This morning I would like to look back at the 1985 theatre season in London. The West End saw many stars in revivals that year such as Dame Judi
Dench and Daniel Massey in Harley Granville-Barker's political melodrama WASTE, Deborah Kerr in THE CORN IS GREEN, Joan Plowright in MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION, Tim Curry in the Restoration Comedy LOVE FOR LOVE and Ben Kingsley's intelligent Moor and David Suchet's vividly-realized Iago in OTHELLO. Ian McKellen's comic performance in Richard Sheridan's THE CRITIC was considered one of the year's highlights. McKellen also starred in John Webster's THE DUCHESS OF MALFI and a highly acclaimed production of THE CHERRY ORCHARD.
Robert Morse played a philistine producer in Moss Hart's LIGHT UP THE SKY and Lauren Bacall fascinated as a pasee movie star with a cigarette voice and a tiger raging in her nerves in Tennesse Williams' SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH. Strong, poised and beautiful Liv Ullmann made her London stage debut in OLD TIMES and brought an astonishing intellectual rigor to Pinter's play. Charlton Heston brought his commanding physical presence to Lt. Queeg in THE CAINE MUTINY COURT MARTIAL and Diana Rigg showed her versatility as a deliciously alluring Serpent of Old Nile in Shakespeare's ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA and as the wealthy overbearing wife in Ibsen's LITTLE EYOLF.
A revival of Strindberg's DANCE OF DEATH starred Frances de la Tour and Alan Bates who some said challenged the memory of Laurence Olivier's Captain at the Old Vic twenty years earlier. THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL returned to London for the first time in almost a century with Donald Sinden in splendid form. The stage version of Baroness Orczy's novel was the last of the great Victorian swashbucklers and a dozen years later Frank Wildhorn would turn it into a musical.
An electrifying revival of THE SEAGULL at the Queens theatre starred Jonathan Pryce, Vanessa Redgrave and her daughter Natasha Richardson making her West End debut as Nina, the role Redgrave herself played alongside Peggy Ashcroft at the same theatre 21 years earlier. Redgrave won the Evening Standard Award for Best Actress and one British critic said, "She is quite simply the greatest actress this country has." Her Arkadina was elegant, kittenish, deceptively self-effacing and kind. Puffing nervously on a cigarette as she peers through her unbecoming glasses, Redgrave communicated all the sadness of a once beautiful woman conscious that age is creeping up on her.
THE MYSTERIES was considered the stunning theatrical achievement of the year and Bill Bryden won the Olivier for Best Director. The ensemble recreated scenes from the Bible and the visually exciting production included a vast turning ferris wheel.
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