LONDON â€" Is that a theatrical dame you see before you Very likely this season in London, where the twin titans that are Helen Mirren and Judi Dench have opened in new West End plays within three weeks of each other.
Time was it seemed as if every London theater season would offer up one or another of this country’s thespian grandees on an ever-rotating basis, be it Diana Rigg, Eileen Atkins, or Maggie Smith - dames of the realm, all.
Ms. Atkins, in fact, was on stage late last year, winning kudos for a rarely staged piece by Samuel Beckett, “All That Fall.†But Ms. Rigg hasn’t done a London play since a supporting turn in “Pygmalion†in 2011, and Ms. Smith has said in interviews that she doesn’t expect to return to the theater even though “Downtown Abbey†has brought her supreme timing to a newly aware public.
So there’s a genuine excitement that comes from finding Ms. Mirren and Ms. Dench back on stage in quick succession, both taking chances on new plays when they could easily be brought in for yet another go-round in Shakespeare, Chekhov, or the canonical dramatist of choice.
One could argue that Ms. Mirren is revisiting familiar terrain. After all, Peter Morgan’s play “The Audience†at the Gielgud Theatre casts its star as Elizabeth II, the very monarch for whom this actress won an Oscar in the film “The Queen,†written, as it happens, by Mr. Morgan. In fact, that 2006 film focused on a very particular moment following the death in 1997 of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the attendant shock waves as they rippled not least across a royal household that was deemed to be out of touch with the sentiments of the British public.
“The Audience,†very much by contrast, takes a prismatic view of the Queen’s 61 years on the throne, as refracted through the weekly meetings that have been and continue to be held, apparently without fail, between the monarch and whichever of 12 prime ministers happens to be in office at that particular time. (The play shows us eight of these politicians in varying degrees of discourse with Her Majesty, the real letdown being the synthetic-seeming encounter with Haydn Gwynne’s Margaret Thatcher.)
The task, therefore, requires Ms. Mirren to make quicksilver adjustments in costume and voice and levels of confidence, as befits both a newly enthroned 20something and a seasoned octogenarian who has seen so many elected leaders come and go that she can function as both inquisitor and adviser, counselor and confidante: The actress handles the various points on that ever-shifting spectrum with the same easeful elegance communicated by Stephen Daldry’s production, which manages to be properly weighty but also rather puckish. Here’s one history lesson, however fictionalized, that has about it a sense of fun.
“The Audience†this week was nominated for five Olivier Awards, London’s equivalent of the Tony, having squeaked in just under the wire: the play opened on the final day of eligibility for the 2013 trophies, to be awarded April 28.
What better time for this production than in the year following the diamond jubilee and an Olympics opening ceremony in which HRH cut an unforgettably comic figure Elizabeth II seems of late both to walk among us and to remain somehow indefinably remote - which makes “The Audience†about as near as most of us are ever likely to get to the real thing.
Ms. Dench won her own Oscar for playing a queen - Elizabeth I in “Shakespeare in Love.†That accolade followed on from the actress’s first Oscar nod for “Mrs. Brown,†in which this quintessential creature of the British stage transferred her indelible capacity for both asperity and pathos to the part of Queen Victoria on screen.
But the actress has also long displayed a knack for anatomizing those ordinary, quotidian existences that don’t make the headlines. “Peter and Alice,†John Logan’s knotty play at the Noel Coward Theatre through June 1, chronicles a kind of limbo - that’s to say, what happens when fame by association takes over a life that can’t compete with the renown that nonetheless happens to be yours.
It’s a matter of record that in June, 1932, Alice Liddell Hargreaves met Peter Llewelyn Davies in a London bookshop. What we don’t know is what the inspirations for Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, respectively, actually said to one another, any more than we can be fully sure of the content of those private audiences between Elizabeth II and her country’s political leaders.
As directed by Michael Grandage, who staged the same author’s Tony-winning “Red,†Mr. Logan’s fantasia posits across 85 minutes a joint fall through the separate rabbit holes of memory and creation. The real-life characters are seen ricocheting between the authors who alighted on them, perhaps inordinately so, way back when â€" as well as the literary figures that were the result. And whose takeover of our collective imaginations risked damaging their progenitors for good.
Sound tricky It is, and the result, however ravishingly designed by Christopher Oram, feels both needlessly thorny and insufficiently rich thematically. Far too many lines are given over to the unexceptional realization that life is no wonderland. Whoever said it was
On the other hand, the presence of Ms. Dench as she heads towards 80 late next year constitutes its own, entirely separate wonderland, whether she is seen tossing off mots justes like a latter-day Lady Bracknell or surrendering to the grief of which the play makes a near-fetish by the time of its rather thudding final line. (Surely the material demands a more poetic or metaphor-laden close.)
A corresponding next generation of talent is on offer in the eminently capable Ben Whishaw, Ms. Dench’s “Skyfall†colleague who, in fact, has the largest, most demanding role as a Davies seen trying to sublimate the psychic agitation that will do him in. But listen to his distaff colleague speak, as Hargreaves, of being “an old lady not much loved by anyone,†and you can all but hear an entire playhouse shaking its head, with reference to the actress on view: Not true. No!
