IHT Quick Read: Feb. 11

NEWS For months, Damascus has hunched in a defensive crouch as fighting raged in suburbs, but a rebel advance has created a new level of alarm and disorder. An employee of the New York Times reports from Damascus and Anne Barnard reports from Beirut.

President Obama will use his State of the Union speech on Tuesday to reinvigorate one of his signature national security objectives â€" drastically reducing nuclear arsenals around the world â€" after securing agreement in recent months with the United States military that the American nuclear force can be cut in size by roughly a third. David E. Sanger reports from Washington.

Scotland would have o renegotiate membership in the European Union and other international organizations if it votes for independence in a referendum next year, according to legal advice expected to be published Monday by the British government. Stephen Castle reports from London.

A Hong Kong television series has tapped into the tensions between the city’s residents and mainland Chinese visitors, striking a nerve on both sides of the border and drawing the attention of Chinese censors. Gerry Mullany reports from Hong Kong.

Several journalists who cover Myanmar said Sunday that they had received warnings from Google that their email accounts might ha! ve been hacked by “state-sponsored attackers.” Thomas Fuller reports from Bangkok.

The Financial Times is celebrating its 125th birthday Wednesday. While the print editions are fading, The F.T. has figured out how to make money from new outlets. Eric Pfanner reports.

EDUCATION The use of part-time faculty who have little possibility of tenure or permanent employment is increasingly common at U.S. colleges and universities. But European law gives workers more rights, and French workers are among the most protected in Europe â€" unless, it seems, they work for an American university. D. D. Gutenplan reports from Paris.

ARTS An exhibition at the Museo del Novecento in Milan celebrates Olivetti’s contribution to the design culture of the modern industrial era. Alice Rawsthorn reviews from Milan.

FASHION The blizzard kept Suzy Menkes from getting to the early New York fashion shows, so she pulled out her iPad to watch them online. Suzy Menkes writes from the virtual front row.

SPORTS England was the big winner of a second weekend of the 2013 European Six Nations rugby championship that ended with the perennial power France at the bottom of the table. Huw Richards reports from Paris.

As Gareth Bale of Tottenham and Cristiano Ronaldo of Madrid led their teams to victories this weekend, some wonder if they will be playing together next season. Rob Hughes reports from London.

Builder of China\'s \'Great Firewall\' Finds His Holiday Greetings Spurned

BEIJING â€" Fang Binxing is known here as the “Father of the Wall,” that is, the Great Firewall â€" the sprawling system of technological controls in China that has created a parallel online world, or “Chinternet,” where global favorites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are blocked.

In fact, it’s fair to say that Mr. Fang is unpopular among quite a few of China’s hundreds of millions of netizens, though he does have his admirers, including among those who support the government’s large-scale efforts to “weiwen,” or maintain stability.

Just how unpopular he is was demonstrated again over the weekend when his New Year’s microblog greeting was promptly bombarded with messages telling him to “go to hell,” according to netizens (it wasn’t possible to read each message, but Mr. Fang’s post had been forwarded over 23,000 times at the time of writing).

Pithily, in one word repeated again and again, the critics said: “gn,” or “æ'š.” (The word literally means “roll,” or, in an officially accepted slang variation, “beat it.”)

“Fang Binxing sends everyone New Year’s greetings! May all be joyful and successful in the Year of the Snake!” he posted on his Sina Weibo, or microblog, account, on Saturday, continuing with salutations to his university (he is the president of the University of Posts and Telecommunications in Beijing) and a poem.

“Yesterday, a university president wished everyone Happy New Year on his microblog account and the result was he got over 10,000 forwards saying ‘go to hell,’ ” He Bing, deputy director of the School of Law at the China University of Political Science and Law, posted to his nearly 395,000 followers on Sina Weibo.

“As long as people like this continue to be the presidents of universities there’s no hope for China,” Mr. He’s post continued.! By Tuesday afternoon it had been forwarded about 3,700 times.

Mr. Fang acknowledged in an interview in 2011 that he had designed major parts of the Great Firewall. He is a lightning rod for protest among the Internet-savvy who want broader freedom of speech.

He’s had eggs and a shoe thrown at him, and in 2011 had to close his newly opened microblog after thousands of users left comments within hours â€" almost all of them critical, the populist newspaper Global Times noted.

“I regard the dirty abuse as a sacrifice for my country,” the newspaper quoted Mr. Fang as saying.

Attention is growing around the world on how the Chinese state uses the Internet, with The Washington Post reporting today on a new intelligence assessment in the United States. The newspaper writes that according to a National Intelligence Estimate, the United States is the target of “a massive, sustained cyber-espionage campaign” and that China is “the country most aggressively seeking to penetrate the computer systems of American businesses and institutions to gain access to data that could be used for economic gain.”

The Post is one of a number of U.S. news organizations, including The New York Times, that recently reported having been subjected to cyberattacks believed to have Chinese origins. (The Times has been blocked in China since running a story la! st year about wealth accumulated by the family of the outgoing prime minister, Wen Jiabao.)

Back in Beijing, Mr. Fang hasn’t posted anything since his New Year greeting, so it isn’t clear how he feels about the reaction to it. Meanwhile, word continues to circulate that more “upgrades,” or tightening, of the Great Firewall lie ahead.

In December, several overseas-based companies that provide VPNs to both non-Chinese and Chinese users in the country (a VPN, or virtual private network, enables users to get around the Chinternet, or “cross the Wall” as it’s known here, by logging on via overseas servers) said their services had been interrupted.

In what some read as a warning, Mr. Fang appeared to tell Global Times that overseas-based companies offering VPNs to people in China must register with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

“I haven’t heard that any foreign companies have registered,” he aid. Unregistered VPN service providers are not protected by Chinese law and any company running a VPN business should realize it has a responsibility to register, he said, according to Global Times.

A Different Kind of Labyrinth in the London Underground

LONDON â€" The artist Mark Wallinger has a few strings to his bow: he spent 10 days in a bear suit in 2004 in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin; he won the Turner Prize in 2007; he enjoyed a few days of media admiration/derision in 2009 when he proposed a 50-meter white horse as a public art project in Ebbsfleet in Kent.

On Thursday, Mr. Wallinger presented his newest work: a commission from the London Underground, for which he has created 270 individual panels â€" one for every Tube station â€" showing a labyrinth design in black on white square enamel panels. A small red cross marks a point of entry, and each panel is individually numbered, according to the order used by the winner of the Tube Challenge, an eccentric affair in which people compete to pass through every Tube sto on the network in the shortest possible time. (The current record is 16 hours, 29 minutes and 59 seconds.)

The Underground has long had a tradition of commissioning art. Its headquarters in St. James’s Park boasts reliefs by Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein among others, and its Art on the Underground program has shown admirable eclecticism in its choice of artists for commissioned posters, map brochures and in-station work. Mr. Wallinger’s Labyrinth project is part of Art on the Underground’s celebration, this year, of the Tube’s 150th anniversary.

“Something like 4 million people every day have an opportunity to encounter the art works,” said Tamsin Dillon, the head of Art on the Underground, in a statement marking the official opening of the project.

On the basis of visits, on Friday morning, to 4 of the 10 Tube stations at which the panels were displayed, and the remaining 260 stations will get theirs over the next few months, it ! seems clear that opportunity is one thing, actual encounters are another.

At Baker Street station (No. 58), my first stop, a friendly Tube employee went to find out where the panel was located and came to look at it with me. It was next to the Marylebone Road exit, near a few public phones. In and out streamed the passengers; no one except the two of us seemed to notice the new artwork. “Nice,” he said cautiously.

Similar indifference pertained at Oxford Circus (no. 60), Victoria (no. 103) and Green Park (no. 232), where a man stood consulting his cell phone right next to the panel without noticing it was there.

While this may be a bit discouraging for Mr. Wallinger and Ms. Dillon, there was something rather nice about seeking out the unobtrusively placed artworks, and a slightly Harry Potter-ish aspect to being the only person who could apparently see them as the rest of the world wandered by. Looking for the panels may not be the journey that Mr. Wallinger had in mind (unlike a maze,the labyrinth allows a straightforward passage between entrance and exit, and presumably symbolizes each passenger’s trajectory), but it’s a pleasant diversion in the hurly-burly of commuting. I see a Labyrinth Challenge coming up.

Meditations on the F1 Season to Come - and on 20 Seasons Run

PARIS â€" The 2013 Formula One season has not really begun. The first race takes place on March 17 in Melbourne. But with the launches of the new cars and the first four days of test sessions ending on Friday, the seeds have been planted. What kind of plant is not easy to figure out.

I have been observing from the sidelines for a couple of weeks, watching the fanfare of the car launches â€"or rather, the lack of fanfare â€" and watching the lap-by-lap action on the track in Jerez, Spain. And I have, every day, kept throwing around ideas in my head and saying: So what’s the conclusion What’s to say The cars, most of them, are merely the technical evolutions of last year’s cars.

They all look fairly similar â€" although some, thank goodness, have smoothed out that ugly nose problem of last season â€" and there is a good reason for it: There is very little change in the technical regulations from last season. The big changes will all occur next year, especially with the change in the engin specification. So what is there to say about these cars

Had to wait to see them on the track. Now, it is common knowledge within Formula One and to most fans that the first winter test sessions of the new cars reveal and mean very little. The engineers are not forced into running their cars to racing specifications, and they can test parts that would be deemed illegal in a race. They can run on low fuel to get great results to attract sponsors, or they can sandbag â€" run heavy with lots of fuel and ballast â€" to hide how fast their cars are to the competition.

That said, the tests often do give an idea of who is strong, and who is not. Last year, Ferrari was clearly off the pace â€" by 1.6 seconds, no less â€" and that weighed on the whole season for the Italian team. The Lotus was fast, though, and that showed early in the season too. So what about the last four days

None of it seemed to make sense: Jenson Button started the first session as the fastest car in the McLaren Merced! es, setting his fastest time on the hard tires, which begged the question: “What could he do on the faster soft tires”

Felipe Massa, days later, when he was the fastest car of the day, in a Ferrari, still moaned about the speed of Button’s lap, even though it was slower than his. But it all had to do with tires and track conditions. Then there was the Lotus, with Romain Grosjean setting a fastest lap, and then Kimi Raikkonen doing the same. And there were the amazingly fast laps of the new Toro Rosso car and the Force India.

And there was Lewis Hamilton’s first test as part of the Mercedes team. (Many people criticized him for changing teams while he was secure in his seat at McLaren.) Hamilton ended up running off the track with broken brakes after his first few lap. But he came back strongly and left the session on Friday smiling.

It was after taking all of this action in that I finally realized that there was a take-away, despite the story seeming to change ever day. And that wa it: the story this coming season may well change from one race to another, one session to another, as it had for the first part of last season.

The cars are currently so close together â€" except for the ones like the Marussia and the Caterham, the smaller teams â€" that there could be a lot of shifting around of the powers that be.

If this be the case, we’re in for another great and interesting season. On the other hand, this was just the first winter test session, and we have two more to go, starting with the one in Barcelona on Feb. 19.

Oh, and another thing that left me asking myself metaphysical and existential questions in the last few days is that this whole first test session week happened at a time when a very little talked about, but significant thing happened in American journalism regarding Formula One.

I’m talking about an 8,152-word article in the Feb. 4th issue of the The New York! er all ab! out Formula One. “The Art of Speed; Bringing Formula One to America,” by Ben McGrath, is a well-written and entertaining, but surface-scratching story introducing Formula One to America.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, and felt really stimulated seeing the great New Yorker magazine, a high-brow literary colossus of American journalism, giving this much space and interest to the sport I have been covering for so many years for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. One of the things that intrigued me was that unlike, for instance, The Economist, or other major publications that don’t usually write about the sport, when they do they blast it for some scandal or another, the New Yorker story read like a beginner’s guide to F1.

It was, as the title suggested, an introduction to America of this series that has never pierced the American consciousness the way other forms of auto racing â€" like Nascar â€" have, probably simply because there are no American heroes involved in ittoday.

On the other hand, like the season testing, it also left me wondering just how often Formula One has to be introduced to America after a history that goes back more than 60 years, and two Formula One world champion American drivers, one of whom is named Mario Andretti.

Well, with a New Yorker magazine anointment, I’d say that’s a pretty big step right there.

Of course, this idea of how many times F1 has to be re-introduced to America also reminded me suddenly that 2013 marks the 20th anniversary of my own beginning covering the sport for the International Herald Tribune, when I published my first ever story in the paper on the series: Grand Prix Racing: 1993 Is Shaping Up Great Despite FISA

Meditations on the F1 Season to Come - and on 20 Seasons Run

PARIS â€" The 2013 Formula One season has not really begun. The first race takes place on March 17 in Melbourne. But with the launches of the new cars and the first four days of test sessions ending on Friday, the seeds have been planted. What kind of plant is not easy to figure out.

I have been observing from the sidelines for a couple of weeks, watching the fanfare of the car launches â€"or rather, the lack of fanfare â€" and watching the lap-by-lap action on the track in Jerez, Spain. And I have, every day, kept throwing around ideas in my head and saying: So what’s the conclusion What’s to say The cars, most of them, are merely the technical evolutions of last year’s cars.

They all look fairly similar â€" although some, thank goodness, have smoothed out that ugly nose problem of last season â€" and there is a good reason for it: There is very little change in the technical regulations from last season. The big changes will all occur next year, especially with the change in the engin specification. So what is there to say about these cars

Had to wait to see them on the track. Now, it is common knowledge within Formula One and to most fans that the first winter test sessions of the new cars reveal and mean very little. The engineers are not forced into running their cars to racing specifications, and they can test parts that would be deemed illegal in a race. They can run on low fuel to get great results to attract sponsors, or they can sandbag â€" run heavy with lots of fuel and ballast â€" to hide how fast their cars are to the competition.

That said, the tests often do give an idea of who is strong, and who is not. Last year, Ferrari was clearly off the pace â€" by 1.6 seconds, no less â€" and that weighed on the whole season for the Italian team. The Lotus was fast, though, and that showed early in the season too. So what about the last four days

None of it seemed to make sense: Jenson Button started the first session as the fastest car in the McLaren Merced! es, setting his fastest time on the hard tires, which begged the question: “What could he do on the faster soft tires”

Felipe Massa, days later, when he was the fastest car of the day, in a Ferrari, still moaned about the speed of Button’s lap, even though it was slower than his. But it all had to do with tires and track conditions. Then there was the Lotus, with Romain Grosjean setting a fastest lap, and then Kimi Raikkonen doing the same. And there were the amazingly fast laps of the new Toro Rosso car and the Force India.

And there was Lewis Hamilton’s first test as part of the Mercedes team. (Many people criticized him for changing teams while he was secure in his seat at McLaren.) Hamilton ended up running off the track with broken brakes after his first few lap. But he came back strongly and left the session on Friday smiling.

It was after taking all of this action in that I finally realized that there was a take-away, despite the story seeming to change ever day. And that wa it: the story this coming season may well change from one race to another, one session to another, as it had for the first part of last season.

The cars are currently so close together â€" except for the ones like the Marussia and the Caterham, the smaller teams â€" that there could be a lot of shifting around of the powers that be.

If this be the case, we’re in for another great and interesting season. On the other hand, this was just the first winter test session, and we have two more to go, starting with the one in Barcelona on Feb. 19.

Oh, and another thing that left me asking myself metaphysical and existential questions in the last few days is that this whole first test session week happened at a time when a very little talked about, but significant thing happened in American journalism regarding Formula One.

I’m talking about an 8,152-word article in the Feb. 4th issue of the The New York! er all ab! out Formula One. “The Art of Speed; Bringing Formula One to America,” by Ben McGrath, is a well-written and entertaining, but surface-scratching story introducing Formula One to America.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, and felt really stimulated seeing the great New Yorker magazine, a high-brow literary colossus of American journalism, giving this much space and interest to the sport I have been covering for so many years for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. One of the things that intrigued me was that unlike, for instance, The Economist, or other major publications that don’t usually write about the sport, when they do they blast it for some scandal or another, the New Yorker story read like a beginner’s guide to F1.

It was, as the title suggested, an introduction to America of this series that has never pierced the American consciousness the way other forms of auto racing â€" like Nascar â€" have, probably simply because there are no American heroes involved in ittoday.

On the other hand, like the season testing, it also left me wondering just how often Formula One has to be introduced to America after a history that goes back more than 60 years, and two Formula One world champion American drivers, one of whom is named Mario Andretti.

Well, with a New Yorker magazine anointment, I’d say that’s a pretty big step right there.

Of course, this idea of how many times F1 has to be re-introduced to America also reminded me suddenly that 2013 marks the 20th anniversary of my own beginning covering the sport for the International Herald Tribune, when I published my first ever story in the paper on the series: Grand Prix Racing: 1993 Is Shaping Up Great Despite FISA

In the West End, Directors in Residence

LONDONâ€"“That’s that theater taken care of, then!”

The above could be the catchphrase of London’s West End at the moment, as various playhouses pair up with directors in an attempt to “brand” a theater, so to speak.

Two prominent West End theaters have each hitched themselves to directors who not long ago were regularly seen at a particular Off West End address. I’m referring, of course, to Michael Grandage, the former artistic director of Covent Garden’s intimate Donmar Warehouse, and Jamie Lloyd, who one could argue came of age as a director under Mr. Grandage’s tutelage at the Donmar. (Among Mr. Lloyd’s Donmar credits was the best production I have yet seen of the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical “Passion.”)

The current season finds the two men embarked upon the stewardships of a pair of cmmercial theaters all of five minutes from each other. Mr. Grandage got in first, beginning a 15-month tenancy at the Noël Coward Theater in December with “Privates on Parade,” the 1977 Peter Nichols/Denis King play-with-music that in effect is a revival of a revival. Mr. Grandage staged the same show with a different cast at the Donmar late in 2001 in a production that won its star, Roger Allam, an Olivier award.

And here the title is again, this time with Simon Russell Beale in endearingly frothy, flouncy form as the army captain Terri Dennis, an Englishman abroad who never met a double entendre or innuendo to which he couldn’t apply liberal dollops of camp. (The piece is set at the start of the Malayan Emergency in 1948.)

The show, first seen in the soul-baring confines of the 250-seat Donmar, is perhaps inevitably more presentational at the Noël Coward, with its tradi! tional proscenium and more than three times the seating â€" and correspondingly less revelatory.

That said, the flat-out brio of the revue-style show marks a most agreeable start to a five-play lineup that only gets starrier. Next up is the one world premiere of the lot - “Peter and Alice,” a new play from John Logan (“Red”), that marks the return to the London stage of Judi Dench, whom Mr. Grandage directed four years ago in Yukio Mishima’s “Madame de Sade.” After that come two Shakespeares (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Henry V,” the latter with Jude Law as the king), that pair preceded by Daniel Radcliffe in the first London revival of Martin McDonagh’s “Cripple of Inishmaan” - Harry Potter takes on the part of Cripple Billy.

A short walk across Trafalgar Square, Mr. Lloyd’s sequence of shows at the Trafalgar Studios hasn’t been announced beyond an opening title - a new “Macbeth,” which began performancs this weekend and stars James McAvoy, the Scottish film actor (“Atonement,” “The Last King of Scotland”) who, incidentally, was in that first “Privates on Parade” undertaken by Mr. Grandage at the Donmar. The intention here remains the same as it is for the Trafalgar’s glitzier rival up the road: to position a commercial theater as the stomping ground of a specific director, who in turn can leave an imprint upon a series of shows rather than just going from one ad-hoc production to another as is the directorial norm.

This sort of endeavor isn’t new to the ecology of the West End. The Haymarket is just one of several addresses to have given itself over in recent years to one or another name director. Jonathan Kent, Sean Mathias and Trevor Nunn have all shepherded their own parades of shows to that theater, none of which made much of a noise beyond Mr. Nunn’s wonderful “Flare Path,” starring Sienna Miller and Sheridan Smith, and a Patrick Stewart/Ian McKellen “Waiting for Godot” from Mr. Mathias that looks as if it is going to be revisited on Broadway.

One can see the appeal of the enterprise. Couple a building with an artist who can create an identity for it and you are spared the vagaries of commercial production that can at times leave weeks or months between bookings.

And what director is going to balk at a scenario whereby he or she is the self-evident draw Mr. Grandage and Mr. Lloyd are (so far, anyway) scheduled to direct all the shows in their respective seasons, whereas his former leadership of the Donmar inevitably meant that Mr. Grandage could only direct a percentage of the offerings at a non-commercial house where he - or any artistic director - would be expected to share the wealth.

Throw in Kevin Spacey’s ongoing stewardship of the Old Vic, a once-troubled playhouse that has become profitably associated in the minds of the London public with the double Oscar winner, and the virtues of branding a theater are on view before you.

What happens to the theaters when these men move on The answer, or part of it, may be on view at the Donmar, where Josie Rourke is now in the artistic director’s chair.

In the West End, Directors in Residence

LONDONâ€"“That’s that theater taken care of, then!”

The above could be the catchphrase of London’s West End at the moment, as various playhouses pair up with directors in an attempt to “brand” a theater, so to speak.

Two prominent West End theaters have each hitched themselves to directors who not long ago were regularly seen at a particular Off West End address. I’m referring, of course, to Michael Grandage, the former artistic director of Covent Garden’s intimate Donmar Warehouse, and Jamie Lloyd, who one could argue came of age as a director under Mr. Grandage’s tutelage at the Donmar. (Among Mr. Lloyd’s Donmar credits was the best production I have yet seen of the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical “Passion.”)

The current season finds the two men embarked upon the stewardships of a pair of cmmercial theaters all of five minutes from each other. Mr. Grandage got in first, beginning a 15-month tenancy at the Noël Coward Theater in December with “Privates on Parade,” the 1977 Peter Nichols/Denis King play-with-music that in effect is a revival of a revival. Mr. Grandage staged the same show with a different cast at the Donmar late in 2001 in a production that won its star, Roger Allam, an Olivier award.

And here the title is again, this time with Simon Russell Beale in endearingly frothy, flouncy form as the army captain Terri Dennis, an Englishman abroad who never met a double entendre or innuendo to which he couldn’t apply liberal dollops of camp. (The piece is set at the start of the Malayan Emergency in 1948.)

The show, first seen in the soul-baring confines of the 250-seat Donmar, is perhaps inevitably more presentational at the Noël Coward, with its tradi! tional proscenium and more than three times the seating â€" and correspondingly less revelatory.

That said, the flat-out brio of the revue-style show marks a most agreeable start to a five-play lineup that only gets starrier. Next up is the one world premiere of the lot - “Peter and Alice,” a new play from John Logan (“Red”), that marks the return to the London stage of Judi Dench, whom Mr. Grandage directed four years ago in Yukio Mishima’s “Madame de Sade.” After that come two Shakespeares (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Henry V,” the latter with Jude Law as the king), that pair preceded by Daniel Radcliffe in the first London revival of Martin McDonagh’s “Cripple of Inishmaan” - Harry Potter takes on the part of Cripple Billy.

A short walk across Trafalgar Square, Mr. Lloyd’s sequence of shows at the Trafalgar Studios hasn’t been announced beyond an opening title - a new “Macbeth,” which began performancs this weekend and stars James McAvoy, the Scottish film actor (“Atonement,” “The Last King of Scotland”) who, incidentally, was in that first “Privates on Parade” undertaken by Mr. Grandage at the Donmar. The intention here remains the same as it is for the Trafalgar’s glitzier rival up the road: to position a commercial theater as the stomping ground of a specific director, who in turn can leave an imprint upon a series of shows rather than just going from one ad-hoc production to another as is the directorial norm.

This sort of endeavor isn’t new to the ecology of the West End. The Haymarket is just one of several addresses to have given itself over in recent years to one or another name director. Jonathan Kent, Sean Mathias and Trevor Nunn have all shepherded their own parades of shows to that theater, none of which made much of a noise beyond Mr. Nunn’s wonderful “Flare Path,” starring Sienna Miller and Sheridan Smith, and a Patrick Stewart/Ian McKellen “Waiting for Godot” from Mr. Mathias that looks as if it is going to be revisited on Broadway.

One can see the appeal of the enterprise. Couple a building with an artist who can create an identity for it and you are spared the vagaries of commercial production that can at times leave weeks or months between bookings.

And what director is going to balk at a scenario whereby he or she is the self-evident draw Mr. Grandage and Mr. Lloyd are (so far, anyway) scheduled to direct all the shows in their respective seasons, whereas his former leadership of the Donmar inevitably meant that Mr. Grandage could only direct a percentage of the offerings at a non-commercial house where he - or any artistic director - would be expected to share the wealth.

Throw in Kevin Spacey’s ongoing stewardship of the Old Vic, a once-troubled playhouse that has become profitably associated in the minds of the London public with the double Oscar winner, and the virtues of branding a theater are on view before you.

What happens to the theaters when these men move on The answer, or part of it, may be on view at the Donmar, where Josie Rourke is now in the artistic director’s chair.