The London Season

THE LONDON SEASON THERE ARE NOT MANY 'l1lUSTWORTHY CONCLUSIONS to be drawn from six months of limited playgoing, but the first and most enduring is that the London theater is a more lively and varied one than any in the United States, and, from all reports, in Europe as well, There are banality and commercialism enough, but interesting plays still seem to be able to survive without thunderous acclaim. Except for My Fair Lady or a Margot Fonteyn appearance at Covent Garden, tickets are generally available at fairly short notice; and they are quite cheap by American standards. (Most theaters still hold gallery seats for sale the day of the performance at prices under haH a dollar; it is possible for students to go to the theater often and easily.) In part, the situation is improved by subsidy; the Arts Council has about three million dollars to distribute annually, although it must be a small portion that reaches the Old Vic and the English Stage Company. Yet the vigor of related arts, such as opera and ballet, and the survival of numerous local repertory companies must have their effect upon the training of audiences as well as of players and writers. (In East Kent, for example, there are companies in Canterbury, Margate, and Folkestone which present, somehow , a new play each week throughout the year, with occasional revivals of classics and more occasional original productions. There are, as a result, between four and five thousand actors employed in live theater in England, and the London stage has not shown any attrition before television.) As part of the climate which keeps the theater interesting , one should mention as well the BBC Third Programme. Reduced in time to about twenty hours a week, it still does two fulllength performances each week of a great range of plays-Shakespeare 's King John, Cymbeline, and Pericles recently; Ugo Betti, Samuel Beckett, Romain Rolland, Gorki, Musset, Kleist, new translations of Sophocles and Aristophanes. There are two further aspects of the London theater which must strike an American. One is the versatility and dedication of its fine actors. This season Sir John Gielgud will have played in The Tempest, Graham Greene's The Potting Shed, and Henry VIII, Robert Helpmann , who is certainly unique, after both acting and directing at the Old Vic last year, has so far this season played in Sartre's Nekrassov and Noel Coward's Nude with Violin and is now dancer and choreographer for the current Royal Ballet season. The other is the sense of an international theater one can get in London. Last year there were two French companies, the Berliner Ensemble doing Brecht, the Polish 53 54 May State Jewish Theater, and the Bolshoi Ballet. There is no such array this season, but there have been a brilliant company from the Chinese Classical Theater in Formosa, dance groups from every nation or subnation in eastern Europe, a pantomime from Denmark; and in the late spring there will be four weeks of the Moscow Art Theater doing Cbekov. Politics and ease of transportation account for the second of these advantages, no doubt; the first and perhaps the greater is probably due to the repertory tradition. Although they hardly account for the largest share of the London theater, the repertory theaters have great influence. The Old Vic is this year completing, in eight Shakespear~ productions, its Five Year Folio Plan. Next year it may return to performing other classics (it will do Schiller's Maria Stuart at Edinburgh) or even doing new plays; it will by fall have a new workshop adjoining the theater. And the most important group in London at the moment is the English Stage Company , which has just completed its second year at the Royal Court in Chelsea. It produced in its first year or so works by Giraudoux, Ionesco, Beckett, Brecht, Arthur Miller, Angus Wilson, Nigel Dennis, and, of course, John Osborne. So far this season it has done Sartre's Nekrassov, Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun, Dudley Fitts' translation of Lysistrata, a new play by Ann Jellicoe, and two Osborne works. There are more things to come, and there have been single Sunday performances...