Buckingham Palace isn’t the only joint in this city where the guards change. Three of London’s major theater institutions — the Royal National Theatre, the Donmar Warehouse and the Almeida Theatre in Islington — acquired new artistic directors in the past year. A fourth company, the Old Vic, has a new head as well, a starry American one: Kevin Spacey, who plans to act in and direct Old Vic productions.
The changes have already worked, renewing interest in these high-profile subsidized companies lying outside the sphere of West End commercial interests. Not that they haven’t transferred shows to the West End; the big, brash trash-opera now at the National, “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” is moving there in the fall.
Booking “Springer” into the National was the idea of Nicholas Hytner, the new artistic director. He is best known in America for “Miss Saigon” and, via its Chicago pre-Broadway tryout, “Sweet Smell of Success.” But he’s established himself as a typical English success story whose credits include Shakespeare — his “Henry V” at the National is as sharp a modern-dress Shakespearean history foray as I’ve ever seen, starring Adrian Lester as the king — and contemporary non-musical work.
Bringing in new faces
Hytner says the Springer musical, which was the hit of the recent Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is “pulling in a completely fresh crowd because of what it is.” Dressed in jeans and a sport coat, the quietly intense director sits on a couch in his yet-to-be-fully-unpacked National office overlooking the Thames.
Some audiences and critics may believe the “Springer” musical’s outrage factor wears out its welcome before three songs are gone — but “in its off-the-wall way,” Hytner says, “it has traveled way off the culture pages of the newspapers. And thank God [London] is still a theater culture — in a way, I suspect, that Chicago still is. New York isn’t, but Chicago is.”
This may be personal disappointment talking. In New York, “Sweet Smell of Success” fared poorly and lost millions. Hytner, however, had “the most terrific time” in Chicago working on it.
At the National he’s hoping to shake up the programming in ways beyond booking a Springer goof. Thanks to a grant from Travelex, the summer programming features 10-pound seats (about $17 American). “We’re reaching out to people who have simply been excluded in the past,” Hytner says.
U.S. government arts subsidy pales in comparison to Britain’s, which to Hytner means “you have to be heroic to work in the American theater . . . at the National I’m not going to let money be an issue as far as our programming’s concerned. I’m just not going to let it happen. The great thing about the cheap seats is this: The audience becomes not an end to itself, but a means to an end. When you have an adventurous, lively, up-for-anything audience, you can program them anything.
“It’s not budgets that constrain me; at the moment it’s the lack of confidence in the younger generation of playwrights when it comes to writing large-scale plays for our two large houses. It’s often said there’s lots of playwrights who can write for the Olivier and the Lyttelton,” he says of the larger National houses. “And they’re all called Alan, David or Tom: David Hare and David Edgar; Alan Bennett and Alan Ayckbourn; and Tom Stoppard. After that it starts looking thin.
“But only [the National] can do the big plays. So we must.”
Formidable footsteps
Over at the Donmar Warehouse, artistic director Michael Grandage has fewer seats to worry about — all he’s dealing with is the shiny legacy of his predecessor, the celebrated Sam Mendes (“American Beauty,” “Road to Perdition”). He’s dealing with it very well so far. Grandage’s recent revival of “Caligula” was a dazzling rendition of a truly daunting text, lively without being junky, guided by a tour de force performance by Michael Sheen.
“An existentialist play by Albert Camus is not an easy sell,” the ebullient Grandage says, seated in a second-story lobby corner of the Donmar. “If we’re lucky enough to have good reviews and a good word-of-mouth, because we’re a 250-seat theater” — the next Donmar offering, co-produced by Chicago Shakespeare Theater, is the aptly scaled Gary Griffin revival of “Pacific Overtures” — “we can sell out.” But in the current worldwide economy, he notes, few theaters enjoy the sort of advance sales they once did.
The Donmar is one of those special, comfortable places to see a show: Its famous back wall, a tall, wide, brick landscape, pushes the actors wonderfully close to the audience. On a similar audience/actor scale up in the north London neighborhood of Islington, the Almeida Theater offers related atmospheric rewards, starting with its own brick back wall, gently curved as opposed to the straight-backed Donmar.
The new Almeida head is Michael Attenborough. After working out of a former bus garage for two years, the Almeida recently moved back into its 321-seat auditorium, following a multimillion dollar refurbishment. The auditorium itself hasn’t changed; the building has merely been reinforced to the hilt. What’s new, and marvelous, is the lobby, the adjoining bar and a pleasing indoor-outdoor flow.
The first show in the reopened theater was Trevor Nunn’s revival of the Ibsen romance, “The Lady from the Sea” starring Natasha Richardson. Nunn’s revival was smart, well-crafted, if somewhat overpraised in London. As she did to her Broadway engagements of “Closer” and “Cabaret,” Richardson brought formidable presence and throaty emotional power to Ibsen’s conflicted heroine. The play remains a bit of a whatzit, but as with the Donmar “Caligula,” as with the National’s “Henry V,” the Almeida supporting cast was rife with excellent character actors, actors whose lives and careers have been forged in the English theater.
England’s newspapers in recent months have been full of stories with headlines like “The death of the West End” (the Guardian) or, more charitably, “Welcome to the vile West End” (the Daily Telegraph). America has its fabulous invalid, Broadway; England has the late, vile West End.
It’s neither dead nor truly vile, at least from one American perspective. It is, however, jam-packed with missable shows at the moment. Things at the National, the Donmar and the Almeida, however, have been far less missable.
