Looking Back: the London Theatre Season of 1985
Looking Back: the London Theatre Season of 1985
BwayMagic@aol.com
Chorus Member Joined: 9/4/04
#1Looking Back: the London Theatre Season of 1985
Posted: 8/7/14 at 10:05pm
Tonight 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.
BwayMagic@aol.com
Chorus Member Joined: 9/4/04
#2New Plays of 1985
Posted: 8/7/14 at 10:12pm
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."
BwayMagic@aol.com
Chorus Member Joined: 9/4/04
#2The Musicals of 1985
Posted: 8/7/14 at 10:18pm
1985 saw some musicals open on London's West End:
LES MISERABLES divided the critics. One review stated, "Frankly, LES
MIZ is a disappointment...the music is neither strong nor varied enough
to sustain three hours...classic novel reduced to a comic strip...stands in relation to the original as a singing telegram to an epic." But some critics found the show an enthralling spectacle filled with good tunes. Sheridan Morley raved, "Not since Sondheim's SWEENEY TODD has there been a score which soared out from the pit with such blazing theatricality. LES MISERABLES is everything the musical theatre ought to be doing...a brilliantly guided tour of Victor Hugo's novel and indeed there is no way that in three orchestral hours we can ask for more than that."
Michael Coveney called Colm Wilkinson's lyrical high tenor version of
the Verdian "Bring Him Home" one of the year's highlights. Wilkinson as
Jean Valjean and Frances Ruffelle as Eponine would repeat their roles
on Broadway in 1987. Patti Lupone won the Olivier Award for Best
Actress in a Musical as the original Fantine as well as her performance
in a revival of THE CRADLE WILL ROCK at the Old Vic. LES MIZ was
nicknamed the Glums and has been an undeniable hit with
audiences and been running in London ever since its debut in 1985.
FIGARO
was a new adaptation of Mozart's opera which updated the story to the
1960's and put the libretto into colloquial English. There was sharp division over the rightness of giving Mozart this cut-down, brushed-up treatment and the small-scale musical only ran three months. "If you are going to play around with Mozart, it helps to be Peter Shaffer," warned one reviewer.
GIGI was one the year's disappointments. The Lerner and Lowe musical
was first a 1958 Academy Award-winning movie and turned into an unsuccessful Broadway musical in 1973. The West End production starred Jean-Pierre Aumont, Beryl Reid and Sian Phillips as the aristocratic Aunt and was criticized for John Dexter's slow and unimaginative staging. One critic said, "great film though it may be, GIGI just doesn't cut the mustard
onstage...what it desperately misses is atmosphere and style." Without
style, GIGI was lost because it has little plot.
Most of the cast seemed decidedly uncomfortable which wasn't surprising
considering none of them could sing. Apparently it wasn't the night
they invented champagne and the revised and scaled-down GIGI ran at the
intimate Lyric Theatre from September 1985 to April 1986.
KERN GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
was a revue of Jerome Kern's film songs starring the 81-year-old
Elisabeth Welsh and Liz Robertson. It came to Broadway a year later.
1985 also had some revivals of musicals such as the joyous return of the 1937 musical ME AND MY GIRL which won the Olivier Award for Best Musical of the Year. (The only other nominee was LES MISERABLES.) Robert Lindsay won the Olivier as Best Actor in a Musical and was hailed as the new Michael Crawford. The critics felt that ME AND MY GIRL seemed guaranteed to set Lindsay firmly on the road to stardom. One critic enthused, "He gives as ingenious a performance as I've witnessed in a musical. He dazzles and charms and avoids sentimentality." Lindsay's co-star was 25-year-old Emma Thompson. The Lambeth Walk musical was called the happiest show in town and it ran from February 1985 to January 1993.
GUYS & DOLLS
arrived at the Prince of Wales Theatre after a long tour and apparently
bore little relation to the landmark 1982 National Theatre revival. Critics were unhappy with the "terrible touring tackiness to it."
THE CRADLE WILL ROCK
was revived at the Old Vic with John Houseman as the director. Critics
found the show dated and felt that the musical's history was more
thrilling than the show itself.
BwayMagic@aol.com
Chorus Member Joined: 9/4/04
#3MUTINY!
Posted: 8/7/14 at 10:23pm
MUTINY!
David Essex, Che in the original London production of EVITA with Elaine
Paige in 1978, starred and wrote the music for this musical of MUTINY
ON THE BOUNTY. Critics could only praise the magnificent sets which featured a four and a half ton, 30-foot sailing ship that "spins, rises, tilts, turns, floats and sways all the while revolving to reveal below-deck cabins, high masts, vast areas of deck space and rigging. Seldom has London had a stage set that was so consistently intriguing and exciting to watch. And it is a pity that the rest of the show should prove something of an anti-climax."
The problem with any version of MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY is the vast sprawl of the storyline. We are not here dealing with one simple voyage or one single act of rebellion: the tale spreads across decades encompassing
England and Tahiti and involves generations of sailors. It was so hard
to cram all that plot into a three hour show with 28 songs that there were times when the musical's storyline resembled a skeletal synopsis for a school's documentary.
One review grumbled, "A good deal of Essex's songs sound remarkably alike. The songs are of the kind that might make you wish they'd get on with the story, except the story is so glum you wish they'd bring on the
songs, except the songs...." Another critic said, "The set had us
gasping and so did the songs but for different reasons." Despite the almost unanimously bad notices, MUTINY! was able to run from July 1985 to September 1986. Does anyone remember MUTINY! at the Piccadilly Theatre?
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