Letter from London: A sterling Sondheim redeems the theater scene

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While in London last week to enjoy some pre-holiday cheer with a few old chums (beach holidays being anathema to a theater critic), I found myself on the typical jet-laggy “If this is Wednesday, it must be Sophocles” itinerary.

The high point of my theatergoing was a gloriously intimate production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “A Little Night Music” at the Menier Chocolate Factory. And the upshot of the trip was a confirmation that the two most fertile patches of theatrical ground in England today are the Menier and the Donmar Warehouse, which put on an exquisite production of T.S. Eliot’s intractable verse drama, “The Family Reunion.”

Trevor Nunn isn’t a name associated with America’s greatest living musical theater composer; nor is he the go-to guy for small-scale. But directing his first Sondheim at Menier’s thumbnail space, Nunn reveals a talent for working in miniature.

The production, which stars a radiant Hannah Waddingham as a younger-than-usual Desirée Armfeldt, might emphasize the work’s melancholy strains over its farcical rhythms. But there’s a genuine, unamplified tenderness that manages to achieve what musicals so rarely do anymore: move us.
As Nunn’s handling of the show reveals, smaller can be a whole lot bigger emotionally. It can also point the recessionary way to a new back-to-basics approach to theater, which for too long has let grandstanding showmanship upstage humanity and heart.

“Send in the Clowns” is a song that has become completely detached from its “Night Music” context. With so many renditions — pop, folk, jazz, you name it — it’s an invitation for a performer to preen. But that is precisely what Waddingham avoids as she sonorously muses to the love of her character’s life, Fredrik Egerman (a worthy Alexander Hanson). Her talking-singing method, more Kurt Weill than “American Idol,” never lets Sondheim’s brilliant, bittersweet lyrics slip their dramatic moorings.

‘The Family Reunion’

Meanwhile, the Donmar is bravely essaying Eliot’s largely forgotten play, assembling some of the best British actors for the occasion. Directed by Jeremy Herrin, as part of the theater’s T.S. Eliot Festival, the production stars Gemma Jones and Penelope Wilton as the aging aristocratic mother and sibylline aunt wrestling for spiritual control over the household’s guilt-wracked heir (played by Samuel West, who directed that terrific production of “Dealer’s Choice”).

“The Family Reunion” gorgeously unfolds in designer Bunny Christie’s elegantly dilapidated drawing room, lighted with candle-burning atmospherics by Rick Fisher. And the cast members are all so distinctive, they’re like an assortment of rich butterscotches and refreshing mints served in a fanciful tin. The Donmar has once again outdone itself.

But Eliot’s campaign to return drama to its ritualized roots through poetry is a lost cause, at least in this over-articulated attempt. Which isn’t to say that the exacting eloquence of his writing is not often astonishing. There’s just way too much of it, words piled upon words to plumb an existential mystery that the poet-playwright himself acknowledges is beyond language’s grasp.

‘No Man’s Land’

It was the next generation of dramatists, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter most notably, who would discover a more agile theatrical vocabulary to accomplish Eliot’s metaphysical task. But sorry to say, the still waters of Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” don’t seem to run especially deep in Rupert Goold’s revival at the Duke of York’s Theatre.

Michael Gambon is his usual virtuoso self as Hirst, a wobbly literary boozer with a handsome basset hound face who opens his well-stocked bar to David Bradley’s elderly, raffish Spooner, a broken-down poet with an unquenchable thirst for liquor and loquacity. But Goold, who directed Patrick Stewart in the eerily modern “Macbeth” that made it to Broadway this last spring, muddles the domestic dimension.

The drama (about the unverifiable nature of memory and the intense contests of power that can ensue when the home curtains are drawn) chatters away in a capacious study in a North West London home, presumably not far from Hampstead Heath, where the older gentlemen have just recently met — either as strangers or old Oxford classmates. The antique cabinet loaded with high-proof drinkables — “the central feature of the room,” according to the stage directions — is transformed by Giles Cadle into a gigantic bar that would be too grandiose for most clubs, and as a result, the social milieu doesn’t register.

‘Short of event and foggy with ambiguity, “No Man’s Land” cries out for a less aloof theatrical environment. Even with the capable aid of David Walliams and Nick Dunning as Hirst’s servant-henchmen, this Gate Theatre Dublin production seems overblown. Pinter -- who died Wednesday -- unquestionably deserves the majestic West End embrace, but the gothic scale neutralizes the impact of his fascinating vintage obscurity.

‘Oedipus’

TheNational Theatre’s ‘Oedipus,’ starring a shorn-headed Ralph Fiennes as the ill-fated king, Alan Howard as a shambling, bird-like Teiresias and a marvelously earthy Clare Higgins as wife-mother Jocasta, ably delivers on the pity and fear. But Jonathan Kent’s modern-dress staging hasn’t figured out how to handle the chorus — the actors sing, chant and declaim, but their relationship to Oedipus (and his to them) seems stilted and forced.

Set on a raised disk that awkwardly challenges the performers to maintain their balance, the production reaches for non-realistic effects, but it’s too stuck on language (Frank McGuinness’ showy translation doesn’t help) to appreciate the work for what it is: - a great sacrificial mass about what it means to be human. During the eye-gouging finale, Fiennes harrowingly acquits himself, but the journey to this catastrophe seems, for all Kent’s evident craft, disappointingly clumsy.

‘Gethsemane’
Finally, David Hare’s latest, “Gethsemane,” directed by Howard Davies with cinematic energy at the National, offers just what you expect from him — topical intelligence and lumpy playwriting. Though carefully thought out, the play, a broadly ambitious examination of media, politics and money, is both overwritten and under-imagined.

The story revolves around the British Home Secretary (Tasmin Greig), whose rebellious teenage daughter (Jessica Raine) seems out to sabotage her political career. Lori (Nicola Walker), a once-inspired teacher who has become a busker in the tube, comes to the rescue and in the process works through her own doubts about the possibility of making a difference in an age of metastasized greed and gossip.

Hare is always worth listening to, although his drama — grounded more in complex ideas than well-observed characters — is still a few drafts away from being ready. You can’t help applauding his engagement with the most insidious issues of the day, yet you can also understand why the London scene is so dominated right now with more visceral American imports.

I didn’t have time to see Tracy Letts’ ’August: Osage County’ at the National, Neil LaBute’s ‘In a Dark Dark House’ at the Almeida, or Tarell Alvin McCraney’s ‘Wig Out!’ at the Royal Court, never mind the many Broadway musicals vying for weakened pounds sterling. But Sondheim’s singular genius sent me home on a cloud.

--Charles McNulty

Top photo: Alexander Hanson and Hannah Waddingham, above, in the Menier Chocolate Factory production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s ‘A Little Night Music,’ directed by Trevor Nunn. Credit: Catherine Ashmore. Bottom photo: Michael Gambon, foreground, and David Bradley in ‘No Man’s Land’ at the Duke of York’s Theatre