London Spotlight: April 2006
Perhaps because she’s currently England’s most important Hollywood dame, Judi Dench is currently the first lady of the London stage. Like fellow leading ladies Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins, and, Vanessa Redgrave, she makes a serious point of returning to the stage with great frequency. But Dench doesn’t necessarily return to be serious. For example, this month she opens at the Haymarket as Judith Bliss in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, in which she will be trading bon mots with drawing-room comedy authorities Peter Bowles and Belinda Lang.
If it’s serious theater you want, there’s an abundant supply this month. At the National, a number of old hands are showing up. Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun will be revived with Trevor Nunn directing a top-notch cast including Oliver Cotton and Alun Armstrong Also at the National, veteran helmer Peter Gill digs farther back into 20th-century staples for Harley Granville Barker’s family drama, The Voysey Inheritance, starring Julian Glover and Dominic West.
For the ultra-serious theater maven, the Samuel Beckett centenary festivities continue at the Barbican. During this four-week period, there will be carefully mounted glimpses at Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Play/Catastrophe. By the way, the Barbican is the only place you’ll see Beckett in London this special season, because there’s a ban on anyone else presenting his work. The other revival to pay attention to is Phaedra at the Donmar Warehouse. This one showcases the great Clare Higgins, who will be raging against the gods in the Racine opus about the stepmother-stepson love affair that causes quite a royal ruckus.
Also for the seriously inclined is the controversial My Name is Rachel Corrie, which concerns an American girl standing up to an Israeli bulldozer about to flatten a Palestinian home. Developed by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner from Corrie’s writings, the play has just reopened at the Playhouse in the West End.
Musical lovers have some special treats as well. Twyla Tharp’s masterpiece, Movin’ Out, set to the songs of Billy Joel, finally hurtles onto the Apollo Victoria boards. Jerry Herman’s Mack and Mabel, with David Soul as the legendary movie-maker Mack Sennett and Janie Dee, who bubbles more than a glass of Kristal, as the legendary screen comic Mabel Normand, comes to the Criterion. Meanwhile, the less thrilling Footloose roosts at the Novello. Finally, Chicago, which has been playing for many years at the Adelphi on the Strand, closes there on April 22 and starts back up at the Cambridge on April 28.
