During a week of theatergoing in London, I saw some truly glorious stage monsters. I cannot get over how many larger-than-life figures dominate the stages over there; our own Broadway season quakes to see it. We have stars too, I found myself muttering defensively, for what must be the first time ever. Yet New York’s biggest theaters only rarely give great performers revivals of work the actors love. What rich food the British producers are offering! You could see performers taking strength as they fed.
Far and away the best show I saw in London was a revival of Clifford Odets’s 1937 masterpiece “Golden Boy” (running through Oct. 31). It’s a beautiful play but a bleak vision: Seen through the cockeyed gaze of the young boxer Joe Bonaparte (Josh O’Connor), life is a series of combats, a melee out of which you hope to snatch money and fame. Joe knows the score, so he gives up his beloved violin for a chance as a fighter. He even crows in triumph when he breaks his sensitive hands in the ring — at last, he thinks, music cannot tempt him anymore.
O’Connor is transcendent here, graceful and wary and bruised. Speaking Odets’s Bronx-inflected lyric, his own musical sense never fails him. He seems to control tempos outside his own body: When he looks down into a woman’s face, time in the room seems to stop; when he stands with his eyes closed, dreaming in his long coat, it skips and dances.
At the Almeida Theater, the director Sam Yates creates an expressionist production that weaves, punch-drunk, through Joe’s consciousness. O’Connor chases his own violinist double (Roman Lytwyniw) across the set and up into a kind of high alcove, where a chamber quartet plays the music in Joe’s mind. The boxing matches are depicted as frightening bouts between O’Connor and a heavy punching bag, which he drags around like a corpse. (Joe has more than one visual echo onstage.)
Yates also directed the terrific solo “Vanya” with Andrew Scott, and though he employs a wonderful ensemble here — particularly Stanley Townsend as Joe’s heartbroken father and Daniel Mays as his touchy manager, Tom Moody — you can still recognize that “Vanya” sensibility at work. O’Connor alone expands to fill up all the dark places of the theater; his Joe is larger than his one life, than his awful losses, than every drop of blood in his body. His many exploiters try to drain all that blood out of him, sure, but he keeps getting bigger anyway. Hey! Hey! He’s fighting to tell you something here! A man can be a world.
Three of the other titans stomping through London this fall had something in common, if one could just put a finger on it: There was Tilda Swinton (playing a woman disguised as a man); Cate Blanchett (playing a girl dressing as her own absent brother); and Gillian Anderson (playing a harpy who emasculates her husband). In play after play, I saw furious female characters slipping into the niches abandoned by men, coiling there like eels before they strike.
At the Royal Court Theater (through Oct. 24), Swinton returns to a part she first played in 1987, the German widow Ella in Manfred Karge’s poetic monologue “Man to Man.” Karge’s original title, “Jacke Wie Hose,” is an idiom that translates roughly to “six of one … half a dozen of the other.” That’s the resigned, cynical spirit behind this odd, belligerent show: With her husband, Max, dead, Ella tells us she might as well put on his pants, might as well take over his job, might as well become a Nazi prison guard. What’s one man, more or less?
“Man to Man” is a throwback to the ’80s in more ways than one: The director Stephen Unwin recreates his original production, which features every disruptive regietheater technique then available. There’s a mess of wires onstage, cans of beer that Swinton will pour on her head, grainy archival video. At one point, Swinton kicked a ball into the audience, and it hit someone. “You all right?” she asked. The patron stared blissfully up at her, swooning at this rough contact. (The show tours to New York in February.)
Blanchett’s presence had a similar deranging effect on the audience at the National Theater, where she concluded a run on Oct. 11. She and the gorgeously wry Nina Hoss appeared down near the seats at the start of “Electra/Persona,” the director Benedict Andrews’s double-feature abridgment of Sophocles’s tragedy and Ingmar Bergman’s screenplay. Blanchett asked a theatergoer to toss a coin to help them determine which woman would play Electra and which would play her hated mother, Clytemnestra. It was so exciting that the theatergoer bobbled it. No one wants to do a fine-motor-control task under that hooded, Olympian gaze.
Sophocles’s tragedy describes what unbounded, unmediated grief can do to its container. One of the few props described in the 2,500-year-old play is an urn, which may have Electra’s brother’s remains in it. Electra, in a certain way, is that urn. I saw the iteration in which Blanchett plays Electra, in what’s easily the greatest performance of the role I may ever see. So much energy passes through her body that it seems as if her own bright container might fly apart.
Andrews sends his Electra ranging up and down a huge, stage-filling staircase, juddering with broken sanity. She’s most dangerous when she dons her brother’s old jacket and imagines herself taking his place. Perhaps she’ll kill their mother? Blanchett drops her voice an octave and strides around with a hammer, swinging it as a counterweight to her own slight frame. She yearns to smash it all.
I regretted the play’s second half, a stage version of Bergman’s 1966 movie about an actress who goes temporarily mute. Hoss and Blanchett film each other, recreating some of Bergman’s stark black-and-white compositions. I didn’t need it! We already have plenty of chances to see these faces onscreen. And no mere close-up can approximate the intoxicating sensation of Blanchett-in-proximity. I was many rows behind the coin-flipper, but I could still feel the weight of its metal landing in my hand.
In the revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at the @sohoplace theater (through Dec. 19), the director Marianne Elliott has staged the vicious 1962 domestic insult fest with a carefully tuned ear for its biting comedy. George (Billy Crudup) and Martha (Anderson) have a young couple — Honey (Phoebe Horn) and Nick (Josh Dylan) — over for several nightcaps after a university faculty party. The older couple, past masters at marital combat, then attack each other with any weapon to hand. If Honey and Nick don’t like being hammered into spears, well, they shouldn’t have dropped by.
Crudup — antic, grinning, charming, rabid — was born to play George. His vibrating manic force is what actually keeps the show in motion. This is sort of literal: The in-the-round @sohoplace (an almost brand-new West End theater at only 4 years old) allows the set designer Miriam Buether to build George and Martha a circular living room, which slowly rotates. George is this production’s tormented, tormenting axle. Sometimes, at the end of an act, Crudup will stand in the exact center of the stage and disappear, dropping straight into the floor like Lucifer in the lake in “Inferno.”
Anderson’s unadulterated beauty actually puts her at a bit of a disadvantage while playing Martha: Albee’s jokes about her age and sexual desperation don’t make sense, given the confidence with which she moves. Anderson adopts a broad Brooklyn accent (which sits oddly on the expensively educated, New England character), and she never appears with a hair out of place or a shoe unbuckled, even when Martha’s been pursuing extracurricular enrichment in the bedroom.
Her slight unreality encourages us to read the couple’s combat as metaphor, or perhaps Freudian fantasy: Albee is both lancing the boil of his own ugly family life and painting a portrait of the American will-to-destruction. Albee is (relatively!) light handed about this, naming his characters after George and Martha Washington and then leaving us to think about the country’s founding violence for ourselves. But I did see one other work that tried more explicitly to sum up a country in a play — or a person.
The stand-alone, though hardly the standout, of the major shows I saw was “The Standard of Living,” James Graham’s biographical treatment of the economist John Maynard Keynes. This West End show at the Theater Royal Haymarket (through Dec. 12) is the rare completely new work amid all these revivals and reworkings, and while its excellent star, Rory Kinnear, is famous, he is known best for Shakespeare (and perhaps “Black Mirror”), not for Hollywood.
The play’s focus is fine when it’s on Keynes, but it’s pretty poor when it’s on his friends, the so-called Bloomsbury set — Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Leonora Carrington. Graham doesn’t trust that the audience will actually know who they are, so someone will often say something along the lines of, “Oh, Virginia is upstairs reinventing the novel.” Every instance of this grates.
The most forceful scenes of “The Standard of Living” show Keynes’s decades-long debate with the economist Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston). Hayek wrote the anti-interventionist “The Road to Serfdom,” which has become dogma to laissez-faire, austerity-obsessed governments everywhere. Keynes insisted instead that a country can alleviate both its people’s suffering and its damaged markets by spending deeply. Kinnear’s gravity supersedes the sometimes silly show around him to make Keynes’s moral argument vivid: A nation must help its people live.
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