A Season in London, 2011
A period of nearly three weeks in London (March 21 – April 8, 2011), during which we saw the following plays. There was no time for chronicling these experiences, owing to a heavy research schedule, and so, at this late point (April 17, 2011 and subsequent dates) I am now attempting to recall and record what I remember:
- Wednesday, March 23: Caryl Churchill, Fen (Finborough)
- Saturday, March 26: Terence Rattigan, Cause Célèbre (Old Vic)
- Wednesday, March 30: Terence Rattigan, Flight Path (Haymarket)
- Thursday, March 31: Bruce Norris, Clybourne Park (Wyndham’s)
- Monday, April 4: David Eldridge, The Knot of the Heart (Almeida)
- Tuesday, April 5: Beethoven, Fidelio (Covent Garden Opera)
- Wednesday, April 6: Allan Monkhouse, Mary Broome (Orange Tree, Richmond)
- Thursday, April 7: Mark O’Rowe, Terminus (Young Vic: Maria)
Before this visit I had not been to London for well over three years. My impressions at that point, that British theatre was suffering from hard economic times and a growing dearth of new talent, were confirmed this time. Among the eight works we saw, only two were truly new, and one (Clybourne Park) was an American play in its first London production. Of course, London theatre has always paid great attention to revivals, and five of these plays had not been seen for some time: Churchill’s Fen for nearly thirty years (I remember reading it as a young teacher in connection with a production by the University of Massachusetts theater); Monkhouse’s Mary Broome, in what is, I believe, its first revival since 1912; and Rattigan’s early play about pilots in the second war, Flight Path, which is one of two Rattigan plays contributing to the current Rattigan revival, the other being Cause Célèbre, Rattigan’s last produced play, dating from, I think, 1977, though focusing on a true event, a murder and a trial, that occurred in the 1930s. Fidelio, of course, the perennial favorite for its wonderful music, but produced last April in a Covent Garden revival that lacked movement and a coherent setting.
Overall, then, a somewhat mixed bag of plays and opera. British actors are still among the world’s best, but not so many of them are employed these days as used to be. The Royal Shakespeare Company several years ago ended its “permanent” tenure in London, at the Barbican, and only occasionally now jobs in a hit production at one of the West End theatres. I have yet to go to the reconstructed Globe, and will not until I manage to get to London in the late spring or summer, when it is open. And some London houses are venues I have never been in and whose doors I will never darken, so long as a musical by Andrew Lloyd Weber is playing there or some other equally trite, mindless concoction.
My long-standing bias against musicals stands open in that statement. I make no apology for this gaping lacuna in my otherwise broad and eclectic taste for the theatrical experience. I have tried to like musicals ever since I lost my