End of a Golden Age?

Americans who like to moan about the decline of U.S. theater and the rise of England's can point for proof to Broadway: no fewer than five of its current plays originated in London.* And more would seem to be on the way: London playgoers now have no fewer than 45 plays and musicals to view, compared with Broadway's 30.

But appearances are deceiving. Accustomed since John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) to a seemingly endless blossoming of new theatrical talent, Londoners now are suffering through a period of drought. According to TIME Correspondent Horace Judson, the crackle of sere and yellow revivals is in the air. Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap is still running in what is advertised as its "16th mind-boggling year." Among the musicals in town are a revival of The Boy Friend (1953) and an exhumation of The Desert Song (1926). George Bernard Shaw has been revived at least ten times during the past three years; Irene Worth and John Clements are currently appearing in Heartbreak House. Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde are also being trotted out regularly; last week The Importance of Being Earnest opened with Dame Flora Robson, and Hay Fever opens this week. Producers have even harked back to such antiques as The Bells, a Victorian melodrama in which Sir Henry Irving made his reputation, and John Galsworthy's hoary Edwardian relic, Justice, a preachy treatise on crime and punishment.

Murky Waters. Of the only two new plays with any serious intellectual content to have opened in the West End this season, one--Peter Ustinov's disappointing Halfway Up the Tree--closed in New York after only 72 performances. The other, Wise Child, has already closed in London, despite a strong cast headed by Sir Alec Guinness. A kinky, comic and slightly sinister play by Simon Gray, Wise Child presented Guinness as a criminal on the lam, disguised as a woman. He is being blackmailed by a weirdo youth who carries out the pretense of being his son; the boy, in turn, is being pursued by a homosexual hotel manager. "Very murky waters indeed," said the Times.

London has no Off Broadway; the once adventurous Royal Court Theater, since the death of Artistic Director George Devine, has been taken over by a feeble clique of conventionally minor playwrights and directors. In this vacuum, the tiny semisuburban, underbudgeted Hampstead Theater Club has attracted critical notice with its recent productions of two stimulatingly offbeat dramas: Tennessee Williams' Two Character Play (TIME, Dec. 22), and its currently featured Bakke's Night of Fame by Playwright John McGrath. In the latter, the action takes place in the death cell of a U.S. prison, where Bakke, awaiting electrocution at midnight, ingeniously and humorously torments his guards, the warden and the priest who is making one last attempt to save his soul. McGrath has a rare English ear for U.S. speech and manner, and the actors, mostly unknowns, keep their American accents accurate and consistent.

Even those triumphs of English repertory, the National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, are having a few troubles. Four of the seven plays in the National's repertory are holdovers from last season: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Chekhov's Three Sisters, the classic Feydeau farce, A Flea in Her Ear, and Strindberg's Dance of Death, in which Sir Laurence Olivier, with scalding authority, dominates the play in the role of Edgar, the retired Swedish army officer. But with the exception of the all-male As You Like It (TIME, Oct. 13), the National's new productions this season have been disasters: a Tartuffe that misfired despite Sir John Gielgud as Orgon, and Volpone, in which Director Tyrone Guthrie made the mistake of carrying Ben Jonson's animal names too far and dressing the actors in beaks, snouts, fur and feathers.

Dense Thicket. The Royal Shakespeare, from which the gifted Peter Hall this month resigned as managing director, is also making do with holdovers: Ghosts, starring Dame Peggy Ashcroft, All's Well That Ends Well, Macbeth, with Paul Scofield, who manages to restore immediacy and meaning to the old lines with his dry, fractured, arhythmic reading of the title role.

Scofield is the only one of England's great actors who still seems to be on course and functioning to full capacity. The ailing Olivier is less active; Gielgud is more attenuated, cerebral and distant than ever; Sir Ralph Richardson seems to have given up the struggle against his own mannerisms. And not since 1965 has there been a new play by John Osborne or Harold Pinter--or better yet, some worthy successors.

* Joe Egg, Staircase, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, There's a Girl in My Soup.

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