London Spotlight: September 2005

Theatergoers who habitually head to London simply because they want to see great acting are rarely disappointed. They certainly shouldn’t be this month. To begin with, Simon Russell Beale — the man considered to be in the top five of today’s superlative British actors, the man who in the past year has played both Macbeth and Cassius — is opening at the Donmar Warehouse in a revival of Christopher Hampton’s highly intelligent drama, The Philanthropist. Russell Beale is one of those stage illusionists who can make you believe he is whatever and whoever he wants you to see.

The same can be said (for the most part) of two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey, who will start his second season as artistic director of the Old Vic by taking on Richard II in William Shakespeare’s melancholy play of the same title. Incidentally, this Richard II represents a pair of significant firsts. Spacey, who promised he’d return the classics to a house haunted by the ghosts of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, makes his England debut as a Shakespearean. And Trevor Nunn, whose smart and sassy Hamlet shook these walls two seasons ago, will direct the play for the first time in his career.

Spacey, as an American making this town his home away from home, is joined in London by two other American actors, who’ve decided it can’t hurt their careers to wrack up British credits. Rob Lowe is headlining Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men in the part Tom Cruise played in the film (and Tom Hulce played in the original production). Dedicated West Wing watchers on both sides of the Atlantic will instantly realize this marks a Lowe-Sorkin reunion.

The other Yank invading the shores is Frasier‘s John Mahoney, who will take on the hilarious role of the judge in David Mamet’s courtroom romp, Romance. It’s as showy a turn as an actor could wish for — and it comes in a start-to-finish funny play that might be described as Glengarry Glen Ross turned inside out.

A true Brit, Joseph Fiennes returns to the stage in a revival at the Comedy Theater of John Osborne’s Epitaph for George Dillon. There have been so many angry young men hurtling through English plays since Osborne first sent Look Back in Anger‘s Jimmy Porter snarling and chewing old furniture that people sometimes forget this playwright was the one who unleashed it all. This play will remind today’s theatergoers where and why this genre began.

Theatrical fireworks of the more ensemble kind will crop up this month at the National Theatre, where two established iconoclasts are presenting new work. David Edgar, the most political of the local dramatists (well, maybe David Hare runs a close second), takes the wrapper off Playing With Fire, which is about a New Labor official dispatched to a north-of-London industrial burg with a large Muslim population. Before you can say “Tony Blair,” he gets involved in something much more divisive than he bargained for. This comedy veers into something much darker, and from the sound of things, it could be a sequel — at least in mind-set — to Edgar’s great Pentecost.

The other highly sought-after ticket is Mike Leigh’s latest project — for at the moment it is known only as A New Play by Mike Leigh. (A name should be selected by the show’s first preview on September 8.) This is the first work the pain-staking director has been commissioned by the National to put together. His creative methods are by now well-known. He gathers actors he trusts — in this case Allan Corduner and Adam Godley are among the eight-member cast — and cajoles them through a series of improvisational writing-rehearsing sessions. Whatever name they eventually hang on it could very well become the identifying phrase for a hit to match the likes of Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, Abigail’s Party, Ecstasy and Vera Drake.