This being the month of Valentine’s Day, a theater prognosticator’s thoughts naturally turn to pairing off. The cutest couple of the month are playwright Mark Ravenhill and Sir Ian McKellen, who will play a good husband with a dark secret in Ravenhill’s new play, The Cut, at the Donmar Warehouse, directed by Michael Grandage, the company’s artistic director. This production is shaping up to be a must-see in part because Deborah Findlay, one of London’s best stage actresses, co-stars as McKellen’s wife, who learns more than she’d hoped to know about hubby’s occupation and preoccupations.
Could there be a more intriguing pairing then film director (and soon-to-be Oscar winner) Robert Altman and the late great Arthur Miller? Altman is helming Miller’s last play, Resurrection Blues, which was completed a month before he died last year, with a star-studded cast headed by Neve Campbell, Matthew Modine, and Maximillian Schell. On February 13, the day before performances start, there will be a National Theatre platform tribute to the late playwright. He was well loved by the English, and an impressive number of people who worked with him on these shores will talk about the experience.
Another pairing that seems to have paid off is the one between the National Theatre and Simon McBurney’s award-winning theater company Complicite. In the spring of 2004, the extraordinarily talented McBurney directed William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at the request of the National’s artistic head, Nicholas Hytner. The early 17th-century comedy-drama, often dubbed as “a problem play,” was such a runaway success that Hytner is doing the smart thing by bringing it back for a six-week run.
Yet another tempting team are Jodhi May and the always reliable Roger Allam (who recently co-starred with McKellen in Aladdin) who will star in David Harrower’s Blackbird. He’s a man who chose to toss off his past and she’s the woman who decides 15 years later to reconnect with him. The show premiered with the same cast last year in Edinburgh to favorable reviews.
One more welcome collaboration is the one between the Barbican Centre and The Gardzienice Center of Theater Practices, which Wlodzimierz Staniewski founded in 1977. The Polish outfit, which is devoted to taking folk traditions and songs from all corners of the country and working them this way and that into experimental presentations, will be performing Metamorphoses/Elektra from Apulieus and Euripides. Directly following Staniewski’s opus, Peter Brook’s adaptation of The Grand Inquisitor hunkers down for a short stay. As book lovers will instantly realize, the piece is excerpted from Fyodor Dostoyevski’s Brothers Karamazov.
More esoterica abounds at the Trafalgar Studios, where the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Gunpowder Season” extends in recognition of the early 16th-century plot to knock out the monarch. Philip Massinger’s period play Believe What You Will opens early in the month and is followed quickly by the prolific Frank McGuinness’ new play Speaking Like Magpies, which takes up the scurrilous (although perhaps not considered so by all at the time) Gunpowder Plot.
For the visitor from America — or anyone else looking to catch up with a hot stateside playwright — there’s Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, which concerns a woman who’s cut herself off from her roots only to find out there’s much to be gained by re-rooting. For the visitor looking to catch up on a hot British playwright, race to see Laura Wade’s Other Hands at the Soho Theatre. At the National, the terrific British actress Margaret Tyzack will show up in Samuel Adamson’s new play, Southwark Fair, which has the air of being a contemporary picaresque work.
Finally, a few recommendations for those interested in out-of-town happenings: At the Richmond Theatre, Susannah York will decorate the Terence Brady-Charlotte Bingham adaptation of Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers; on its heels comes the frighteningly atmospheric Shared Experience adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Lastly, the Pavilion Theatre in Brighton offers the Inservice company’s version of John Webster’s The White Devil, directed by David Oyelowo.
