Lord Love a Wild Duck

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

However robust Broadway is, it usually looks anemic compared with London. Thanks in part to the government-subsidized Royal National Theater and Royal Shakespeare Company, London generates three times as many productions as the Great White Way -- including many more new dramas and a much more varied range of revivals -- and commonly does them better. In recent years British superiority even extended to Broadway's signature genre, the musical. As a succession of London hits was packed up for export (and runaway profit), Broadway started to seem like just an early stop on the international touring circuit.

But things have changed. The Broadway season just past far outshone its London counterpart. The writing was better, the staging was better, the acting was better. Moreover, American writers such as David Henry Hwang, David Mamet and August Wilson had far more impact in London than Britons did on the Main Stem. And Broadway's musical hits were homegrown, while most London musicals of consequence featured American creators, recycled American songs, American topics, or all three, and were generally mediocre to boot. Fortunately, three British stalwarts -- a writer, a director and an actor -- have mounted superb tragicomedies that give the season's tag end a renewed hope for dispirited audiences and a belated enticement to American tourists.

The playwright, Alan Ayckbourn, 51, is represented in the West End by a new play, Man of the Moment, and a stunning revival, Absurd Person Singular, and at his regional theater in Scarborough by yet another debut, Body Language. All three are characteristically bleak and acidulous comedies staged by the author himself. The conventional wisdom about Ayckbourn has been that he started as a boulevard farceur and turned darker in the course of his 39 plays. Yet Absurd, from supposedly sunnier days in 1971, shows that acutely observed misery and hypocrisy have been his comic subjects all along. The funniest scene depicts desperate attempts at suicide by a deranged housewife, brilliantly played by Jennifer Wiltsie, that are cheerily misunderstood by a passel of busybody "friends." Body Language posits a scientific mishap that leads to a body swap between two women, an ascetic fitness fanatic over whom men drool and a hedonistic slob whom men mock and abuse. It could be a feminist diatribe, but Ayckbourn never lets dialectic overwhelm compassion.

The season-saving actor is Michael Gambon, best known in the U.S. for starring in the quirky TV mini-series The Singing Detective. Gambon gives his finest, subtlest performance yet in Ayckbourn's Man of the Moment as a meek, awkward bank clerk thrust among celebrities on the Costa del Sol. Buttoned and besweatered despite the heat, walking and even sitting as though on eggshells, relentlessly dull and relentlessly decent, Gambon is a man who lives by principle being belittled by people who live for style. He has been summoned for a TV documentary recalling his moment of heroism years before, when he confronted an armed bank robber who has become a TV chat-show host. To the documentary producer's disappointment, Gambon won't quarrel with the man who threatened him and maimed his future wife. He feels no envy of the other man's wealth and, strikingly, no bitterness, in part because he believes the incident led to all the modest benefits of his life, including the very chance to marry that once beautiful woman. As many an artist has learned, nothing is harder onstage than to make good more intriguing than evil. Ayckbourn and Gambon do it.

The director, Peter Hall, who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and succeeded Laurence Olivier as head of the National, now seeks to mount the classics at a profit. Having triumphed with Vanessa Redgrave in Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending and with Dustin Hoffman in The Merchant of Venice -- both productions that moved to Broadway -- he has undertaken, without a megastar this time, to debunk Moss Hart's witticism that the way to get even with any producer is to persuade him to mount an Ibsen revival.

The Wild Duck, customarily dour, turns out in Hall's interpretation to be buffoonishly funny while retaining every bit of its escalating horror. Hall's central insight is that the main characters, erstwhile school friends, are boys who have aged but not grown up. As the improvident photographer and family man Hjalmar Ekdal, Alex Jennings pouts and proffers endless excuses. As the highborn renegade Gregers Werle, David Threlfall (Smike in Nicholas ^ Nickleby) grins with the chilling smugness of a religious cultist as he peddles his extremist slogans, sadism masquerading as idealism. In some ways this is a Wild Duck subtly informed by Peer Gynt: the women are all strong and nurturing, the men all feckless and childlike. What is most remarkable is that Hall, aided by Threlfall's scary believability, makes the play's nasty events feel natural rather than freakish. At a production like this, the very quintessence of Ibsenism, Broadway's traditional envy of London makes good sense.