We’re into reverse Platonic stages of reality now: Neil Simon, the
playhouse, is on Broadway, at West Forty-fifth and dark; Neil Simon, the play,
is off-Broadway, at the Union Square Theatre and packed; and Neil
Simon, the playwright, is somewhere far out of sight, possibly in a row
boat adrift off the coast of Labrador. If you crossed a lemming with
a sloth, you’d come up with something approximating what remains
of New York theater, but nothing symbolizes its stately spiral
downward—the safer and safer vehicles playing to smaller and
smaller audiences—quite like London Suite.

At one time, Simon was Broadway’s most successful playwright;
then, he was Broadway’s only
playwright; now, even he can aspire no higher than East Seventeenth Street.
And what’s brought him to his off-Broadway debut? Nothing bold or
brave or experimental, but a cozy rehash of familiar characters and
situations: off-Broadway off-cuts. Since the autobiographical
trilogy, the experiment with farce in Rumors, the failures of
Russia and Jake’s Women and the aborted Gershwin show, Simon has
retreated in the Nineties to what he knows best—the gag-factory good
ol’ days of Laughter on the 23rd Floor, the half-hearted
musicalization of The Goodbye Girl. But London Suite is so
warmed over that I can’t see why the participation
of the real, living Neil Simon was required:
this is computerized play-making.

After Plaza Suite (1968) and California Suite (1976), we are now
in a London hotel, not dissimilar to the Connaught.