With a Little Help from Our Friends

By RICHARD CORLISS

London's theaters offer quite a show for visiting Americans

A cut-rate sun has risen over what used to be called the British Empire. That at least is the view from the far side of the Atlantic, as the dollar registers historic highs against the pound. For 2.5 million American travelers a year, a vacation in England--with frequent visits to its hallowed tourist lure, the theater--never looked so good. Britons may complain that some musicals, like the American import On Your Toes, are charging record ticket prices (nearly $20), but these are still lower than the cheapest admissions to most Broadway shows, and not a few off-Broadway. The best seat in most West End houses costs from $13 to $16; the National Theater offers many seats for about $6.50; and at the "fringe" theaters one can see first-rate plays for a fire-sale $4.25.

Taking a hint from their Broadway brethren, London impresarios have stocked their theaters with musicals. There currently are 19 on display, ranging from ripe chestnuts like The Boy Friend and West Side Story to such instant-nostalgia items as Peg (a new show based on the 1912 J. Hartley Manners comedy) and Singin' in the Rain (with aging sprite Tommy Steele in the Gene Kelly role). The big noise, though, comes from two dueling musicals. Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and Lyricist Tim Rice, once the Midas men of British songwriting with the shows Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Evita, have separated and are parading their new collaborators before London playgoers.

Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express, a homage to trains, with lyrics by Richard Stilgoe, is (surprise!) the season's hottest ticket. It is also just about a total bust. For this multimedia combo of Rollerball and The Little Engine That Could, Designer John Napier has ramped and revamped the huge Apollo Victoria Theater, allowing the young cast room to roller-skate through three levels of the audience. But all the amplified sound and whirling energy cannot hide the show's vacuity. The story line is repetitive and inconsequential; Trevor Nunn's staging is an elephantine parody of his wondrous work on Nicholas Nickleby and Lloyd Webber's Cats; and the composer, who until now seemed an inexhaustible fountain of inventive melody, has devised a bluesy score that is sere and predictable. Lloyd Webber is no longer content simply to write musicals; now he must mount spectacles for theatergoers who will accept something big in place of something good. The performers, led by Stephanie Lawrence and a break-dancing blur named Jeffrey Daniel, are energetic troupers whose relentless "high spirits serve to underline the inspiration, and ultimate destination, of Starlight Express: this is Vegas on ball bearings.

Rice, at least, is on track with his pretty, witty Blondel (rhymes with fondle), a fable constructed on the life of a minstrel (Paul Nicholas) in the court of King Richard I. With the twist of a political metaphor, the Lionheart turns into today's "Iron Lady" of 10 Downing Street. And in case there is any mistaking the satire, King Richard sings a brief ditty on the virtues of self-reliance whose 16 lines begin with the letters M-A-R-G-A-R-E-T THATCHER. But if the show has an angry bark, it is also frisky as a puppy. Nicholas and his co-stars (all veterans of the Cats cast) strut engagingly through the handsome sets. Stephen Oliver's score drapes cleverly oratorical orchestrations on his plain songs, and the whole thing moves with the brash dash of an undergraduate jape.

Two and a half years ago, the National Theater poached on Broadway turf with a vivid revival of Guys and Dolls that is still running in repertory. Less successful have been efforts by the company's director, Sir Peter Hall, to stage original, serious musical works. Last winter his collaboration with Composer Marvin Hamlisch on a dirge about Jean Seberg, in which the actress was seriously compared with Joan of Arc, fizzled at the stake. Now Sir Peter has devised an adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm. As in Jean Seberg, masks abound, with the actors simulating Orwell's heroic horses, quisling chickens and Stalinist pigs (led by David Ryall as Squealer). It is all very faithful and, in a couple of songs by Adrian Mitchell and Richard Peaslee, tuneful. The mood on Sir Peter's green and peasant farm is not so much entertaining as edifying. Such, perhaps, is the attendant burden of running a national theater.

Most of the classical revivals at the National smell just as strongly of the lamp. Both Clifford Odets' Golden Boy and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd lie open and inert on the stage, as if they were exams to be passed and not theatrical experiences to be shared. Only Wild Honey, Michael Frayn's free adaptation of a play Chekhov wrote when he was still a student, strikes vital sparks, and this because Frayn treats the text as an organism that can flower with care and pruning. At 21, Chekhov was already halfway toward being "Chekhovian"; he alternated comic and pathetic moods instead of blending the two into a sonorous melancholy for the class of landed Russians who would fall before the Revolution.

And so Frayn has broken the play in two. The first half is all cellos and sad small talk ("If you think this place is dull when you're here you should be here when you're not here"); the second half is flat-out farce with the tincture of domestic tragedy coloring the night sky. Ian McKellen is fine as Platonov, the country schoolmaster whose bitter gaiety attracts women to him like flies to wild honey. But the true star of Christopher Morahan's production--and, these days, of the entire National Theater--is Designer John Gunter. His garden and woodland sets provide the perfect trysting place for sobriety and anarchy, and the majestic train engine he sends chugging toward the audience at play's end is more effective than any of the loco motion in Starlight Express.

In Britain, revivals are not simply the province of the subsidized companies, the National and the Royal Shakespeare Company. At any moment in the commercial West End a durable star--Glenda Jackson, Albert Finney and Peter O'Toole already this summer--is likely to pop up for a month or two in a classic play. And now Rex Harrison is treading the Haymarket boards with filmdom's Claudette Colbert, still blowing strong at 80, in Frederick Lonsdale's 1923 drawing-room comedy Aren't We All? Though Colbert is onstage for less than half an hour, the audience devours her celebrity like After Eight mints. Another character tells her, "You become younger every day," and the stalls erupt in seconding applause. But her vehicle is a poor rickety thing with no mileage left. Colbert exaggerates every great-lady gesture, while Harrison wanders through the action trying to remember his lines, or why he is there. Honor the memory of these two gracious stars and catch a double bill of The Palm Beach Story and the 1948 Unfaithfully Yours.

A steady diet of revivals might convince the visitor that London is a museum, or mausoleum, of theater art. But right now a quartet of new plays demonstrates the range and intermittent vitality of British playwrights. As it happens, all four plays are about the inherent treachery of friendship. The setting is usually mundane--a middle-class kitchen, a tousled living room, a university dorm, a patio set for dinner--and the conversation is often muted and indirect, like snatches of chat overheard at the next restaurant table. The playgoer must listen between the lines, waiting patiently for simmering resentments to explode in unsuspecting faces.

Two of the playwrights, Simon Gray and Alan Ayckbourn, look to be marking time by rewriting earlier hits. Gray's The Common Pursuit is set in academe and publishing, his favorite haunts from Butley, Otherwise Engaged and Dog Days. He follows six friends from their Cambridge years through advancements, affairs, decay, betrayal, only occasionally taking his waspish wit for a walk (the nine members of an Arts Council are succinctly characterized as "three queers, three not, three nothing"). The exhaustively inventive Ayckbourn (The Norman Conquests, Bedroom Farce) has now devised a pyramid of farcical possibilities. Intimate Exchanges begins with one of two different scenes; each of those scenes offers two more variants; and so on, and so on, and so on. It makes for 31 scenes in 16 possible permutations--all on the author's familiar theme of suburban swinishness. This is a prodigious stunt of dramatic construction and performers' memory, but hardly worth 16 nights of anyone's time. Or one night.

For some traditional virtues of British theater--familiar characters, sardonic raillery, a fiercely political point of view--Doug Lucie's Progress fills the bill. Will (Gregory Floy), who makes television documentaries, and Ronee (Lindsay Duncan), who does social work, open their flat to counsel and console London's emotionally deprived. Not easy, since Ronee is having a lesbian affair, the upstairs tenant is a yellow journalist with a randy mouth, a battered young bride has come to share the living room, and the three members of Will's male sensitivity group have all fallen in lust with each other. "We don't have barneys here," Will observes evenly, "we have orgies of sociopolitical truth telling." A paradigm of mellow macho, Will must eventually be proved a woman-defiling rotter; when the priapic imperative rears in his head, the playwright must cut if off. But agitprop aside, Progress is two hours of mean-spirited fun. It augurs well for Lucie's future.

The spirits are subdued, ironic, regretful in Michael Frayn's lovely Benefactors. The plot is hardly the stuff of melodrama. A young architect (Oliver Cotton) receives a commission to build a London housing project; his wife (Patricia Hodge) is skeptical; their best friend (Tim Pigott-Smith) is bitterly opposed; his wife (Brenda Blethyn) goes to work for the architect. No one really is at fault here; as one character says, "Life goes round like a wheel. . . We don't change. We never escape." This is a story of the inevitability of compromise in friendship, careers, marriages, in youthful dreams of life's possibilities.

Frayn, who with Wild Honey and his clockwork farce Noises Off now has three London hits, is a master of deft construction, corkscrew insults, rising hostilities, crumbling egos. The cast, directed by Michael Blakemore, makes a faultless quartet. The best new play in London may look a bit precious to visiting Americans on the prowl for a big night out. It is not, but no matter. Who says the English can't go to their own theater? --By Richard Corliss