Bard, Bible and Forklift Truck

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

London theater, like Broadway, has had less than a banner year. No new Amadeus, The Real Thing, Cats or Nicholas Nickleby, no groundbreaking experience, has emerged to take the West End and then America by acclaim. The difference is that when Broadway falters, production slows to a trickle and half the theaters are dark. In London there is always plenty to see, including, at the moment, as many American musicals as on Broadway, at roughly a third of Broadway prices. Shows open and close more quickly in London than in New York City, where financial success usually depends on a long run: visitors earlier this summer could have enjoyed Liv Ullmann in Old Times, Charlton Heston in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Deborah Kerr in The Corn Is Green and Alan Bates in Dance of Death. Currently, Lauren Bacall is starring in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Vanessa Redgrave in The Seagull.

The West End offers at least one major new play, Breaking the Silence, and hit revivals of Harley Granville Barker's Waste, a dizzying story of political corruption, and Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, a cascade of coruscating epigrams coupled with glimpses of gymnasts, astronauts, concupiscent doctors and murdered rabbits, all in the arcane service of condemning modern epistemological philosophy.

Despite this commercial abundance, some of the hottest tickets are for productions at the subsidized National Theater and Royal Shakespeare Company. Both suffered cutbacks when their Arts Council grants were announced this spring, and the National's director, Peter Hall, temporarily closed his experimental Cottesloe stage. Some critics wondered if there might be a connection between the dispute and productions that have endorsed leftist views or attacked the conservatism of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The National's Pravda, for example, seems to say that the worst sin of Fleet Street is generosity toward Thatcher. The R.S.C.'s Today is a paean to men who abandoned their homes and families to fight as Communists in the Spanish Civil War.

The most conspicuous and skillful example of a leftward tilt is the R.S.C.'s anti-imperialist version of Shakespeare's celebration of conquest, Henry V. This was the text that Laurence Olivier used on film to rally his countrymen to nationalistic zeal. But in Director Adrian Noble's post-Falklands vision, the play becomes a chronicle of doomed and bloody consequences of meddling abroad. In its most striking visual image, the names of the dead from the Battle of Agincourt are inscribed on a scrim resembling the Viet Nam memorial wall in Washington. This sobering reminder of the wages of war remains onstage during the final lighthearted scenes, when the King shifts from fighter to lover, as if to mock his charm. The production is vigorous, persuasive, at moments unforgettable, and in Kenneth Branagh, 24, it features a potential heir to the legacy of Olivier, Richardson and Gielgud. Branagh has the animal magnetism of a leading man and the cerebral fire and ice of a character actor. He brings off the hortatory set pieces of command with howling fervor and excels at the gentle comedy of courtship, pouring his heart into the cracked vessel of his schoolboy French as he woos the French princess Katharine (Cecile Paoli).

Among more conventional stagings of the Bard's work, the R.S.C. offers an electrifying Richard III with Anthony Sher hurtling around the stage as a disabled but untrammeled personification of evil and, at the company's other home in Stratford-Upon-Avon, a darkly funny As You Like It, again dazzlingly directed by Noble. His splendid, spare, Freudian production uses a flowing white sailcloth draped about the stage to represent a snowstorm, a dream-scape, a bower and a marriage tent.

The R.S.C. has been equally innovative with Breaking the Silence, a quasi-biographical work that centers on Playwright Stephen Poliakoff s grandfather, a Russian Jewish aristocrat who refuses to accept the changes that Lenin's Soviet revolution have brought. Forced to live in near squalor on a railway carriage while assigned as a roving inspector, he stubbornly devotes all his energies to developing a talking motion picture. Although he is an untrained amateur, there are glints of genius in him. The play deftly balances his private quest against vast social change, and culminates in an agonizing exile from a homeland that has already ceased to exist. Alan Howard plays the inventor, Gemma Jones (PBS's Duchess of Duke Street) his wife, and Jenny Agutter their servant. If plans work for bringing the show to Broadway, they ought to be imported as well.

The National also augmented a solid season by sending productions to the West End. Its own stages offered Athol Fugard's poignant The Road to Mecca and an over-the-top rendition of Gogol's antibureaucratic satire The Inspector General. The cheeriest West End offering is a charming revival of Guys and Dolls starring the pop singer Lulu. But the most exciting theatrical experience in London is a trio of full-length plays originated at the Cottesloe, The Nativity, The Passion and Doomsday, that retell the Bible, accenting the life and death of Christ. The language comes from the alliterative, rhyming poetry of medieval English miracle, or mystery, plays, chiefly the York, Wakefield, Chester and Coventry cycles, but the visual imagery is imaginatively modern: God sits in judgment on a whirling metal cage of a world, and Jesus ascends into heaven on a forklift truck. Director Bill Bryden has preserved the vernacular tone and naive simplicity of the originals and has staged the action so that much of the audience can mingle with the actors. The atmosphere is festive yet never trivial, and whatever a spectator's religious convictions, the cumulative power of the story is overwhelming. --By William A. Henry III