EMPIRE OF THE STAGE

From London's footlights, the monarchs of British theater rule the cultural seas. Broadway and Hollywood bow before their talents; JOHN HEILPERN explores their method and their madness

SIR JOHN GIELGUD

Actor, director, producer, writer. Aged 91; 66ploys (fire King Leary); 60films (Arthur); 35 television roles; Id major-awards. Knighted in 1953.

Photographed July II, 1995, in his garden.

Famous for his gaffes, or "Gielgoofs": Actor Clive Morton once knocked on his dressing-room door after weeks of being ignored when they appeared together in a play. "Thank God it's you," said Gielgud as Morton put his head round the door, tSr "For one dreadful moment I thought it iV&s going to be that ghastly old bore Cfive Morton'

The rector of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, London, his pink, kind face almost unlined though he's 80, peered at me hopefully. "Excuse me," he asked, "are you Alan Bates?"

Now, what was doubly sweet about this is that I'm afraid I look nothing like Alan Bates. I wish. "Oh dear," the stagestruck Reverend Gordon Taylor sighed. "I was longing to meet him."

The rehearsal for the memorial service of John Osborne, which would take place the next day, was under way. Osborne, glorious voice of protest and un-English passion, had revolutionized British theater in 1956 with his Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre. (Alan Bates was in the original production.) "I have been blessed with God's two greatest gifts—to be born English and heterosexual," the famous dramatist declared in outrageous mischief. He aimed his Swiftian fusillades, John Mortimer wrote admiringly in The New York Times, at "all those who would turn the world gray in the name of political correctness." And now we had come to celebrate his turbulent, memorable life in the little church that was founded in the 12th century.

HELEN MIRREN

Actress. Twenty-seven plays (Antony and Cleopatra, A Month in the Country); 23 films fExcalibur, The Madness of King George); 27 television roles fPrime Suspect); three major awards.

Photographed July 7, 1995, in a studio dressing room.

Coming up in: Prime Suspect IV and the film Some Mother's Son.

At the memorial rehearsal, the rector was the director. Peter Brook, arguably the greatest theater director that England has produced, once defined the mysterious art of directing as "getting people onand offstage." The rector of St. Giles-in-the-Fields understood this in his bones. "You need to be out of your pew before the Elgar music has stopped. Otherwise it doesn't flow," he was saying to Dame Maggie Smith. "Then it's back to your pew for the hymn."

She nodded respectfully. She would be reading "Mr. Valiant-for-Truth" from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. A born worrier, she makes you laugh on sight. She can fill any theater on either side of the Atlantic. She's a peculiarly English mix of the suburban and the glamorous.

Dirk Bogarde, another of Osborne's friends, was at the rehearsal, looking dapper. He would be reading a moving passage from Holy Dying, by Jeremy Taylor. "Oooh," said Maggie Smith when Sir Dirk told her that she could park her car in the churchyard. "I don't think I want to park there yet."

Not everyone at the rehearsal was a knight or a dame. They'll just have to wait their turn. Michael Ball, the young star of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's Aspects of Love, strolled into the church. He would be singing "If You Were the Only Girl in the World," for Osborne loved the romance and sentiment of the Edwardian music hall. There seemed no urgency. Flippancy under pressure—very British. And no one troubled to rehearse his piece— actorly one-upmanship that grew collective.

David Hare, one of the foremost playwrights in England, would give the address. "Of course," said Bogarde, "you'll have to give the address from the pulpit." "I'm too terrified," Hare replied, and looked it. "Oh, I couldn't. I would have to be ordained." "Frightful coward," said Bogarde.

"Is it getting ugly?" Helen Osborne asked, giggling. She was John's fifth wife. It was a happy, 17-year marriage. She used to be a drama critic.

Trumpeters from the English Chamber Orchestra could be heard rehearsing in the church balcony. "Good luck!" they wished one another. "Good luck tomorrow."

I had gone to London—"This earth, this realm, this England, " as the United Airlines commercial goes—to celebrate British theater itself. England may soldier on stoically, but its theater still rules the Englishspeaking world like the last colonial outpost of an Anglophile empire. Few would deny, at least, that the American War of Independence has been lost on that oldest established, permanent floating crap game in New York known as Broadway. How come "little" England still rules the waves—but only in theater? Who are they? Come to think of it, how dare they?

Shakespeare, like God, is an Englishman. Therefore, the English believe, all theater began in England. They tend to overlook the Greeks. But classical Greek dramatists didn't write in English. The historical continuity of England's theater tradition accounts for the national pride (and prejudice). "We have been doing it longer than anyone else," I was often told. Too often! But, after all, Shakespeare has been continuously performed in England for 300 years.

Prestigious British imports dominate the long since Lloyd Webberized Broadway. Look at just a few facts from the contemporary scene:

There were 141 productions in the West End last season. There were 52 on Broadway—and a quarter of those were British. Those massive nonprofit theater corporations and power bases the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company between them produced 53 plays. There were a mere 8 new plays on Broadway last season; the Royal Court Theatre (George Bernard Shaw's old theater) alone premiered 19 plays, and has more than 30 new dramatists under commission. The nonprofit theaters of England are the formidable tributaries to the commercial West End and Broadway. Four recent transfers to Broadway were from the National Theatre—Arcadia, Carousel, Les Parents Terribles (renamed Indiscretions), and An Inspector Calls. Two more were via the tiny Almeida in North London—Medea, starring Diana Rigg, and Hamlet, starring Ralph Fiennes. Each star walked off in successive years with a Tony Award, for best actress and best actor.

The common language that unites and divides us, the ambivalent sentimental ties that bind us, make for the complex "special relationship" between America and Britain. We're like a split personality of cultural opposites. In acting terms and style, you could list some of the differing aspects of our national identities in parallel columns as the late Kenneth Tynan listed the qualities of Laurence Olivier (Burgundy wine) versus those of John Gielgud (claret):

U.K.

Theater

Olivier Shakespeare

Lyricism Tea

Rhetoric

Anthony Hopkins Jeremy Irons Emma Thompson Lloyd Webber

U.S.A.

Film

Brando

Method Psychology Emotion Dustin Hoffman John Malkovich Meryl Streep Lloyd Webber

The differences blur—no young British stage actor in his right mind isn't influenced by the film naturalism and awesome Method of, say, Pacino—but the division is in the heritage. England is built on a theater culture; America, though it has its great theater, is a film culture. "Theater is our primary way of self-definition, like movies in America," said Stephen Daldry, the punk theater evangelist who runs "the chorus of dissent" at the Royal Court Theatre. Daldry's Hitchcockian production of J. B. Priestley's 1946 warhorse, An Inspector Calls, won him a Tony Award on Broadway. "But every time I went through customs, I was stopped," he told me amusedly. "I'd tell them I worked in theater. They'd search my bags as if I were involved in some illicit pornographic activity. I've given up now. I say I work in movies. No problem! 'Welcome to the U.S.A.! Good luck!'"

There is no real British film industry, least of all in the Hollywood sense. The biggest annual film budget in Britain would scarcely make a single Hollywood movie. TV's Channel 4's 1995 budget of £16 million helps to finance 18 small films: among its past productions are Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Crying Game, Howards End, and The Madness of King George. The successful producer behind them, David Aukin, worked in theater for 20 years and was the National Theatre's executive director. Sooner or later in Britain, everything comes back to theater.

JOJMATHAN PRYCE

Actor, singer. In finin' spokesperson. Fourteen ploys (Miss Saigon, Oliver!); 25 films (Brazifi; Jive major awards.

Photographed June 15, 1995, in a 1967 Mercedes SL250 outside the Ivy restaurant in London's West End.

Won best actor at Cannes

for his performance as Lytton Strachev opposite Emma Thompson in Carrington, to be released next month.

There were 141 productions in the West End last season. There were 52 on Broadway-and a quarter of those were British.

JEREMY IRONS

Actor, gentleman, motorcyclist.

Sixteen plays (The Real Thing>; !9films (The French Lieutenant's Woman, Reversal of Fortune,;,• more than 10 television roles (Brideshead Revisited^,* two major a wards.

Photographed July 18, 1995, outside Snowdon's Kensington studio with a 1964 Triumph 500 belonging to Snowdon's son, David Linley.

Married to actress Sinead Cusack (his co-star in the 1992 film Waterland); two sons.

Forthcoming roles:

a dying playwright in Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty; Humbert Humbert in Adrian Lvne's Lolita.

The British are stage actors first, and last.

"The American way," Aukin pointed out, "is to say, 'Why on earth would you want to do theater when you can be a movie star?' But here, theater is the actor's credibility and calling card. It tells the film world, 'We're not totally beholden to you.' It marks them out as different and special, because Johnny Depp couldn't do that."

The British are stage actors first, and last. (Not like Johnny Depp.) Olivier virtually abandoned his Hollywood career to spend a decade founding the National Theatre. A succeeding generation of leading stage actresses—Vanessa Redgrave, Maggie Smith, Glenda Jackson—won five Academy Awards among them. And today the roots and heart of almost every British actor who has made it in Hollywood are in the theater—from Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson ("Ken and Em," as they're known in England, cozily curdling the creme de la creme) to Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons, Miranda Richardson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gary Oldman, Ralph Fiennes, et al.

When the British stage actor looks in the mirror, he is likely to see a character actor; his American counterpart sees a hero, or antihero (or the next Tom Hanks). At center the British are great character actors— transferring with effortless superiority from stage to screen. In addition to the native Room with a View genre, they have a useful sideline supplying Hollywood with, for example, its school of beguilingly charming, sometimes camp villains: Anthony Hopkins's cannibalistic Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs and his Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone's forthcoming movie; Alan Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and terrorist-aesthete in Die Hard; Jeremy Irons's pseudo-cultivated alleged wife murderer Claus von Biilow, his treacherously languid Scar in The Lion King, and his own terrorist-aesthete in Die Hard with a Vengeance. They earn these born stage actors an honest mil or three.

SIR PETER USTI NOV

Actor, broadcaster, playwright, producer, director, set designer, costume designer, raconteur. Twenty-three plays (Romanoff and Juliet);

42 films (Topkapi, Billy Budd); more than 28 television roles; six major awards. Knighted in 1990.

Photographed July 3,1995, in an 18th-century Bath chair outside the Theatre Royal Bath.

The reserved and witty British need their theater like oxygen—or a fix—to loosen up, to understand who they really are behind the masks. I went to meet Michael Gambon, in his 50s perhaps the finest actor in England, though virtually unknown in America (he was last seen here on PBS in the dark, brilliant mini-series The Singing Detective)—a. dangerous actor, "the Great Gambon," as Sir Ralph Richardson dubbed him. Albert Finney calls acting "farting about in makeup"; Gambon calls it "shouting in the evenings." He was taking a break from rehearsing his Volpone at the National, looking like a tall, podgy Everyman and smoking like a chimney. I asked him why theater is so essential here.

"I suppose it's because we're so fucked up, really," he replied. "We're a complex people, putting on disguises and fronts, sidestepping. It's just my instinctive response. But that's why we have a real need for theater."

Or as Declan Donnellan, co-director of the internationally known Cheek by Jowl company (whose The Duchess of Malfi comes to New York this fall), put it, "Sex, murder, betrayal, politics, poison, kings, damnation, and salvation—all the things we really love! A good night out!"

The English also love pomp and circumstance. They own the copyright. It was Alan Bennett, an unapologetic monarchist, who nevertheless showed how the royals are really actors. "Wave! Smile at the people!" the king commands his wayward family in Bennett's The Madness of King George, the film version of his original play. "Let them see that we're happy! That is why we're here!"

FIONA SHAW

Actress. Twenty-one plays; nine films ("Three Men and a Little Lady/' eight television roles; three major awards.

Photographed July 6, 1995, at the National Theatre in costume for her sensational Richard II, which she has been starring in since June.

"Being called the next V anessa Redgrave drives me bananas."

I met Alan Bennett for tea amid the faux-Versailles splendor of the Palm Court in the Ritz Hotel in London. Bennett is one of England's national treasures—along with, of course, the Queen Mother. He is nicely idiosyncratic, wry, unpretentious, and among the funniest writers in England. He was recognized almost immediately. A representative of the National Summer Fruits Association wanted him to join its annual strawberry tea party in the adjoining room. "Oh, no. I couldn't, I couldn't," he apologized, turning pink. "Thank you very much, though."

It was as if we were in one of his plays. What does he appreciate more than anything? "Silliness," he replied, and began to laugh. "It's the saving grace. That's why Mrs. Thatcher is so un-English. There's not an ounce of silliness in her. Americans have got much more gravity. They get things done more than we do. But they aren't silly. It's not to be confused with foolishness. But I couldn't live without a silly streak."

It was silly, really: even the Osborne memorial made scandalous frontpage news. Unknown to the rectornaughty!—a notice by the church steps had barred entrance to four public figures. "The undermentioned will NOT be admitted," the notice read, like a Lutheran pronouncement. The banned were listed as "Fu Manchu," Osborne's nickname for Sir Peter Hall, the former director of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre; "The Bard of Hay on Wye," who is playwright Arnold Wesker (who lives in Hay on Wye); Albert Finney, with whom Osborne had feuded over royalties for the movie Tom Jones, which he scripted; and Nicholas de Jongh, an extremely self-important drama critic.

The fuss! "As to the note on the door excluding four people," Lord Gowrie, chairman of the Arts Council (the equivalent of the National Endowment for the Arts, without the death warrant), wrote in the letters pages of The Times in reply to those who found the incident un-Christian, "who says the Almighty has no sense of humor?"

VANESSA REDGRAVE

Actress, former card-carrying member of the

Workers Revolutionary Party, special representative for UNI CLP. Sixty-one plays ("Vita and Virginia/; 40 films ( Howards End/* 13 television roles ("Playing for Time/* eight ma jor a wards. Photographed July 6, 1995, at Eton College, near Windsor/by the river Thames op the set of The Wind in tittM illows. Defining role: defender of Yas§e$krafat. nrthcnming nregtas eo-starring with Torn Cruise in Missiop: Impossible; will star with her brother, Corin, in Antony and Cleopatra, whieh will come to the U.S. this February.

The'best of English life is a play, a show, a pageant even before God.

The traditional Shakespearean voice can stop ships at sea.

ALAN AND BENEDICK BATES

Actors, father and son. Alan: 27 plays (Look Back in Anger; the upcoming Master Builder. directed by Peter Hall): 41 films (An Unmarried Woman!; more than 50 television roles. Jour major aw ards.

Benedick: nine plays: one Jilin.

Photographed June 7. 1995.

Founded Tristan Bates Theatre in London in memory of Benedick's twin brother.

Sign in Hyde Park: "Please refrain from any leisure activity on this site until new grass has established itself."

Sign in theater lobby: "Due to the indisposition of Miss Stacy Francis the role of Doris Winter will be played by Miss Priscilla-Mae Jones."

Music-hall expression: "Don't clap too hard—it's a very old building."

The verbal felicities—"Please refrain from," "Due to the indisposition of'— keep up appearances the British way, the old-fashioned way, like West End theater managers in evening dress. The theaters are old.

The West End theater district began in the 17th century on the site of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (now home to the Cameron Mackintosh production of Miss Saigon). West End theaters are basically Victorian, unless they're Edwardian. Anything later is considered new. The air-conditioning within them could melt an iceberg, but never mind. It's for show. The Python-esque culture clash comes with the different approaches to waiting on line. In the lobbies of New York theaters, there's a sense of tumult and rush to get the tickets that only adds to the pre-show excitement. The English wait on line, silent, uncomplaining, obedient—even when another box office which is open for business has no line. They join the line. They love the line. "Ladies and gentlemen," goes the polite announcement, "this evening's performance will begin in two minutes." We are waiting on line. "So that will be two tickets for Saturday night, will it, dear?" the box-office lady is saying. "Let me have a look-see. I think you'll do better Wednesday matinee ..."

"Ladies and gentlemen, the curtain is about to rise. The curtain is about to rise." No rush. We'll all get there in the end. But one night broke the line—it seemed reasonable at the time—going to a queueless box office. "You can't do that! There's a queue," protested an indignant gentleman waiting on line.

We in America see the best of British theater. During my monthlong visit to London so pleasant, I saw 15 productions, for which I shall be receiving an honorary knighthood shortly. The reality of the West End is rather like a pupu platter—unlike Broadway, there's a little bit of everything for everyone. Some of the marquees might convince you that time stopped in London circa 1949. One half expects to see Shaftesbury Avenue shrouded in fog. There's the revival (or re-evaluation) of the shabby gentility and class-ridden British reticence of the Terence Rattigan oeuvre that Osborne and the new playwrights of social realism were thought to have swept away. There's the ritual fare, such as Don't Dress for Dinner, the jolly farce about double adultery and gourmet cooking; the Murder, She Wrote thriller genre; and the trusty old Mousetrap, now in its 43rd glorious year. The oldest theater joke actually happened to me. As the cabdriver dropped me outside the St. Martin's theater to see The Mousetrap, he called after me cheerfully, "Enjoy the show, guv! The butler done it!" I'm not saying the butler done it, but that's what the cabdriver said.

MAGGIE SMITH AND SONS

Dame Maggie Smith and her sons, Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, whose father is Sir Robert Stephens.

Actors. Smith: more than 50 plays (Three Tall Women);30 films (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, A Room with a View);16 television roles;

13 major awards. Made a dame in 1989. Stephens: eight plays

(AMidsummer Night's Dream, Coriolanus); one film; two television roles.

Larkin: five plays; two films; two television roles.

Photographed June 20, 1995.

As always, appearances are deceptive. If there's more pabulum in the West End than on Broadway, there's also more choice. Among many new and classic dramas to see were Tom Stoppard's memory play of the empire, Indian Ink; young Patrick Marber's poker-playing morality play, Dealer's Choice; Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge; Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars; John Webster's Jacobean favorite, The Duchess of Malfi; and Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides, his conscience drama of the life of the Berlin Philharmonic's genius conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, directed by Harold Pinter.

There's the Andrew Lloyd Webber empire and the Cameron Mackintosh empire—and there's the rest. Mackintosh's personal fortune is estimated at half a billion dollars. The global earnings of Lloyd Webber's production company, the Really Useful Group, now approach $3 billion.

Lloyd Webber holds court at his 4,000-plus-acre (Continued from page 199) Hampshire estate, Sydmonton Court, with its private chapel (where his mega-musicals are previewed before a select audience). Andrew Lloyds Bank, as he's known, irritates some. "Easy come, easy go," Paul Johnson wrote in The Spectator when Lloyd Webber paid $29 million for Picasso's portrait Angel Fernandez de Soto. The British tradition known as the Tall Poppy Syndrome likes to cut uppity success down to size. "At least you know where you are, " explained Kenneth Branagh, who is judged as being too ambitious, not a gentlemanly thing—too pushy, in a sense too American.

Continued on page 207

THE HIGHBROWS

Adrian Noble, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (2! productions for 1995-96 season); Richard Eyre, director of the Royal National Theatre (23 productions in 1995).

Photographed June 12, 1995, in the paint room of the National Theatre in front of the backdrop for La Grande Magi a.

The global gaxglings of Andrew Lloyd Webber's producation company now approach $3 billion.

THE MIDDLEBROWS

The People Who Brought You Cats (and, in ,arious pLttm'r.slups and co/lahoratumN, Jesus Christ Superstar. Eita, I.cs Misérabks, The Phantom of the Opera. Miss Saigon. Starlight Express. and Sunset Boulevard). Left to rig/it: producer Canieron iliackintosk. clwreographer Gil/ia, Lynise, composer Sir lndrt'is' Jo,d Webbti director Trevor Ni aiu(prdisiiou desigiier John Napirr.

Photographed June 22, I99~ at the ew London Theatre.

SIR ALEC GUINN ESS

Actor, master of disguise. Aged 81;

66plays (John Mortimer's A Voyage Round My Father,); 48 films (Kind Hearts and Coronets, Star Wars,); eight television roles (Smiley's People,); one memoir; 10 major awards. Knighted in 1959.

"There are three ways, I suggest, for a determined actor to deal with critics. The first, most sensational, slightly dangerous but highly successful if carried out with sincerity, is to hit them."

PAUL SCOFI ELD

Actor. Aged 73; 76plays (including the acclaimed 1962 Peter Brook production of King Lear,); 17 fdms (iCing Lear, Quiz Show,);

seven major awards, including an Oscar for A Man for All Seasons. Only British actor to turn down a knighthood.

Currently shooting The Crucible, in which he plays Governor Danforth opposite Daniel Day-Lewis.

SIR DEREK JACOBI

Actor, artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre. More than 22plays; 16films; 15 television roles; four major awards. Knighted in 1993.

Photographed July 24,1995, in the cloisters of Chichester Cathedral in costume for Hadrian VII.

'Stage fright' is too mild a word for it; it is absolute stark terror."

SIR IAN MCKELLEN

Actor. One hundred two plays; 16 films; 28 television roles; eight major awards. Knighted in 1991.

Photographed August 17, 1995, at Syon House with a statue of Bacchus.

Coming soon to a multiplex near you: Restoration, Jack & Sarah, Richard III.

"I've no fear of standing up in front of 3,000 people and showing off and taking my clothes off. . . . But could I tell anyone I was gay? No."

SIR ANTHONY HOPKINS

Actor, director, reformed wild man, self-described "Amerophile. " Twenty-five plays (TravdaJ; 32 films (The Silence of the Lambs, The Remains of the DayJ; 40 television roles; seven major awards. Knighted in 1993.

Photographed at the Richmond Theatre in London.

For his National Theatre audition, he performed a scene from Othello for Olivier, who said, "You've got a bloody nerve."

Catch him in: the title role of Nixon, opening next month, and as Picasso in Merchant Ivory's Surviving Picasso.

BEN KINGSLEY

Actor. Bom Krishna Blianji in North Yorkshire.

Thirty-seven plays; 20 films; 28 television roles; four major awards, including one Oscar, for his portrayal of Gandhi, 1982.

Photographed June 12, 1995.

In 1963, at age 19, he was so awed by Ian Holm's Richard III that he actually passed out.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM"

Fairies s,,rroiu,d Tita,ia am! flonon: (plated hr .Stella Gosiet iiiid l)e s nioml Bassit). I lex Jeiss, as Oheron, is in ise oress4,si:d. Photographed IaS3. 1995. on the stage of the Barbican Itteatre in Iondon. s here it has been running since April 25. Ike Royal Shakespeare (ompan production. directed h drian obk, with sets b ;nthon ard. ss ill tour this .1anuar. arid opens at the ederlander Iheatre on Broadssa in Iarch.

At center the British are great character actors.

Continued from page 199

RADA CLASS OF '85

Actors and Royal Academy of Dramatic A rt graduates Jane Horrocks (The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, directed by her former beau Sam Mendes; TV, Absolutely Fabulous,); Iain Glen (Macbeth;7, Silent Scream; married to actress Susannah Harker); and Imogen Stubbs (Othello\film, Jack & Sarah; married to director Trevor Nunn). Not pictured: classmate Ralph Fiennes.

Photographed July 12, 1995.

"There's this thing that teachers at RADA and directors

always say to you. `Be yourself, darling.' And I want to say: look, the whole reason I'm here is so I don't have to be me for a while." -Imogen Stubbs

The egos were always big; it's the theater world that got small. As the world turns and spins, cats and phantoms and trains and helicopters and miserable French people are circling the globe, now and wherever. And it all began there, in the land of Shakespeare. Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, in partnership, then separately, beat America at its own game. They invented a new popular culture as powerfully pervasive in its way as Disney—the global musical.

Broadway traditionalists may not care for Lloyd Webber, but he seized the lightning at a time when Broadway was declining into remembered dreams, backstage stories, and uncommercial Sondheimian disenchantment. Look at his early choices: Jesus (Jesus Christ Superstar), the wife of an Argentinean dictator (Evita), cats (and T. S. Eliot's cats, at that).

"People hated even the name Cats," Cameron Mackintosh, its producer, pointed out. "Everyone turned it down. I was probably the last person Lloyd Webber played it to." (Mackintosh boldly chose a director who had never staged a major musical beforeTrevor Nunn, then the boss of the Royal Shakespeare Company.) "Global hits didn't exist at that time. Nobody thought about it, including me. I promise you."

But he saw the opportunity. And when the aging ruling elites of Broadway woke up, it was too late. Mackintosh, the young British impresario, hyped, marketed, and merchandised his musicals in ways that had never been seen before. Cats invented the universal musical logo—a neutral symbol, a semiotic sign, a figure dancing in the eyes of a cat, like the mask (Phantom), the waif (Les Miz), the helicopter (Miss Saigon). The logos transcend language barriers; they're instantly recognized everywhere; they go very nicely on souvenir T-shirts and mugs. When was there ever a Cameron Mackintosh (or a Lloyd Webber) musical that didn't have the biggest advance ticket sale in history? It's a spectacle! It's a special effect! It's an event! Barnum Mackintosh created Event Theater.

Yet, to meet him is to be surprised. His headquarters in North London is an 18th-century house. He comes into town two days a week from his Somerset home, a restored 12thcentury priory. One has the impression he has always been a happy man. Ruling the musical world is a bonus. (Fifty-one Mackintosh productions are currently playing round the world.) He's a likable man, now 49, unflamboyant, uncomplicated, clear. He possesses the more traditionally American enthusiasm and buoyancy—the vivid, confident belief in what he does—that were the territory of Broadway. "I'm no good at all at coming up with an original idea. I can recognize it. That's my talent. Anyone who thinks they know what the public wants is an idiot. I'm still surprised and delighted the public likes what I like. I produce absolutely for myself."

Although the global musical was born in England, it has taken on the force of a multinational superpower. The unique identity of English theater resides in its celebrated tradition of great classical acting.

"In England, acting is a heritage passed on through the ages," noted a 1991 New Yorker profile of Michael Gambon. "From Burbage to Garrick, from Garrick to Kean and Macready, from them to Irving, and on to Olivier, Gielgud, and Richardson—and Gambon and McKellen. As is also true of great clowns, actors learn and borrow from their predecessors, who borrowed from those who came before them."

As befits a king, Laurence Olivier's ashes lie close to where King Henry V is buried in Westminster Abbey. He knew him well. Olivier's plaque is found on the stone floor of Poets' Corner—as popular a tourist attraction as Hollywood Boulevard-placed alongside the plaques of two other great actors: David Garrick, from the 18th century, and Henry Irving, from the 19th. They face the statue of Shakespeare, national playwright.

Continued on page 213

TOM STOPPARD

Play wrihf * screen writer, former Thutcherite. Twenty-Jive plays fRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Travesties, The Real I'hiiij*. Arcadia^; eight screenplays; nine teleplays; nine radio plays; one novel; II major awards.

Photographed July 13, 1995. in the library of the United Oxford and Cambridge University Club in London.

Born Thomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937: moved to Kngland at age eight; currently seeing favorite leading lady Felicity Kendal; four sons.

"I like lorn Stoppard enormously.... Not everyujae who votes Conservative in Kngland is representative of an Evil Kmpir -Harold Pinter

HAROLD_PINTIR

P1UE J$TUl 1, Iictor, Iirc'ctor, agitutoJ Ts'ent,'-eiAltpIa)'s (The Birthday Party. The Homecoming. Betray at): 18 screenplays; tiro teleplars:foiir maor a u'ards.

Photographed July 19. 1995, during j rehearsals for a resival of The Hothouse.

larried Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980; one son. Suffered from svriters block from 1978 to 1993.

Latest project: iIoonl:gzr, opening at the Roundabout Theatre in New York this month.

"There's something about Harold that makes me look under my navel to see if it says IDE IN IsJN." -Tom Stoppard

STEPHEN REA

Actor. Forty-six plays (Someone Who'll Watch over Me,); 16films (The Crying Game,); 26 television roles.

Photographed August 13,1995.

Forthcoming films: All Men Are Mortal, The Last of the High Kings, A Further Gesture, and Neil Jordan's latest, Michael Collins.

"To me, theater and film are like hurling and football—different sports, but both equally great."

JUDE LAW

Actor, wild child. Aged 22; nine plays; three films (Shopping,); two television roles.

Photographed June 25, 1995, in New York City.

His nude scene in Indiscretions caused an increase in usaee of onera classes on Rroadwav

ALAN RICKMAN

Actor, director, scenery eater, Labour Party fund-raiser. Twenty-seven plays (Les Liaisons DangereusesJ; 11 films (Die Hard, Robin Hood: Prince Thieves,); nine television roles; two major awards.

Photographed August 3,1995, at the Albert Memorial, wearing a clan-Macdonald kilt in honor of the Sharman Macdonald play The Winter Guest, which he recently directed at the Almeida Theatre in London.

Forthcoming films: Sense and Sensibility, Michael Collins.

PATRICK STEWART

Actor, Trekkie idol. One hundredfour plays (including The Tempest on Broadway this fall); 20 films; 52 television roles; three major awards.

Photographed August 7,1995, at Heathrow Airport.

Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant. . . —Prospero, The Tempest, Epilogue.

Make it so. —Captain Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation.

RICHARD E. GRANT

Actor, diarist, no relation to Hugh. Four plays ("The Importance of Being Earnest,); 12films fWithnail and I);four television roles.

Photographed August 8,1995, in Snowdon's hall.

Born and raised in Mbabane, Swaziland; married to voice coach Joan Washington; one daughter. Nonsmoker, nondrinker, non-caffeine imbiber, non-meat

eater; loves shoes.

His Four Weddings: Jack & Sarah, opening February 2,1996.

The reserved and witty British need their theater like oxygen.

JOHN HURT

Actor, voice-over master. Twenty-three plays;

58 films ('The Elephant Man. Scandal,)/ 30 television roles; five major awards.

Photographed

June 30, 1995, as a traditional pantomime Dame.

Soon to appear in: the film Wild Bill, opening in December.

Continued from page 207

Olivier (the son of a priest) continued the sanctified theatrical cycle when his astonishing, regal memorial service took place in Westminster Abbey in 1989, attended by 2,000 and rivaling the Battle of Agincourt in patriotic fervor. It was quite a production. The Abbey echoed to Sir William Walton's theme music for Olivier's film versions of Henry V and Hamlet. Paul Scofield, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Maggie Smith, Dorothy Tutin, "and also starring" walked in stately procession to the altar, carrying what The Times of London described as "Olivier's treasury": his insignia of the Order of Merit; a model of the National Theatre and another of the Chichester Theatre, both of which he founded; his Oscar (for Hamlet)', his crown from the film version of Richard III; his laurel wreath from the Stratford production of Coriolanus; his Lear crown from the television production that brought him out of retirement; and his most meaningful prop, Edmund Kean's Richard III sword, handed on to Olivier by Sir John Gielgud.

Richard Olivier, one of Olivier's four children, at 33 now making his way as a well-regarded theater director, was 27 when his father died in his early 80s after a long battle with illness. "There was a strange awareness that I'd seen him die a lot of times," this gentle man told me. "In King Lear, in Brideshead Revisited. . . . Unlike other children, I saw my dad acting dying. He once told me, T've played more than 200 parts, and I know them better than I know myself. I don't know who I am when I'm not acting.' And when I was young, I would cry at his death scenes. But when his death was real, I couldn't cry."

Almost crushed by the legacy of his father, he loved him. "I feel very grateful and proud to have spent that time with him," he said.

DAME DIANA RIGG

Actress, lecturer, diva. Twenty-three plays (Medea); 10 films; 14 television roles (including host of PBS's Mystery! series); three major awards. Made a dame in 1994.

Photographed July 27, 1995, as a traditional pantomime Principal Boy.

Best known for portrayal of cat-suit-wearing secret agent Emma Peel in The Avengers.

Currently starring in Mother Courage and Her Children at the National Theatre, directed by Jonathan Kent.

Sir John Gielgud is the last of that glittering triumvirate—Olivier, Gielgud, and Ralph Richardson—who, with Dame Peggy Ashcroft, led British theater into its golden age. Gielgud's acting lineage alone stretches back into the 19th century: his grandmother was a well-known actress; her sister (and Irving's acting partner) was the legendary Ellen Terry—"the most adorable woman ever created by God or man," said a swooning Swinburne.

Ninety-one and still active, Sir John is invariably sunny, talkative, and slyly modest. He lives on a 17th-century estate deep in Buckinghamshire, where, he told me, he likes to watch any old rubbish on TV. "I can't keep away from the Simpson trial," he said, laughing. "It's rather bad theater. Too many interruptions. Still, I can't keep away! I'm sure he did it, aren't you?" He said he acts in "little bits" of films —"quite pleasant, not taxing"—and in radio plays, which he enjoys, meeting new people. He was too diffident to mention that one radio play, which celebrated his 90th birthday, was King Lear—the fifth Lear in his magnificent career.

The entire London picture changes with the power and creative volume of those nonprofit empires the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. "Do the English people want a national theatre?" George Bernard Shaw asked 50 years ago. "Of course they do not. . . . They have got the British Museum, the National Gallery and Westminster Abbey, but they never wanted them." They got used to them.

The spine of London theater—the reason it flourishes and is the envy of America—is government subsidy. It has survived cutbacks and assault, and nuclear attack through the 1980s from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the slash-and-burn Newt Gingrich of the arts. "When can we stop giving money to awful people like Peter Hall?" she pleaded, enraged that the man who was then running the National should lead the battle against Tory philistinism and mean minds, as he saw it.

No one has done more to keep alive the heritage of British theater than the workaholic director-producer Sir Peter Hall, and few powerful figures in England fascinate more. He could be Machiavelli, Iago, Coriolanus, Don Juan, or, of late, Falstaff.

He's the master builder of British theater. At 30, he founded the Royal Shakespeare Company; then, succeeding Olivier, he led the National for more than a decade, into its new South Bank empire. And for good measure Hall ran the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. There's practically nothing left for him to run. Yet this impresario is close to an academic scholar in the privacy of the rehearsal room, tapping out the beat of the Shakespearean verse on a lectern like a conductor.

"What we're all bleating about, as usual," Hall told me, "is fighting against decline. In the 1960s, a young actor would have been marinated in Shakespeare. The easy solution now is the convention of the real—gritty underplaying, as on TV. It's affected the whole ecology. But Shakespeare's a verse dramatist. The reason Shakespeare got longer is because actors play the words, not the line. You preserve the sanctity of the line. I reckon there are only about 50 actors left in the country who can do it."

LEO MCKERN

Actor, bon vivant, ham. More than 200plays; more than 40 films ('Ryan's Daughter?; more than 100 television roles.

Photographed June 9, 1995, at the Chichester Festival Theatre on the set of Hobson 's Choice.

Of course, known to millions as Rumpole, the title character in the television series he starred in from 1977 till 1992. "I consider that my best performance ever was as Peer Gynt. But if I get an obit in the London Times, they will say, '... of course, known to millions as Rumpole.' "

ALAN BENNETT

Playwright, actor, screenwriter, diarist, monarchist. Fourteen plays (the revue Beyond the Fringe, Kafka's Dick?; five screenplays;

20 television works; 11 major awards.

Photographed July 10,1995, on the Long Walk at Windsor Castle. "The Copper Horse" statue of George III in the background is a reference to his opus The Madness of George 111.

The butcher's bicycle is a nod to his father's trade. The royal corgis refer to his play A Question of Attribution, which featured

Queen Elizabeth II and one of her signature dogs.

Hall, a railwayman's son, came out of Cambridge University. So did many of the newer generation—Richard Eyre, Nicholas Hytner, Sam Mendes, Emma Thompson, Declan Donnellan, Nick Ormerod, and Simon McBurney and Annabel Arden of London's Theatre de Complicite. The Marlowe Society at Cambridge, under the. direction of George "Dadie" Rylands, shaped the undergrad Peter Hall. The heritage was passed on when Hall handed over the Royal Shakespeare Company to Trevor Nunn (who was also at Cambridge), and continued through Hall's years at the National, where the Marlowe torch is now carried by former society president Sir Ian McKellen.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Hall at 64 looks more hopefully to America than to Britain. I had put it to him that for too long Americans have been going down on one knee before the god of Shakespeare, when they possess all the skills of dynamic language and physicality—speed, wit, naturalism, daring—to burst through the conventions and make new. "If they could be trained to observe the form and breathe at the right places," said Hall, "they'd knock the shit out of us."

It is extraordinary that Arthur Miller—the dramatist of Death of a Salesman and founding father of modern American drama with Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams—is now produced and celebrated more in England than in his own land.

Whereas his 1994 play, Broken Glass, closed early on Broadway, in London it was taken under the protective umbrella of the National Theatre, transferred to the West End, and went on to win the Olivier Award for best play. The spiraling cost of producing plays on Broadway is at least twice as high as in London, making the more commercial work the safer bet. But Arthur Miller goes further:

SIR PETER HALL

Director, producer, diarist, eminence grise. Knighted in 1977.

Photographed July 26, 1995, on the Chelsea Embankment.

Founder and managing director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1960-68; director of the National Theatre, 1973-88.

THE NEXT GENERATION

Theater directors, top left to right, Simon McBurney (The Street of Crocodiles,), Stephen Daldry (An Inspector Calls,), Richard Olivier (Shirley Valentine,), Jonathan Kent (Ralph Fiennes'sHamlet,), Roger Miehell (My Night with Reg,), Sean Mathias (Indiscretions,), Katie Mitchell (Women of Troy,), Sam " Wunderkind" Mendes(The Rise and Fall of Little Voice,), and Matthew Warchus (Volpone,).

Photographed July 11, 1995.

N ICHOLAS HYTNER

Director, rising star. Sixteen plays (Miss Saigon, Carousel,); one film

fThe Madness of King George,); nine operas; five major awards.

Photographed June 24, 1995, in Greenwich Village, New York City.

Currently filming The Crucible, starring Paul Scofield,

Daniel Day-Lewis, and Winona Ryder, on location in Massachusetts.

CHEEK BY JOWL

Designer Nick Ormerod and director Declan Donnellan, co~artistic directors of the internationally celebrated theater troupe.

Photographed August 4, 1995, in the gardens of mannequin-maker Adel Rootstein.

Their production of The Duchess of Malfi will be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this December.

"Broken Glass wasn't Cats, " he points out in his deep, deceptively calm American voice. "On Broadway, it's purely business. But a West End theater doesn't regard a few empty seats as a disgrace. The American system is a commercial, cockeyed, historically determined process where success is everything. Even profit isn't enough. It has to be a big profit."

Look briefly at the route to New York of Tom Stoppard's latest success, Arcadia. It was first produced at the National Theatre. Then it transferred to the commercial West End. Four New York producers wanted it for commercial Broadway. Stoppard, the playwright of scintillating ideas, chose the nonprofit Lincoln Center Theater instead. "I wanted an axis in New York that would do my plays without picking and choosing the ones that might make money and might not," he explained. "The experience of having a play produced in New York is still unequaled. If you could smoke there, it would be perfect." He has made the nonprofit theater in New York his base, and his uncommercial Hapgood—which no Broadway producer wanted—could therefore be produced at Lincoln Center alongside Arcadia.

The golden boy of British theater, 38-year-old director Nicholas Hytner, now lives in London and New York, enjoying the best of both worlds. Hytner understands popular taste, but he functions outside the mainstream. After directing the blockbuster Miss Saigon, he returned to the National to direct the stage version of The Madness of King George. In New York, he has become an associate director of the Lincoln Center Theater, site of his beautiful production of Carousel, and after all the acclaim for his film version of King George, when Hollywood was at his feet, he chose the route of modestly budgeted films for adults.

It is his way of keeping control, of "doing good work" unfettered by too blatant commercial compromise. His new film is Arthur Miller's The Crucible, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, and Paul Scofield. It continues Hytner's system of alternating between films and the theater, in the well-founded belief that there exist sufficient millions of movieand theatergoers who take pleasure in the artfully "uncommercial."

NIGEL HAWTHORNE

Actor, director, late bloomer. Fifty-two plays fShadowlandsj; 24 films (The Madness of King George);

37 television roles (Mapp and Lucia, Yes Minister?; nine major awards.

Photographed July 28,1995, at the antiquaire Crowther of Syon Lodge, London, with a glass of wine—a clue to the undoing of the Duke of Clarence, whom he plays in Richard Loncraine's forthcoming film,

Richard III.

The keepers of the nonprofit flame, Adrian Noble, boss of the R.S.C., and Richard Eyre of the National, have this deeply in common: they are both insomniacs. Eyre, described by Frank Rich of The New York Times as "the most successful producer in the English-speaking theater," wears it well. The words "community," "group," "society," pepper his conversation like a conscience-words, he said, "people who don't like the theater recoil from, as if from rabid dogs."

Now 52, he has decided to leave the National in two years after more than a decade of success at the helm. "Let somebody else have the sleepless nights!" he said, and laughed. Eyre has worked in the nonprofit theater all his life, and it's difficult to imagine him working anywhere else. He turned down the opportunity to direct Les Miserables, which is like misplacing your winning lottery ticket. "I don't regret it," he explained phlegmatically. "I believe the Faustian contract is a reality. The others can do musicals like Les Miserables in good faith. But it just won't farm out for me if I do things in bad faith. I know that sounds like a sanctimonious prick, but that's what I feel."

Eyre's counterpart at the Royal Shakespeare Company is the wired Adrian Noble. "Terrible, appalling, appalling!" he said when I asked him about his insomnia. What does he do all night? I wondered. " Worry," he answered. His body behind his desk in Stratford bent into the shape of a question mark, as if weighed down by the wearying burden of the classical world.

Continued on page 224

"Theater is the actor's credibility and calling card."

JULIA ORMOND

Actress, starlet,

next Audrey Hepburn. Nine plays; five films Legends of the Fall); six television roles.

Photographed August 16, 1995.

Won London Critics' Award for best newcomer in 1989 for her portrayal of Elisabeth in Christopher Hampton's Faith, Hope and Charity.

Make-or-break role: stars opposite Harrison Ford in Sydney Pollack's remake of Sabrina, opening this December.

KENNETH BRANAGH

Actor, director, playwright, overachiever, husband of Emma Thompson. Twenty-one plays; nine films; 16 television roles; four major awards.

Photographed June 5, 1995, on a tanning bed at Shepperton Studios during a rehearsal for the forthcoming film version of Othello, in which he plays Iago.

Frequently compared to: Laurence Olivier; fingernails on a chalkboard. Score points: his Henry V reduced Prince Charles to tears. Sore points: being more popular in America than in his home country; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

THE N EXT WAVE

Actors Phil Daniels ("Dealer's Choice,), Alan Cumming ("Cabaret; film, Goldeneye, Circle of Friends,), Paul Rhys ("Design for Living;film, Chaplin,), Joseph Fiennes (A View from the Bridge,), Rupert Graves ("Design for Living; film. The Madness of King George,), and Simon Russell Beale ("Richard 1119-

Photographed August 14, 1995, in the Virgin Upper Class departure lounge at Heathrow Airport.W

RUPERT EVERETT

Actor, writer, singer, novelist, Vanity Fair contributing editor. Ten plays; 16 films ("The Madness of King George/seven television roles.

Photographed August 1,1995.

Debuted as Guy Bennett, the character based on Guy Burgess, in the acclaimed 1982 production of Julian Mitchell's Another Country.

Forthcoming film: Dunston Checks In.

RACHEL WEISZ

Actress, starlet. Four plays ("Design for Living);fourfilms; four television roles.

Photographed June 10, 1995.

Appearing as Miranda in the film Stealing Beauty, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, to be released in spring 1996.

JULIE CH RISTI E

Actress, animal-rights activist, enigma. Three plays ("Old Timesj; 30films ("Doctor Zhivago, Shampoo/five television roles; two major awards. Lived on and off for seven years with Warren Beatty in the Escondido Suite of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Photographed August 2,1995, on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London.

MICHAEL GAMBON

Actor, mechanic. Forty plays Volpone films; 13 television roles

rrhc Singing Detective; five major awards.

Photographed August 2, 1995, at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Joined National Theatre in 1963 under Laurence Olivier, who personally selected him to be a spear-carrier.

"Role for role, pound for pound, Michael Gambon is, arguably, the finest actor in the English theater." —The New York Times, August 23, 1987.

NATASHA

RICHARDSON

Actress, theater royalty. Seven plays f High Society, Anna Christie^; 11 films fNell>;

six television roles; one major award.

Photographed September 5. 1995.

Elder daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and the late director Tony Richardson;

granddaughter of Sir Michael Redgrave; Mrs. Liam Neeson; one son.

Continued from page 218

"It's a living heritage," he said. "For me the English national identity isn't invested in the text of Shakespeare's plays, but in the people who hear them. Hamlet said, 'We'll hear a play.' For Shakespeare it was the ear. He made pictures through language. I believe the living heritage contains stories and myth that resonate in life, poetry that can enrich us, an experience that can renew us." It's as if Shakespeare were alive, looking over his shoulder, whispering, "Keep going. I'm better than the movies. Find the present in the past and you understand the world."

Today, whispered—and not so whispered—sacrileges are being heard against the heritage of Olivier and Gielgud, as if that tradition belonged more to a pinnacle of 19thcentury acting. It's an overthrowing, too, of the watered-down legacy of the stiffly rhetorical, the emotionally dead, the British style and voice—the traditional Shakespearean voice, which can rip through the back of the stalls and stop ships at sea.

And some of those new voices come from within. "I never saw Olivier, Gielgud, and Richardson," the successful young West End director Sam Mendes of the Donmar Warehouse Theatre told me. "In fact, my generation grew up with John Cleese."

Another of the new generation of international directors is Jonathan Kent, co-director of the fringe, 300-seat Almeida Theatre in North London. He took Ralph Fiennes and Diana Rigg to Broadway. "I didn't want Hamlet produced in a high-art ghetto," he explained. "I don't want to exhume museum pieces as a cultural duty or a kind of medicine. The only point of doing these plays is because they're terrifically popular plays. So it was marvelous that Hamlet was on Broadway down the road from Beauty and the Beast. "

So, the barricades went up outside the Belasco Theater on West 44th Street. Hamlet had Ralph Fiennes, of course, which helped. But Kent had talked to him about taking on the unsolvable mystery two years before he became Ralph Fiennes. And the actor, now a movie star, had spent four seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company. No recent performance on Broadway had been more excitedly anticipated than the Fiennes Hamlet—a modern Hamlet for "rotten" times. Our First sight of the star was of a tragic antihero alone, his back turned on us.

RICHARD HARRIS AND PETER O'TOOLE

Actors, hell-raisers, teetotalers.

Photographed August 17, 1995, in the Oliver Messel Suite at the Dorchester Hotel.

Harris: 26 plays (Camelot); 51 films (This Sport ini' Life); six television roles. Defining role: a man called Horse. Plans to bring Pirandello's Henry IVto Broadway this season.

O'Toole: 104 plays (The Merchant of Venice); 41 films (My Favorite Year); 11 television roles. Defining role: Lawrence of Arabia.

The unique identity of English theater resides in its cebrated trathih of great classical acting.

Fiennes was a Hamlet without the princeliness: unregal, unshaven, unkempt, a dark, contemporary grunge Hamlet on the precipice. In isolation, he might have been a rock star about to explode in klieg lights and smoke, hurling his black topcoat aside to turn and shout to his fans, "Love ya, Cleveland!"

John Osborne's memorial was a crowded gathering. There were England's dramatists—among them Harold Pinter, Christopher Hampton, and John Mortimer. And there were its actors—among them that patrician, carved, enigmatic face of Paul Scofield, the only actor in England to have turned down a knighthood. And there was the ghost of Olivier, the only great actor in English history to have been made a lord. A recording of Laurence Olivier singing and dancing as Archie Rice in The Entertainer, Osborne's music-hall metaphor of crumbling postcolonial England, was played during the service, bringing sighs and affectionate laughter. For the most celebrated actor of the century could scarcely sing a note.

And perhaps it was all there in the secluded chapel that morning earlier this year—in the timeless, formal, expert English ceremony of it all, in those restrained, reedy English voices singing lusty hymns, in the prayers and English music and flawless readings from great actors— the inescapable impression that the best of English life is a play, a show, a pageant even before God. "It is impossible to speak of John Osborne without using the word 'England,'" said David Hare in his fine and surprisingly emotional tribute. So it is impossible to imagine England without its theater.