THE KINDNESS OF FOREIGNERS

By Richard Zoglin

As an associate director at the Royal Shakespeare Company back in the early '80s, Howard Davies earned his stripes by staging such Bard classics as Macbeth and Troilus and Cressida, along with occasional modernist ventures like Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Good. But whenever he suggested doing the work of American playwrights like Tennessee Williams, he was out of luck. "Nobody wanted to revive them," says Davies. "I was banging on doors, and no one was interested."

How times have changed. While theatergoers on this side of the Atlantic still lament that Broadway is overdependent on British imports, London seems to be infatuated with Americans. Transplants from Broadway like Grease, Smokey Joe's Cafe and Neil Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor are side by side on the West End with Andrew Lloyd Webber extravaganzas. The Royal National Theatre has just revived Richard Eyre's landmark 1982 production of Guys and Dolls, whose success inspired a string of British revivals of classic American musicals. Even so unfashionable, and quintessentially American, a pop figure as Al Jolson has gained new life on the West End: Jolson, a musical tribute to the 1920s star, has been running more than a year.

And at the moment three classics of the American postwar theater are enjoying simultaneous London revivals. Davies (who eventually did direct an acclaimed 1988 National Theatre production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) has staged a hit revival of Edward Albee's masterpiece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Diana Rigg and David Suchet. Willie Loman is lugging his valises home once again in a National Theatre production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. And veteran director Peter Hall has imported Jessica Lange to play Blanche Dubois (a role she played on Broadway in 1992) and surrounded her with a British cast in a new production of Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.

Why are the Brits so taken with the American canon? As odd as it may seem to some Anglophiles, they find the work superior to much of what British theater is turning out these days. "The Americans offer us something we don't get in contemporary British plays," says David Thacker, director of the National's Death of a Salesman and a longtime champion of Arthur Miller's work. "They are very emotionally powerful plays--they reach the heart as well as the head. They are psychologically profound and truthful. And the best are strong on narrative. We'd have to look back to Shakespeare to see drama at that level."

Indeed, what first strikes an American theatergoer on seeing these plays in London is how much respect they are accorded. Brash young directors like Stephen Daldry and Sam Mendes are busy deconstructing British oldies like An Inspector Calls or finding quirky new takes on Shakespeare. But the directors of these American classics have treated them for the most part with straightforward fidelity. The second thing one notices is how well the British actors handle the American idiom. Aside from an occasional slip--listen for those long e's in been--the American accents are convincing, or at least unobtrusive.

More important, the British don't overcompensate by caricaturing the native milieu of these very American plays. In Hall's Streetcar the run-down New Orleans neighborhood where Blanche finds her sister Stella living could probably do without the roar of a passing train drowning out the dialogue every few minutes (a Streetcar Named Deafening). But nearly everything else in the production is delicate and understated, starting with Lange's touching and unfussy portrayal of Blanche. Toby Stephens (the son of actress Maggie Smith), an improbably fine-boned actor to be playing Stanley Kowalski, misses the brutishness (and the humor) that Marlon Brando forever stamped on the role. But who needs another Brando imitation? Stephens' Stanley is a credible alternative: a cocky bantamweight, less Brando than Cagney. And if his climactic sexual conquest of Blanche is more like a grapefruit in the face than the shattering of a deluded woman's life, the approach makes Stanley less of a monster--and more of a plausible match for Stella, played with unusual strength and spunk by Imogen Stubbs.

Willy Loman, Miller's famously doomed salesman, is also brought down to size a bit on the British stage. In the National's Death of a Salesman, Willy is played by Alun Armstrong (a veteran of musicals like Les Miserables as well as the original cast of Nicholas Nickleby), whose tidy little mustache, hangdog expression and Brooklyn accent anchor him firmly in the dreary everyday. Armstrong's Willy is a small man, too downtrodden even to rail with much conviction. It's an elegant production, the dominant stage image a tree in full blossom, with a broken trunk. The big scenes are somewhat muted (Marjorie Yates' Linda and Mark Strong's Biff are good if unmemorable) but the small ones achingly poignant--like the mix of awe and desolation with which Willy marvels at next-door neighbor Bernard's success: "Your friends have their own private tennis court?" What emerges most clearly in this version is Miller's critique of capitalism: Willy is less a tragic figure brought down by his flaws than the pawn of a system that sells a dream, then cannot deliver.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? too is about characters being stripped of their illusions--but here they do it in a garish, Roman-Colosseum spectacle. The conceit of Albee's play--two couples spend a long, booze-soaked night exposing their secrets and lies--has been copied so often that it might seem passe by now. But Davies' production quickly brushes away any cobwebs. Diana Rigg, as Martha, the university president's daughter frustrated with her underachieving history-teacher husband, is acid, sexy and funny without turning into a camp diva spewing one-liners. She is matched snide-for-snide by David Suchet (PBS's Poirot), with his oversize glasses and chiseled, world-weary sarcasm. Together with Lloyd Owen and Clare Holman as the young couple drawn into the game playing, they bring out all the lacerating power and poignancy of Albee's depiction of the blasted American Dream. Make that everyone's dream.