London Spotlight: October 2005

As I discovered on my recent visit to London, many of Great Britain’s finest actors are practically invisible when you see them off-stage. But they shine quite brightly when behind the footlights.

Take Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter, who are such a potent team in the Donmar Warehouse production of Frederick von Schiller’s Mary Stuart that a transfer to the West End’s Apollo (opening October 19) became obligatory. Not a play many are eager to mount, this intense historical drama was directed by Phyllida Law, who guided her leading ladies with such force that Schiller’s talkfest became totally revivified.

If you’re in town for the first half of the month, it’s your last chance to
catch Simon Russell Beale’s Philanthropist stint, which is another notch in this impressive actor’s belt. In fact, it’s also your last opportunity to see Beale in the U.K., before he heads stateside to take over for Tim Curry in Spamalot in late December.

Richard Griffiths, best known stateside for his role as Papa Muggle in the Harry Potter flicks, is one of those actors who can slip along byways unnoticed, despite his ample girth. But he always radiates star quality while on stage. He’s done so in Alan Bennett’s History Boys for the past two years (and will surely do so again when the play arrives in Manhattan this spring), and he should also do so when he opens this month in Heroes, a three-hander by Gerald Sibleyras and translated from the French by Tom Stoppard. Griffiths will share the stage with well-known scene-stealers John Hurt and Ken Stott in this play about three men plotting their escape from a veterans hospital.

Stephen Dillane, who could pass for a broker on a break when slipping along a side street, has set himself up with a particularly shining challenge on his one-man adaptation of Macbeth, which he worked up with director Travis Preston at the Sundance Theatre Lab in Los Angeles. Dillane, who won both an Evening Standard award and a Tony award for the recent revival of The Real Thing isn’t completely alone; he uses three musicians as his supporting cast.

Then there is Richard E. Grant, who might be said to resemble a broker on a longer-term break. (Maybe at a low-security prison for nefarious dealings.) He’s taking center stage in the revival — just in from the Royal Theatre, Bath –of Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged, about a man who can’t take any genuine interest in those around him. Grant ought to be just swell as one of those gray Gray men, who interpret the existential life as meaning total emotional isolation.

Hamish McColl and Sean Foley, who like using their looks to impersonate the clowns in daily life, delighted the Brits in The Play What I Wrote not too long ago but met with much less acclaim in New York. Now they’re coming back in Ducktastic!, in which a performer thrown out of Las Vegas after an emu incident(?!) tries a Newcastle, England comeback. The blokes’ director once again is Kenneth Branagh.

Elsewhere, Martin Shaw, television’s new Adam Dalgleish, is impersonating Sir Thomas More in a revival of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons at the Richmond Theatre, a short underground ride southwest. And Damian Lewis, who played Richard Winters in television’s Band of Brothers and Soames Forsyte in the recent small screen remake of The Forsyte Saga, ought to see his rising star rise even higher when he appears in the National Theatre’s revival of Henrik Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community, which will mark the centenary of the playwright’s death.