Commentators are always fussing about the British invasion of Broadway, but they rarely pause to notice that the traffic goes both ways. In a city committed to the international repertoire, London hosts a constant diet of American work, both new and old, transfers from the United States and world premieres.
This, after all, is the town where David Mamet in 1983 at the National Theater launched ”Glengarry Glen Ross,” long before it was seen in Chicago and New York scooping up Pulitzers and Tonys. Last October Arthur Miller chose the West End, not Broadway, for the debut of his new play, ”The Ride Down Mt. Morgan.” At age 76, Miller felt weary of the pressures of Broadway and felt he`d get a fairer ride in London. To some extent, he was right. Whereas ”Mt. Morgan” closed here after less than four months, the same production in New York might have had difficulty eking out one month.
This year, the London stage has so far hosted one American show after another to the extent that American expatriates may feel vaguely disoriented: don`t you come to England, after all, primarily expecting English theater? Not on the evidence of the lineup so far in `92, which began with a watered-down West End version of ”Sophisticated Ladies,” the 1981 Duke Ellington musical that made a Broadway star out of Gregory Hines, followed by Tina Howe`s delicate 1983 play ”Painting Churches,” coarsened by a poor performance from Josie Lawrence inheriting Elizabeth McGovern`s role as the portrait artist, Mags. (The play closed after three weeks, wrongly bludgeoned by local critics.)
Those American plays with the best chances of survival in London tend either to be new and political or by writers who are old and/or dead.
”Painting Churches” failed for the same reason that the far-inferior
”Steel Magnolias” did before it: domestic American drama in London just doesn`t translate, unless you`re talking ”Long Day`s Journey Into Night,”
nor does a certain kind of American whimsy. It`s no accident, for example, that neither Wendy Wasserstein`s Tony-winning ”The Heidi Chronicles” nor Craig Lucas`s ”Prelude to A Kiss” has been seen in London. The appeal-in Lucas`s case often fanciful-of those two plays would most likely be met locally with blank incomprehension.
Better examples of the American plays that succeed are a pair recently opened at the Royal National Theater, both in superb productions. Tony Kushner`s ”Angels In America” is a young writer`s blistering howl of rage against a country-our own fragmented United States-on the verge of spiritual depletion. Tennessee Williams`s 1961 ”Night of the Iguana” is a classic text by a great American talent, indeed perhaps the American great whom, after Miller, the British produce most often.
The English stage takes a far more adventurous approach to Williams than the American one, regularly scanning the writer`s entire repertoire rather than sticking to the two or three sure bets. It`s instructive to note that even as Jessica Lange prepares her Broadway debut this month in ”A Streetcar Named Desire,” two more problematic Williams works were seen on the West End of late: ”The Rose Tattoo” and ”Orpheus Descending.”
”Iguana” has been done on Broadway twice in the last two decades but on neither occasion with the resources the National here brings to it. More muted and elegiac than such hothouse plays as ”Streetcar,” ”Orpheus” and ”Cat On a Hot Tin Roof,” ”Iguana” emerges in director Richard Eyre`s superlative hands as a wide-ranging epic of the human psyche, embracing fear, longing and occasionally lust before coming to rest in the notion of patience and endurance as the best response to life.
The embodiment of that response is Hannah Jelkes (Eileen Atkins) the itinerant artist who has spent 25 years traveling the world with her 97-year- old grandfather/poet before arriving one sweaty Mexican summer`s day at the hilltop Costa Verde hotel. There she finds a spiritual soulmate, the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon (Alfred Molina), a defrocked clegyman now working as a tour guide for dreary assemblages of fusspot women. Ousted from the church for ”fornication and heresy,” Shannon is about to experience a similar denunciation, having slept with a young woman on the tour.
”The helpless can`t help the helpless,” Shannon tells Hannah, but with the intimate affinities Williams always affords his outsiders, the two do embrace one another in a way that transcends the physical. Indeed, the one tactile gesture between them-Shannon`s touch of Hannah`s cheek midway through the third act-brings to a devastating hush an already still audience. What follows is a dialogue of mutual self-revelation as moving as anything Williams ever wrote, acted with unflinching beauty by the two leads. In the end, Shannon must leave Hannah-the carnal enticements of the hotel`s brassy owner, Maxine (Frances Barber) win out-but one senses that both lives have been transformed.
Both Atkins and Molina are at the peak of their form, investing American roles with a respect they don`t always receive in London. Though well into her 50s, Atkins prior to ”Iguana” has made a career of rejecting American offers, adamant that she didn`t have what she calls the necessary ”pith.” In this instance, her fierce eyes and drawn face are ideal for Hannah, the
”Nantucket spinster” whose reserve seems somewhat English.
New American plays in London are more problematic since they rarely arrive with any imprimatur. Indeed, reading the reviews of ”Painting Churches,” one would think Tina Howe was a sentimental hack rather than a quirky, often very moving stylist with her own distinct take on territory plowed elsewhere by, among others, A. R. Gurney (”The Dining Room,” ”The Cocktail Hour”), another American whose plays don`t travel well.
More to British taste is Tony Kushner`s ”Angels In America,” a 3 1/2-hour play about AIDS, Reaganism and the death of secular humanism, part one of which, ”Millenium Approaches,” opened to rave reviews at the National`s Cottesloe auditorium in January and continues in repertory at least through the summer. (The second part, ”Perestroika,” may join it next year, by which point both halves are expected to have opened in a separate production at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and then off-Broadway.)
Kushner`s vision seems ideally suited to those Britons who think American writers never move beyond trivial domestic concerns. Harsh, fiery and overtly political, Kushner yokes together history and fantasy, polemic and broadside, to tell the story of two couples-one straight, one gay-whose own antagonisms are emblematic of a larger social divide represented by the crack running through the sculpted American flag at the rear of designer Nick Ormerod`s set. ”We`re all scared in the land of the free,” says Marcus D`Amico`s Louis, an employee for the Brooklyn District Attorney who can`t deal with the fact that his lover (Sean Chapman) has AIDS. Set against their crisis is that of Louis` colleague Joe (Nick Reding), a Reagan-spouting Mormon whose increasingly ambivalent sexuality is hastening the mental collapse of his wife Harper (Felicity Montagu).
While the particulars of Kushner`s story are fictional, the play`s driving force is drawn from fact: Roy Cohn (played by Henry Goodman), the notorious McCarthy-era lawyer and New York power broker whose own death from AIDS in 1986 is viewed by Kushner as a classic American irony. Written with a savagery that recalls some of David Mamet`s dynamic devils, Kushner`s imagining of Cohn is just one coup in a play about spiritual exhaustion that seems never to exhaust itself.
If ”Angels in America” is a deserved hit in England, that may be because Kushner unwittingly finds himself occupying prime British territory:
he`s an overtly leftist American writer in a theater often given over to overtly leftist Britons (David Hare, David Edgar etc.) What the British like about ”Angels In America”-and you can`t really blame them-is their sense that it could have been written by one of them.
