Repertory: Best of Breed

Britain’s National Theater is a marriage broker of time: it can wed a present audience to a past play and make them live in timeless harmony. It is also an honor scroll of what makes a repertory group outstanding: fluid ensemble work, resourceful acting, thoughtful direction, intuitive dramatic taste, a sense of purpose and style, a firm guiding intelligence and a zestfulness of spirit. Currently making its first Western Hemisphere appearance with a Canadian tour, the troupe presents three classics from two centuries: Strindberg’s Dance of Death and Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear (early 20th) and Congreve’s Love for Love (late 17th). No American resident company could have done these plays with equal distinction; many repertory groups could not begin to do them at all.

The British National Theater does have one unique advantage: the star power of Sir Laurence Olivier, whose undisputed ability to depict fallen tragic heroes is matched by his less-famed skill at depicting tragicomic grotesque nobodies. Death’s nobody is Edgar, an aging Swedish army captain quartered on an island. Symbolically, it is an out post of hell, an arid devil’s island of an awful marriage that has lasted almost 25 years. Wife Alice (Geraldine McEwan) is a viper-vampire, bleeding her husband of self-respect. She refuses to let him forget that he never rose to the rank of major, that his only accomplishment is an obsolete manual on small arms. Edgar bullies Alice right back, and stamps his army boot on her vanity by noting that the laurel wreaths she cherishes from her days as an actress were given to her, not by an adoring public, but by her own brother.

Spent & Scarred. In dissonant vignettes, the play shows how the pair is welded together in hurt and hate. At one point, Edgar tries to demonstrate his virility by dancing to the Entry of the Boyars. Suddenly the whisky-soaked, lead-limbed captain is transformed into the dapper young officer of long ago. As he elegantly foots the steps, Olivier conjures up unseen reviewing stands, flying banners, and the martial music of the parade ground. But the inner man is spent, scarred and empty. He loses balance and slumps to the floor as if someone had leveled a hammer at his forehead.

Olivier is malignantly and magnificently feral, dangerous precisely because he is a wounded animal clawing at the specter of death. One waits for the Olivier howl, and it comes—but not as the inhuman scream of the blinded Oedipus, or as his trumpet call to glory in Henry V: “God for Harry, England, and St. George!” In words charged with pain and hurtling toward frenzy, Olivier vengefully announces that he wants a divorce in order to “unite my destiny with that of a woman who together with devotion to her husband will also bring into this household youth, and may I say, a little BUUU-TEEE!” Not beauty but a final stroke awaits the captain. Propped in a wheelchair, jaw sagging, tongue palsied, eyes of stone, he must hear out his wife as she reviles him with reptilian glee. With a last convulsive effort he sits up, as if in his coffin, and spits at her, full in the face. It is Strindberg’s riposte to man’s fate.

Revolving Beds. Star though he is, Olivier has a convincing dedication to the spirit of repertory. In the other two productions, he steps back from the limelight into minor roles, allowing the audience a better glimpse of the National Theater’s chamber-music precision. As taxing as Strindberg, though outwardly frivolous, is A Flea in Her Ear. Feydeau, the great master of the French bedroom farce, wrote indescribable plots that do not add up; they divide and multiply to the point of total comic hysteria. In Flea, a wife (McEwan) suspects her husband of infidelity, traps him in a hotel of ill repute, and ignites a Marx Brothers saturnalia of attempted rapes, chases, mistaken identities, kicked servants, slamming doors and revolving beds that cascade with frenetic laughter.

While a company has to be as agile as a flea to do Flea, split-second timing is not quite enough to vivify Love for Love. Director Peter Wood has sacrificed stylized wit for humanizing warmth, but it seems that Congreve’s people thrive best at icily cynical drawing-room temperature. Minor caveats aside, Britain’s National Theater proves that England’s crown jewels are not all in the Tower of London.