New Life at London's Old Vic

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The first image to greet the eye is perhaps the last to linger in the mind: it is the set, vertiginously toppling outward as if to plunge a collapsing world and its demented inhabitants into the audience's laps. The place depicted must have been a palace once. Now the arches have sagged, and the staircases end in midair. The steeply raked floor intersects doorways at crazy angles, as though it were not wood but water, flooding a city where the people too seem to be drowning. This haunted spot is Epirus, home of Pyrrhus, heroic son of the even more valiant Achilles, and the time is soon after the Trojan War.

The nightmare world being enacted is not only ancient Greece but also the courtly France of 1667, where Jean Racine wrote his tragedy Andromaque, and the skinhead London of 1988, whose coarse argot has been chosen by Director Jonathan Miller to lend contemporary clout. The melange of cultures does not always work, although much else does in this hurtling two-hour, no- intermission staging. Yet Miller's production, which opened last week at London's Old Vic Theater, is an event of considerably broader consequence than a re-examination of an austere and little-produced play by one of the theater's ablest and most innovative directors.

The Old Vic for decades housed a company that emphasized Shakespeare and included some of the great British stage names of the 20th century: Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Guinness and Ashcroft among them. Then, from 1963 to 1976, it served as the first home of Britain's National Theater. Thereafter it declined into a mere booking hall, just another space where a producer might launch a commercial production. Now Miller and the theater's owners, Toronto Businessman Ed Mirvish, 73, and his son David, 43, are seeking to bring back the glory days of the classics. Their goal: a commercial troupe to rival in quality the two huge subsidized London ensembles, the National and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

As Miller's controversial reputation would suggest, they will probably be classics with a twist. He has reset an Italian opera in gangster territory, for example, and reimagined O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night as caustic tragicomedy rather than lugubrious apocalypse. Andromache is the first offering of a seven-play season, of which Miller will direct five. With characteristic confidence in his polymathic perversity, he has assigned himself an absurdist British comedy, N.F. Simpson's One Way Pendulum; a Jacobean tragedy, Bussy D'Ambois; a Leonard Bernstein musical, Candide, which Miller says "will have more flavor of the original Voltaire"; and Shakespeare's The Tempest. Also on the roster are Reinhold Lenz's The Tutor, adapted by Brecht, and Alexander Ostrovsky's 19th century Russian comedy Too Clever By Half. "I want to break out of the stale convection current that keeps endlessly recirculating the same old Shaw and Chekhov," says Miller. "We are part of Europe, and there are vast expanses of European literature unknown to London audiences."

Technically, the deal between Miller and the Mirvishes is for just one season, which David Mirvish projects may lose as much as $1 million. Says Mirvish: "We are hoping to do what we have over decades of owning the Royal Alexandra Theater in Toronto -- build a subscription audience that trusts us. We see the first year as an investment." Whatever its eventual fate -- and however long the notoriously mercurial Miller stays with it -- the new Old Vic seems likely, on the basis of its inaugural season, to enrich the scene in London and perhaps beyond.

Andromache is a production of mordant humor, bitter irony and moral force -- if also of significant miscalculation and highly uneven acting. Some of the performers are tripped up by Eric Korn's half-arch, half-vernacular translation, in which vulgarity and clumsy colloquialism ("Is death the net result of all my love?") clash with the neoclassicism of the set and costumes. The plot is a sour inversion of the lovers' tangle in A Midsummer Night's Dream: Orestes (Kevin McNally), son of the murdered war hero Agamemnon, pursues his cousin Hermione (Penelope Wilton), daughter of Helen of Troy, who in turn loves Achilles' son Pyrrhus (Peter Eyre). But Pyrrhus, although betrothed to Hermione, has insulted his fellow Greeks by offering his heart and throne to Andromache (Janet Suzman), widow of the Trojan prince Hector, and by sparing her son Astyanax, the last male of the royal house of Troy.

Andromache lives only for her child and the memory of her husband, and of all the passions avowed in the opening scenes, only hers is steadfast. As portrayed by Suzman, Andromache's immersion in the past is not weak or dreamy but sexy and compelling. In the end, the enslaved queen rules over the city, and her son has been declared the rightful future king of Troy. The fickle, feckless others have been destroyed by their excesses: Pyrrhus murdered, Hermione a suicide, Orestes driven mad. Ultimately the production's shortcomings are not important. Racine, Miller and Set Designer Richard Hudson thrust the audience into a world askew, and the force that has caused the upheaval -- the dizzying, delirious and dangerous power of passion -- has not much changed from the Greek world to our own.