The New Elizabethans

On any night of the week in London this season, a citizen with a couple of shillings in his pocket and a yen to go to the show could have had a ball. He could also have had a fit trying to make up his mind. Should he see Shaw? There would be four revivals in London in the course of the year, one of them with Sir Ralph Richardson. Coward? Four of his plays would run, with Noel in two of them. Arthur Miller? Sir Alec Guinness just opened in Incident at Vichy. Musicals? Hello, Dolly! has Mary Martin, no less. Chekhov? Sir John Gielgud and Claire Bloom were great in Ivanov. There was also a new Hamlet, starring a 24-year-old flash named David Warner. Also plays by two of Britain's most important newcomers, Harold Pinter and John Arden. And Sir Michael Redgrave and Ingrid Bergman in Turgenev's A Month in the Country. Also an updated satirical revue, Beyond the Fringe. Not to forget Sir Laurence Olivier in Congreve's Love for Love, as well as Alec McCowan and Siobhan McKenna in The Cavern and Dorothy Tutin in Portrait of a Queen.

And in case anybody was wondering about some of the other British stage notables, why they were in the colonies--Broadway, that is--with The Right Honourable Gentleman, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Half a Sixpence, Inadmissible Evidence and Marat/Sade. Or they were making movies. Or they were doing television. Or they were--only briefly--between engagements.

Cross-Pollination. What it all amounts to, says Director Peter Hall, with only slight understatement, is "a tremendous explosion in the British theater." Never has the theater there been, as Peter O'Toole says, so "damn healthy." "It is," agrees Claire Bloom, "the most exciting theater in the world"--as the following color pages show. Fifty-one productions are thriving in the London West End and off-West End. Two government-subsidized groups, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater, are turning away customers, and almost any provincial town worth its name has its own repertory company playing a different show every two or three weeks.

Directors, actors and playwrights are cross-pollinating all over the theatrical garden. Peter Brook directed Flower Drum Song, The Visit, Irma La Douce and King Lear (with Paul Scofield) in New York, and he has designed productions for Co vent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera. For the movies, he directed Olivier in Beggar's Opera, Belmondo and Moreau in Moderate Cantabile, and Lord of the Flies. The controversial Marat/Sade is also his. Robert Bolt, who wrote the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, and who wrote the play A Man for All Seasons, is now cranking up the screenplay for Seasons, which will star Scofield--as soon as Actor Scofield completes his London stage run in Gogol's The Government Inspector. Tony Richardson, who directed the film Tom Jones, also directed John Osborne's play Luther. Tom Courtenay, who starred in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner --which Tony Richardson directed--played Pasha in Zhivago, will go back into rep this summer. Albert Finney, who was Tom Jones, has a few more weeks in Arden's Armstrong's Last Goodnight at the National Theater, will next do Strindberg. Gielgud, who brings his Ivanov to the U.S. in April, this time with Vivien Leigh, was seen the last two weekends in The Ages of Man on CBS television in the U.S. Julie Christie, having finished Doctor Zhivago, starts shooting Franc,ois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 this week.

The British theater, in short, has blossomed into a new Elizabethan Age, the likes of which even Shakespeare would have marveled at. The remarkable thing is that a dozen years ago, it was not curtain calls for the stage but curtains--period.

Something Missing. Before that time, the theater settled for the old teacup comedies, some Eliot and Rattigan works and some stunning performances of the classics by Guinness, Olivier and Gielgud. Taken singly, the plays that London offered were often first-rate achievements by first-rate actors and directors. Taken together, there was something missing, an ennui in the audience and on the stage itself. "Apart from revivals and imports," complained Critic Kenneth Tynan in 1954, "there is nothing in the London theater that one dares discuss with an intelligent man for five minutes." Looking back, Director Peter Brook says that "the role of the theater based on escape was finished and had to be replaced by a theater based on what is."

And then, almost inexplicably, in 1956, came a new kind of theater that did not dislodge the fine traditional productions of the classics but complemented them. The first playwright to add the magic was John Osborne, the Angry Young Man, an actor out of work and furiously out of patience with life, the theater, everything. The play was Look Back in Anger, an iconoclastic screed against the suffocating middle-class ethic and the coolly cultivated traditionalism of the Establishment. "When I saw Look Back in Anger" said an ex-pastry cook named Arnold Wesker, "I knew it could happen. I went home and wrote my first play in six weeks." The thunder of Osborne summoned not only Wesker (Roots, Chips with Everything) but a whole cloudburst of writers turned playwrights. Among them: Pinter (The Caretaker), Arden (Live Like Pigs), Ann Jellicoe (The Knack), Brendan. Behan (The Hostage) and Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey). These new dramatists led their audiences out of the drawing room and into the kitchen for a close, painful view of the cynical, life-hungry, postwar generation.

Even Olivier was entranced, although he admits that he loathed Look Back in Anger at first sight. "The second time I saw it," he recalls, "the scales descended from my eyes." He went backstage, asked the playwright if there was a part for him in his next work at the Royal Court. Replied Osborne: "I don't know. Possibly." The possibility turned out to be one of Olivier's most remembered roles--the shabby has-been in The Entertainer.

New Beneficiaries. With people like Olivier in sympathy, the stage began to stir. In England, with the theater so rooted in tradition, the government nourished the renaissance with money. A government-appointed Arts Council had opened the cash drawers in 1946, now began spending widely; last season alone contributed more than $2.5 million for the dramatic arts. The most spectacular beneficiaries today are also the newest--the National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The idea of a national theater had been kicking around for more than a century. But in 1962, Olivier was given the Old Vic theater on the south bank of the Thames and an annual grant of $364,000. He has since made it one of the finest stage companies in the world. Among its recent productions: Olivier's first Othello, Coward's Hayfever, Brecht's Mother Courage. Peter Hall was involved in a similar buskin-strap operation on the Royal Shakespeare Company. Before he took over in 1960, the group had restricted itself to Shakespeare at Stratford on Avon. Today, thanks to a $252,000-a-year subsidy, Hall has added a London theater, the Aldwych, and a year-round company of 110. Marat/Sade is a Royal Shakespeare production.

Rep Apprenticeship. The fountainhead of talent on which both of these groups depends is the provincial theater. In Britain there are 57 fulltime, professional repertory companies--twice as many as in the U.S., which is four times as populous and 40 times bigger. The regional theater is provincial in name only. The Bristol Old Vic, for example, now has had three of its productions running in repertory in London this season, next year will perform three Shakespeare works on Broadway.

The Bristol company also runs its own drama school, but even London's rigorous old Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts is regarded as only a prep school, and an optional one, for rep. For it is in the provincial companies that British performers develop the meticulous diction, vocal resonance, authoritative carriage and infinite versatility that make them so distinguished. Every one of Britain's six acting knights --Guinness, Redgrave, Gielgud, Richardson, Olivier and Donald Wolfit--apprenticed in rep. A knight aspirant, Rex Harrison, started at the Liverpool Repertory Theater at $7.50 a week in 1924, spent six years in the provinces before landing in London. Similarly, Julie Christie, Sarah Miles, Tom Courtenay, Samantha Eggar and Susannah York got their start in the sticks. Sean Connery survived a small suburban rep company. Even Julie Andrews did not escape a traditional grounding--she came out of the pantomimes.

In fact, the pinnacle of prestige for the dedicated British actor is no longer the West End but one of the top rep companies. The play, not the pay, is the thing. When Olivier took on The Entertainer in 1957, he reportedly sacrificed a $250,000 film offer; the Royal Court, London's outstanding repertory company, paid him $126 a week. "There is nothing so beautiful in the theater," says Olivier, "as an ensemble of expert players. Only in such a team can an actor catch sight of something like perfection."

Albert Finney, for example, enlisted in the National Theater and, when asked his preference in roles, replied: "I'll play as cast." With the quality of the rest of the 70-man company--which has included Redgrave, Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay and Joan Plow-right--an actor even of Finney's experience found himself, undaunted, in some minuscule parts. Others join rep troupes either to build their craft or to share it: Tommy Steele (Half a Sixpence) hopes to leave the musical stage soon to work at the National Theater, and Actor John Neville, a Shakespearean and West End principal, left to run the Nottingham Playhouse rep two years ago.

Stage Disaster. The repertory people, moreover, are not manacled to the stage nor impoverished by it. Both Royal Shakespeare and National Theater contracts provide time off for interim film and TV commitments. Olivier himself took leave from the National to film Khartoum. John Osborne, who before Anger was so poor that he wore sandals all winter, has earned enough from screen rights to his plays and the scenario for Tom Jones to own a chauffeur-driven Rolls and a town house in Belgravia; the once Angry Young Man is now one of the richest dramatists in the world. Thus, the interchange between the theater and movies--as well as TV--enriches both the individuals and the media. It is this interplay, in fact, that ultimately explains the pre-eminence of Britain's actors, directors and writers. Most Hollywood stars are so dependent on the sound stage that a Broadway role is considered a special event--and a disastrous one at that; without a mike to amplify them, an artful camera to enlarge them and a clever film editor to enhance them, they are defeated. By contrast, Britain's talented people, who are so accustomed to flitting from stage to screen to TV, are lords of the flies.

It goes without saying that the most enriched people of all are the audiences. In the brief decade or so when the new Elizabethans have come of age, their benign assault on the public sensibilities in Britain has deepened men's insights as well as their enjoyment. Theater, British style, is no longer a let's pretend. It is for real.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.