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New Plays

Posted by:	BroadwayMagic 09:03 am EDT 08/08/14
In reply to:	Looking Back: the Theatre Season in London 1985 - BroadwayMagic 09:00 am EDT 08/08/14

There were some notable new plays that opened in London in 1985 including: David Hare and Howard Brenton's PRAVDA, a scabrously funny comedy starring Anthony Hopkins as a ruthless Rupert Murdoch-like newspaper tycoon who prefers bad newspapers to good because they sell better. Hopkins' dominating presence created a humorless monster of power on the rampage and one critic wrote that his performance was arguably the most magnetic in a contemporary play since Laurence Olivier's Archie Rice in THE ENTERTAINER in 1957. PRAVDA won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year. Hopkins also appeared alongside a young Colin Firth at the Old Vic in Arthur Schnitzler's THE LONELY ROAD. Hopkins played a proud, withdrawn painter who rues his failure as an artist and tells Firth that he is his real father. Critics praised Hopkins' passionate and moody performance "...but the play is unworthy of him and the evening dies early." The Olivier Award for Best Play of 1985 went to Peter Barnes' RED NOSES, a subversive comedy about the black death in medieval Europe. Terry Hands' production was epic theater with a large cast and a mix of satire and slapstick and song-and-dance vaudeville. Many lamented the short run of RED NOSES. The Royal Shakespeare Company had the courage to put it in its main house but sadly it disappeared after just 5 previews and 18 performances. Antony Sher starred as a rebel monk who gives people red clown's noses to cheer them up. Sher also starred as a female impersonator in the Broadway import TORCH SONG TRILOGY. Few artists excited London in 1985 more than Antony Sher who won the Olivier as Best Actor of the Year for TORCH SONG and for playing RICHARD III at the Barbican. In his acceptance speech, Sher cracked that he was honored for playing a king and a queen in the same season. TORCH SONG ran on the West End from October 1985 to May 1986. Antony Sher left on March 31 to rejoin the RSC for an Australian tour of RICHARD III and was replaced by author Harvey Fierstein himself. The hit of Stratford-upon-Avon's season was LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES which was hailed as great and exhilarating theatre and perhaps 1985's only evening of total perfection. Christopher Hampton's dramatization of the 18th century novel of sexual cruelty was stylish, thoroughly dramatic and brilliantly acted. The tremendously exciting stars were the glitteringly dangerous Lindsay Duncan and the heavy-lidded, drawling Alan Rickman whose lascivious sophisticate had depth as well as flamboyance. LIAISONS transferred to London the next year where it ran for four years and Duncan won the Olivier Award for Best Actress. Alan Ayckbourn's painfully funny and sad A CHORUS OF DISAPPROVAL won the Olivier Award for Best Comedy of the Year. It is about a young widower who joins an amateur operatic society and becomes romantically involved with female members of the cast. Michael Gambon won the Olivier for Best Comedy Performance of the Year as the fraught producer wishing his cast were professionals so he could sack them. INTERPRETERS, by Ronald Harwood, had Maggie Smith and Edward Fox playing the British and Russian interpreters planning a visit to England by the Russian president. They argued about whether wine or vodka should be served at an official banquet. The summit meeting becomes background for a romance between the interpreters. One scene had Smith playing footsie with Fox under the table only to be astonished to see him get up and calmly cross the room while his boss's temperature rose in alarm. "It is left to Maggie Smith alone to rescue a remarkably shaky evening" complained one critic. Similarly, critics felt Bernard Pomerance's new play MELONS rarely came to life but Ben Kingsley was wholly remarkable as an aged Apache chief. Kingsley applied the same superb technique and grandeur he brought to a different kind of Indian, Gandhi. Alan Bleasdale's play with songs, ARE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT was a sympathetic look at the rocker's traumatic last years. Although it was more of a play with songs, it won the Evening Standard Award as Best Musical of 1985 over LES MISERABLES. Martin Shaw was highly acclaimed as the older bloated Elvis. Yvonne Bryceland won the Olivier for Best Actress in Athol Fugard's South African drama THE ROAD TO MECCA and Wallace Shawn's AUNT DAN AND LEMON had its world premiere at the Royal Court Theatre. The play examines the relationship between a charismatic woman and a sickly woman and starred Linda Hunt. The reviews were mixed but one critic noted that there was "no denying the intelligence and courage that the playwright brings to his subject." AUNT DAN was part of Joe Papp's cultural exchange and exported to Off-Broadway's Public Theater after the Royal Court run. London saw David Mamet's EDMOND about a married man who leaves his wife and plummets into a nightmare world of sex and violence. Some critics found the 75-minute one-act play undramatic and all style no soul. A two-character play of Manuel Puig's KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN starred Simon Callow as Molina and a 25-year-old Mark Rylance as Valentin. The critics called it immensely powerful and touching ...one of the highlights of the year. Janet McTeer was highly praised for her London theatrical debut in Timberlake Wertenbaker's THE GRACE OF MARY TRAVERSE, a deeply feminist story about a woman in 1780 escaping the claustrophobia of her family home. YONADAB, Peter Shaffer's tale of rape, incest and revenge at the Old Testament court of King David, was one of the year's disappointments...you go to the National Theatre expecting a high standard and you are slightly amazed when something like YONADAB slips through the net. Many complained that the play took three hours to tell a story the Book of Samuel wisely reduced to a few paragraphs. Alan Bates was at his most mannered as Yonadab, the nephew of King David and one critic thought Patrick Stewart would doubtless be a fine King David "if Mr. Shaffer had written the part in any coherent detail."

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