Looking for the Real Thing

By RICHARD CORLISS

London offers a flock of new plays and charming revivals

If Margaret Thatcher did not exist, the British avant-garde might well have invented her. The Conservative landslide that extended her lease on 10 Downing Street has also renewed her reign as the favorite gargoyle of the London theater's left wing. In the suburban pubs and fringe theaters that form London's equivalent of off-Broadway, playwrights have been declaiming for months against Thatcherism and for the nuclear freeze. Two provocative British plays that recently made it to Manhattan, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls and Steven Berkoff s Greek, include oblique denunciations of the Tory leader. A new West End musical, the earnest, tuneful Blood Brothers (book, music and lyrics by Willy Russell), charts the plight of twin boys separated at birth, one raised in the fetid poverty of the post-welfare state, the other by a scheming rich woman whom theatergoers will have no trouble recognizing as a caricature of the Iron Lady. However these dramatists voted last Thursday, they must be grudgingly grateful that their pet beastie will be around for a few more years. She is the noose they can pull around their tight little island.

Meanwhile, in the political and geographic center of London theater, the Old Guard holds forth with style and swagger. Early this month the bedroom farce No Sex, Please--We're British notched its 5,000th performance; Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap is cadging tourists in its 31st year; Andrew Lloyd Webber still has three musicals running (Evita, Cats and Song and Dance), with a new show promised for the fall. Peter Ustinov has donned a peruke and a music-hall German accent to star in his own caustic comedy, Beethoven's Tenth. London's two major repertory companies are concentrating their energies on the Bard and other English classic playwrights. The Royal Shakespeare Company has mounted a characteristically bustling production of Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl, a feminist comedy from 1610, starring Helen Mirren and Jonathan Hyde. The National Theater, the slicker and more conventional of the rep houses, is presenting Sheridan's The Rivals, with sumptuous scenery by John Gunter, all of it devoured by a cast that includes Michael Hordern and Tim Curry. Also at the National: Eduardo de Filippo's Inner Voices, starring that foxy grandpa of British acting nobility, Sir Ralph Richardson.

Younger stars are doing their bit too.

Stephanie Lawrence, who played Eva

Peron in London, is a powerful singer if not a sexual dynamo in Marilyn, a ludicrous, lugubrious bio-opera about Marilyn Monroe. (Doomed movie stars are now the musical rage: a different Monroe show is coming to Broadway next season, and the National Theater is mounting a musical by Marvin Hamlisch based on the life and death of Jean Seberg.) Ben Kingsley, the R.S.C. stalwart who won an Oscar playing Gandhi, has brought his one-man show on 19th century Actor Edmund Kean to the West End. Griff Rhys Jones, who mugged his way to TV celebrity on the BBC's Not the Nine O'clock News, is conducting a valiant but vain effort to revive the corpse of Charley's Aunt. Most of the cast treats this 1892 farce as reverently as if they were playing Westminster Abbey; Rhys Jones, dressed for most of the play in widow's weeds, at least manages a passable impression of Margaret Rutherford imitating Queen Victoria.

The most engaging star turn is that of Denis Lawson, who appeared briefly in each of the Star Wars movies and won friends as the cagey innkeeper in Local Hero. He leads a sprightly revival of the 1929 English musical Mr. Cinders, a pleasant romantic twist on the Cinderella story, with irresistibly hummable songs and some wince-worthy gags (She: Assault and battery! Is that serious? He: I don't know about assault, but for battery they charge you and put you in a dry cell). The attractive, high-spirited cast avoids the twin pitfalls of archaeologist awe and camp condescension. And Lawson is a deadpan delight, a sad-clown naif in the spirit of Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon. Whether scurrying for his snooty brothers' clothes while muttering an ironic "With pleasure!" or double-talking his way into the princess's ball as an Amazonian adventurer, Lawson radiates working-class star quality. He is the best reason to see the snazziest revival in town.

One London play seems, at first glance, to be as innocent and venerable as Mr. Cinders--or at least as Angela Brazil's novels of the 1930s, in which plucky girls in their blue gym slips got into oodles of "scrummy" jams while defending the honor bright of Grangewood, "the jolliest school in England." As it happens, Denise Deegan's Daisy Pulls It Off is neither a revival nor a musical (though it boasts a catchy school song by one "Beryl Waddle-Browne," an anagram for the show's producer, Andrew Lloyd Webber). It is a sparkling, spanking-new parody of the Brazil novels that manages to be at once knowing and wide-eyed. The entire cast is darling--one wants to adopt the lot of them--led by Alexandra Mathie as Daisy, the poor but brilliant girl who ingratiates herself with classmates and audience alike.

At its liveliest, the British theater celebrates the now, not the then. It is a glorious cacophony of playwrights' voices, of eloquent agnostics fulminating like defrocked prelates, debating the fate of modern man with irony and rant. This line of dramatists began not with John Osborne but with Bernard Shaw, and at the end of a ranter's play the theatergoer should echo the fond last words of Shaw's Man and Superman: "Go on talking."

Three London plays that go on talking, and are worth talking about:

The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard. "I don't know how to write love," mourns Henry (Roger Rees), the playwright hero of Stoppard's new play. "Loving and being loved is so unliterary. It's happiness expressed in banality and lust." If Stoppard's other work (Jumpers, Travesties) can be seen as a series of dazzling games--word games, mind games, games the mind plays on itself, games of war and politics, the exasperatingly intricate game of life--The Real Thing announces itself as just that: a real, straightforward play about matters of the heart, one that bathes in the mess of human emotions instead of applying the dramatist's laws of geometry and physics. "I'm sorry," says Henry in one of the play's most telling domestic exchanges. "What for?" asks his actress wife Annie (Felicity Kendal). "I don't know," he replies. Stoppard knows how to write love.

Is love another game? Of course. Can familiarity breed creative evasion? Indeed. And so Stoppard leads the spectator on a merry round of hide-and-seek. Any one scene may turn out to be from one of Henry's plays, or be staged in his mind; it may even be the real thing. And Stoppard is, as always, ready to forget about his juggling act long enough to give an entertaining lecture on politics, language, sex or music. (Henry much prefers the Supremes and Herman's Hermits to "this female vocalist person .. . called Callas in a sort of foreign musical with no dancing.") Henry could be an intellectual popinjay or, worse, a nag. But through the frail magnificence of Roger Rees, last seen heading the R.S.C.'s Nicholas Nickleby, Henry becomes compassionate, troubled, ardent--the best of the rest of us, and the real thing.

A Map of the World by David Hare. More games, of the highest, most perplexing order. In 1976, at a UNESCO congress in Bombay, wealthy nations trade with poor ones: our money for your dignity. Soon another contest is under way. Victor Mehta (Roshan Seth), an Indian novelist similar to V.S. Naipaul, debates Stephen Andrews (Bill Nighy), a young left-wing journalist, on the subject of an author's responsibility to the Third World objects of his satire. The prize: a pretty American actress, Peggy Whitton (Diana Quick). Believe who will. Why would a novelist of declared hostility to the "barbarians" be invited to speak at a meeting devoted to them? Why would an intelligent woman agree to be a sexual trophy? Why (as we discover) would a movie studio make a film from the novel Mehta wrote about the Bombay incident?

Hare declines to solve these riddles.

Like Stoppard, he is interested in shifting points of view: the characters as they were in 1976, as they were refracted in Mehta's novel, as they will be distorted in the movie. He is even more interested in the need of both the Old World and the New to convert the other infidel and to sleep with the rich, silly American (who, the play suggests, will go to bed with any winner). As in Plenty, Hare is weakest when trying to show how his people get from one point in their lives to a radically different one and strongest when he hectors, beguiles, exhausts, persuades through his characters. Roshan Seth, who played Nehru in Gandhi, turns Mehta--at first a stone figure on the horseback of ego--into a complex and winning man of his own world.

West by Steven Berkoff. A Berkoff play (Greek, Metamorphosis, Hamlet) is simultaneously avant-garde and deja vu. Actors in whiteface mime extravagant gestures, confronting the audience with stylized, scatological invective. It is like being back in the rumble seat of '60s performance art, but with a raw poetic urgency. Other English play wrights may update Shaw; Berkoff wants to be an East End blend of Sam Shepard and Jean Genet. West, the first of his plays to infiltrate the West End, can be seen as a new West Side Story. Mike (Rory Edwards), leader of a quintet of Hackney toughs, challenges a rival gang boss to one-on-one combat and just barely lives to tell the tale. Berkoffs twist: Mike and every other character speak in iambic pentameter. Will the rival boss kick Mike in the crown? "Balls! Were he Al Capone I'd pluck 'im down."

This is the Theater of Too Much-- a hothouse of voluptuous imagery where the adventurous playgoer can find weird refuge. As director, Berkoff has molded his performers (including Edwards and the frighteningly dynamic Bruce Payne) until they are as mean and disciplined as an inner-city basketball team ready for the playground playoffs. s work is not for everyone; but for audacious originality, he is the top boy in contemporary British theater.

-- By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.