintly bishop and Robert Lindsay as his
carousing King; Tartuffe, with Paul Eddington as the dithery
paterfamilias turned acolyte to a charlatan and Felicity Kendal
as the saucy, commonsensical maid in a cheerily broad staging,
almost willfully devoid of undertone or relevance, by Sir Peter
Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

    The only slowdown in London comes in musicals. The handful
of creators who, in various permutations, have brought forth
Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon and the like have
nothing new or imminent. Still, an irresistibly energetic and
shamelessly folksy overgrown cabaret show, Five Guys Named Moe,
featuring jazz of the 1930s and '40s and nonstop dancing by an
all-black cast, has taken London by storm. It is headed for
Broadway next April, complete with group singing of calypso
bebop and a whole-audience conga line at intermission.

    The most impressive new British play, Hare's Murmuring
Judges, starts as a panoramic survey of a criminal-justice
system shamefully subverted by careerism and bureaucracy.
Gradually the story focuses on a hapless petty burglar,
imprisoned almost five years for a first offense. Hare, a
left-winger, has a thumb on the scales: his inmate is penitent,
as innocent of spirit as Candide. Moreover, the police are
widely known to have tainted the evidence, but admitting that
would inconvenience powerful people, so injustice prevails. Much
of the dialogue is barely digested statistics; the silliest,
mouthed by a reformist young black woman, argues that
essentially every male under 30 is a criminal, so no one should
be prosecuted. Despite such balderdash, the storytelling is
intense and the acting splendid, especially by Robert Patterson
as the prisoner.

    Ayckbourn's new play is actually two: The Revengers'
Comedies trace, over two full shows, the misbegotten
relationship between a middle-class urban man and a wealthy
country maiden who meet while both are attempting suicide. They
then agree, he halfheartedly and she ferociously, to avenge the
sadness in each other's lives. He is an amiable also-ran. She,
it becomes clear, is a psychopath. Ayckwho also directed, fought
off all efforts to get him to consolidate the two segments into
one long night. He was wrong. There is simply not enough of a
payoff. But the work is often wickedly funny. It is well acted
(especially, in a splendid cameo, by Adam Godley as the
psychopath's languid, childlike aristocrat of a brother). And
its portrayal of what it is like to be the target of someone
truly crazy and obsessed lingers hauntingly, making the play
more interesting to remember than to watch.

    When the 1991 London theater is recalled in longer memory,
however, from a perspective approaching history, neither the
Hare nor the Ayckbourn nor even the West End's renewed vitality
will rate more than a passing mention. The epochal event will
be The Ride Down Mt. Morgan -- and Arthur Miller's stubborn
climb back up to the pinnacle of his talent.