The Stage

Star-spangled ban? - American stars in the West End

Published Friday 26 August 2005 at 11:00 by Al Senter

As the stream of American stars and playwrights plying their trade on the London stage shows no sign of letting up, Al Senter says that it is time theatre waved goodbye to Hollywood and started nurturing fresh British talent

Take a glance at the current West End theatre listings and you could be forgiven for believing that Piccadilly Circus has morphed into Times Square and Shaftesbury Avenue transformed into Broadway. Over the past few years West End producers, normally pragmatic and hard-headed businessfolk, seem to have turned into starstruck autograph hunters, anxious to secure themselves a piece of Hollywood glamour, no matter how faded it might be. And Uncle Sam shows no signs of packing his bags and heading home. Just as David Schwimmer and Val Kilmer prepare to vacate the Gielgud and Playhouse theatres respectively, so Rob Lowe flies in for A Few Good Men at the Haymarket.

Ever since Nicole Kidman’s cavortings in The Blue Room at the Donmar Warehouse and Kevin Spacey’s arrival on a white charger, as star of The Iceman Cometh and potential saviour of the Old Vic, London theatre seems to have been in thrall to the American Dream. The British film industry can be allowed its cultural cringe since it has always been a tiddler in comparison with the Hollywood leviathan. But why should the British theatre business also be on its knees, in humble obeisance to the stars and stripes? After all, London is one of the world’s great theatre cities. British actors, writers and directors emerge in apparently ceaseless waves to triumph in the medium of dramatic fiction on stage and on screen. Yet America rules, okay? It is as if the sanctified greensward of Lord’s had been given over to the baseball World Series and the Superbowl played out on dear old Twickers’ ancient acres.

Of course, there should always be a warm welcome for the giants of 20th-century American theatre such as Miller and Williams, especially when they are represented by productions as magnificent as Death of a Salesman, currently at the Lyric. But must Neil LaBute and even minor Mamet be accorded the same status? Watching Some Girl(s) at the Gielgud - a LaBute trifle with particularly stodgy custard and industrial cream - one wonders if a British version, in which a geography teacher is reunited with his old flames in B&Bs from Scunthorpe to Slough, would have received quite the same treatment.

Earlier this summer LaBute was represented not just by Some Girl(s) but also by This Is How It Goes at the Donmar Warehouse and in line for a similar double whammy is Sam Shepard, now restored to favour after several years in the wilderness, with The God of Hell at the Donmar (October) and The Late Henry Moss at the Almeida (January). The Islington venue, indeed, has gone all-American, launching its new season with Romance, the new play by David Mamet - yes, him again - and including a revival of a rare Tennessee Williams work, Period of Adjustment, next spring.

The Mamet and the Shepards may yet turn out to be unqualified masterpieces and find favour with audiences and critics alike and one does not want to apply a Tebbit-like Britishness test to an organisation’s artistic policies. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to wonder why subsidised venues receiving large dollops of cash from the British taxpayer are so dazzled by all things American. At least the new Donmar Warehouse season includes The Cut, a new play by Mark Ravenhill, with Sir Ian McKellen hanging up Gandalf’s whiskers to star.

Arguments will be advanced that the contemporary American theatre knocks spots off its pallid British counterpart for vitality and resonance. And commercial producers will point out that nobody has yet ended up in the workhouse by presenting American names, made bankable by film and television success, in American vehicles in the West End. Indeed, many leading American thesps would appear to have a romantic and idealised view of performing on the London stage. No matter how many Emmies or Oscar nominations they have amassed in their careers, they do not consider themselves proper actors if they have not trodden on the hallowed boards of London.

Ironically, their British colleagues, often encouraged by their agents, have a much less rosy view of what Sir Anthony Hopkins is alleged to have described as “shouting at night”. Exasperated producers and frustrated writers talk feelingly of their vain courtship of leading British actors, who are almost always ‘waiting for a film’ and only commit themselves to a stage project when all the other options are exhausted. Given the economic realities of the acting game and the disparity of earning power between stage and screens of all sizes, one can understand actors and their ten percenters taking the mercenary line. And if American actors, often with the proceeds of their film and television success safely in the bank, are more willing than their British counterparts to leap aboard the West End treadmill, then so be it.

Yet, with the British film industry once more in intensive care and television drama, with rare and honourable exceptions, stagnating in the familiar and the formulaic, one would have thought that there must be a wealth of leading British actors with proven impact at the box office, sitting at home twiddling their thumbs, waiting like Vladimir and Estragon for a film that will never come. Equally, our native playwrights, both established and upcoming names, are similarly under-employed.

In the West End, the American invasion of recent years and the stealthy encroachment of the musical theatre has led to fewer opportunities for many of our heavyweights. Of the elder statesmen, Ayckbourn appears to have vanished completely from the arena he once dominated, Oscar-winning Ronald Harwood is presumably concentrating on film, Simon Gray clings on, mainly through revivals, Peter Nichols has all but given up hope of seeing his new work performed in London, while Christopher Hampton, equally busy as screenwriter and film director, is also represented by past glories, such as The Philanthropist, opening next month at the Donmar.

As far as the younger generation of writers is concerned, there are only a handful of names - perhaps Marber, Penhall, Elyot Johnson and now Eldridge - who have made the leap from fringe respectability to commercial success. One of the most enduring maladies of the British theatre is the way in which it nurtures new writing talent through its first manifestation at the Bush or the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, only to abandon it to a much harsher commercial environment. New writers then fall easy prey to the lure of television soaps and series and the theatre has lost them forever, with no return for its earlier investment. How can we compete with the allegedly superior strengths of American writing if new British dramatists continually beat their heads against this glass ceiling?

In Dr Senter’s utopia, commercial theatre producers would throw aside their copies of Variety and imitate their opposite numbers in the film industry by developing long-term relationships with British writers and actors. Once the West End’s tectonic plates have settled back into their position after the past momentous few months, perhaps Delfont Mackintosh, ATG, RUT and now Nimax, will hunker down to some serious packaging of proven commercial talents.

Such initiatives may already be taking place over lunch in The Ivy and The Wolseley but one sees precious little evidence of such strategic thinking to judge by what is served up on the London stage. Perhaps, with a Cooney farce and an Agatha Christie thriller heading in our direction, the West End is returning to its ancient traditions. But it also needs to discover new voices and voices that speak in accents more Mancunian than Manhattan, more Bromley than the Bronx. The Broadway melody may be a sweet one but it has delighted us enough.