Twenty or thirty years ago, English theater was confidently thought to be thriving. A busy crowd of playwrights, ranging from naturalists like Osborne and Wesker to wits like Stoppard and Orton, was the envy of the world. Now the swarm of scribblers seems gone, save Stoppard (whose last two plays, Hapgood and Arcadia, have had no New York productions) and Alan Bennett. What has arisen in their stead is a directors’ theater possessing great willfulness and flaunting a common expressionist style, a reborn Meyerholdism that might be dubbed the New Directorate.
Four recent imports from London, all pretty faithful replications of their originals, illustrate the phenomenon. Nicholas Hytner’s Carousel, discussed in an earlier report, can serve as paradigm: an old war- horse ideologically deconstructed, emotionally stripped, and given a new master image that dominates the stage. In Carousel, that image was the globe of the earth itself.
Jonathan Kent, whose bailiwick is the Almeida Theatre, is another of the new London directorial breed; his production of Euripides’ Medea resurfaced at the Longacre. Its set, by Peter J. Davison, declares the mother concept of the staging: we see a high, beetling, stage-choking, V-shaped intersection of two metallic plates that are in due course decomposed into smaller rectangles which slide and clank and finally collapse with a maximum of din. It’s as if Medea were being enacted at a crashed but still operational spaceship on the planet Zargon—with Medea as the creature from Alien. There’s
