The Royal National Theatre of Great Britain stands today as one of the great play-producing machines of the world.
Situated since 1976 on London`s South Bank arts center in an imposing concrete building containing three playhouses, the National each week is able to maintain nine repertory productions in 24 performances before audiences that, at full capacity, can reach 20,000 persons.
In technical demands and aesthetic range, the theater`s repertory is amazing. This season in its largest auditorium, the Olivier Theatre, the National mounted a startling version of ”A Midsummer Night`s Dream,” set in a large pond of mud and water, alongside an elegant revival of George Bernard Shaw`s ”Pygmalion”; and its repertoire, in addition to the classics, included such important new works by English and American playwrights as Alan Bennett`s ”The Madness of George III” and Tony Kushner`s ”Angels in America.” Coming up for a Christmas season opening will be a major revival of the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II musical, ”Carousel,” staged by Nicholas Hytner (”Miss Saigon”) and choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan.
In addition to this array of plays in London, the theater also sends out several touring productions, such as the current U.S. visit of ”Richard III,” and provides dozens of supplementary attractions at its home base, including restaurants, cafes, bookshops, pre-show lobby recitals, art exhibits, post-performance discussions and occasional ”celebriteas,” in which star players chat it up and answer audience questions as part of a civilized afternoon tea.
In the four years since Richard Eyre became the theater`s third director
(after Laurence Olivier and Peter Hall), the National has enjoyed an enthusiastic critical and popular response, so much so that its present repertoire is playing to more than 90 percent capacity; and ”George III,”
premiered last November, has yet to play to an empty seat.
The reasons for the popularity of Bennett`s witty, relevant history play are all up front in the production. Hytner`s staging, abetted by Mark Thompson`s efficent, handsome scenic design, is both smooth and impressive, its cast of 23 actors topped by Nigel Hawthorne in the title role.
As an eccentric yet endearing monarch plunged into a malady for which there is no cure and tortured by physicians from whom there is no compassion, Hawthorne delivers a bravura performance, ranging from ebullience to anguish as the debilitating disease descends on him.
Now at his peak as an actor, Hawthorne is given splendid support up and down the line by the rest of the cast, portraying the real-life 18th Century royal and political figures of William Pitt, Edmund Burke, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the Prince of Wales, the future King George IV. Most of them probably will join Hawthorne for the play`s brief North American tour next year.
Meanwhile, in the National`s small Cottesloe Theatre, another sold-out hit has come from ”Millenium Approaches,” the first half of Kushner`s two-part drama of ”Angels in America.”
Written by an American playwright as his ”Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” the work`s first installment received its premiere in 1991 by the Eureka Theatre Company of San Francisco and will be staged in its entirety this season in a joint production by the Mark Taper Forum of Los Angeles and the Public Theatre of New York.
Its critical momentum, however, developed greatly after its surprise embrace in London, where its mixture of fantasy and reality and of mythical and historical figures was brilliantly staged and designed by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, respectively.
In its examination of contemporary American manners and morals, Kushner`s play owes a great deal to several AIDS-related precedents, such as Larry Kramer`s ”The Normal Heart” and William Hoffman`s ”As Is”; but it has a uniquely fevered, fantastic environment, and it has created one gargantuan character in its portrayal of Roy Cohn, the New York attorney who died of AIDS in 1986.
Again, casting and performances here are impeccable, as if the National actors had been native to the social and political territory of New York and Washington.
One of the most controversial of recent National productions, oddly, has been Shakespeare`s ”Dream,” introduced this summer in the Olivier by Robert LePage, the talented French-Canadian director whose ”Dragon`s Trilogy” has twice been presented in Chicago by the International Theatre Festival of Chicago.
LePage`s vision of the play, staging it in amid a wading pond and its surrounding mud banks, has yielded some striking visual imagery, and his casting of Angela Laurier, a contortionist and acrobat with the Cirque du Soleil of Montreal, as the fairy Puck has produced several spectacular sights. When the comic Bottom is turned into an ass by Puck`s magic, for example, he wears no heavy mask. Instead, Laurier uses her feet to become his donkey`s ears, amusingly suggesting the sudden transformation.
Visually arresting in spots, this ”Dream,” however, is poetically dreary, much of Shakepseare`s language lost or dissipated by poor delivery. And in the end, the idea of turning the comedy into a ”Mudsummer Night`s Dream” (as London wags are calling the production) hardly seems appropriate or revealing.
Across the Thames River in the labryinthine Barbican arts center, the Royal Shakespeare Company, London`s other major subsidized repertory theater, has tried, without success, to provide a lanching pad for a new play by the American (and Chicago native) playwright Richard Nelson.
Nelson`s earlier ”Some Americans Abroad” and ”Two Shakespearean Actors” have had well-received productions at the RSC, but his latest,
”Columbus and the Discovery of Japan,” for all its timeliness and intelligence, added up to a lumbering and dreary patchwork that the company closed early in the face of bad reviews and poor attendance.
Nelson`s idea of portraying Christopher Columbus as a flawed visionary was certainly valid, and his notion of linking Columbus` voyage of discovery with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain gives an interesting kick to its plotting, but it resulted only in a plodding vehicle, directed with surprisingly heavy touches by John Caird, co-director of ”Nicholas Nickleby” and ”Les Miserables,” and lifeless in its portrayals, despite the earnest work of title role actor Jonathan Hyde.
