WEST END STORY

By Christopher Porterfield

WHEN TERRENCE MCNALLY'S Love! Valour! Compassion! transferred from off-Broadway's Manhattan Theatre Club to the Walter Kerr Theater last month, it instantly took on a special status: it became the sole new straight play on Broadway, and only the third to open there all season (out of 15 new productions in total). McNally rightly saw the distinction as dubious. "I take very little pleasure in it," he told a luncheon of the American Theater Wing shortly afterwards. "I wish there were 30 new plays on Broadway."

To find a thriving scene like that, McNally and other theater lovers can only look to London. There, not 30, but no fewer than 14 new plays are currently on mainstream stages. A total of 26 new plays opened in London during 1994, in contrast to 12 on Broadway during the '93-'94 season. The year before that, the tally was 24 in London, against just nine on Broadway.

Musicals, revivals, fresh stagings of the classics, all are vital to a robust theater; but new scripts are its lifeblood. What accounts for London's superiority in nurturing them? Lower production costs, a larger number of subsidized theaters, and a more informed audience are among the usual factors cited-and 400 years of theatrical tradition doesn't hurt either. Arthur Miller, one of several American playwrights who of late have been more warmly appreciated in England than at home, points out that the London theater allows plays to survive and even flourish in a middle range between hit or flop-the only fates available on Broadway. "Here," he says, "it has to be the Second Coming or it's nothing."

Just how rich and varied that middle range can be is shown by a sampling of recent openings in London. The best of the lot: Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard, whose brilliant 1993 Arcadia is still going strong in London (and opens on Broadway next week). Like Arcadia, Indian Ink interweaves two time periods and settings, in this case present-day England and 1930 India. Also like its companion piece, the new play is framed as a quest by a careerist academic who is loaded with data but doesn't have a clue. Here it's an American scholar researching the life of consumptive English poet Flora Crewe-in particular, whether Flora posed nude for an artist named Nirad Das while traveling in India for her health some 60 years ago, and if so, whether the portrait was the token of a love affair.

In Peter Wood's staging, the play glides cinematically among Indian scenes, Flora's letters home, the scholar's footnotes and reminiscences by Das' son and Flora's surviving sister (Margaret Tyzack) to create a tenderly comic rumination on the ironies of history and colonialism, of creativity and eros-all unexpectedly mellow for the pyrotechnical Stoppard. Art Malik catches Das' contradictory yearnings, caught up in India's independence movement yet in thrall to Dickens and all things English. Felicity Kendall wittily and poignantly plays the free-spirited Flora, who shows Das that only by being true to himself and his own culture can he find communion with her in the realm of art.

The other new work by a well-known playwright, Simon Gray's Cell Mates, is a disappointment. Although based on the real-life case of convicted British spy George Blake, who was sprung from prison in 1966 by a small-time ex-con whom he had befriended inside, the piece is strained and unconvincing (as usual, facts are no guarantee of dramatic plausibility). In a kgb-monitored Moscow flat, Blake and his pal Sean Bourke (Rik Mayall) grapple psychologically through stages of need, dependence, emotional freedom and deception, while apparently vying to be the first to finish the memoirs they keep dashing into their rooms to dictate into tape machines.

For dramatic impact, nothing in the script compares with an exit by one of the leading actors-from the play and from England. Stephen Fry, a popular TV and revue performer and best-selling comic novelist, had been cast in an unaccustomed serious role as Blake. The reviews were harsh, and two days later Fry disappeared. For a week the missing star shared the headlines with wanted futures trader Nicholas Leeson, while understudy Mark Anderson gamely played to sparse houses until Simon Ward could take over the role. Finally Fry sent a fax from Belgium, accepting the critics' verdict that his acting was "inadequate," pleading "cowardice, embarrassment and distress," and saying he intended to "rethink my life." What really needed rethinking, though, was the play, which will close next week.

The only headlines actor-playwright Kevin Elyot has had to worry about are those hyping his still emergent career. Elyot's My Night with Reg began at the Royal Court Theatre's experimental upstairs stage, transferred directly to the West End and won the Evening Standard award as the best comedy of 1994. Reg is the transatlantic equivalent of McNally's Love! In the outlines of both works, we can see a distinct subgenre forming: the gay ensemble soap. A group of homosexual men, aids-haunted, gather periodically in the home of one of them, where they banter, bicker, shift alliances and bare their souls (and too often their bodies), occasionally mourning a recent death, and all the while striving to smile gallantly through their fears and loneliness. It's a highly effective vehicle for melodrama, and of course it's grounded in a somber reality--but therein lies the danger. The form relies on the audience's providing reserves of sympathy and ready-made emotion, which are not always earned.

In Reg we never meet the title character, who dies offstage fairly early on. And who has had a night with him? As it turns out, virtually everybody in the cast of characters, unbeknown to his live-in lover. Even the vicar at Reg's funeral remarks afterward how good he was in bed. The successive revelations add up to a La Ronde of betrayal, giving a baleful bite to the play's extravagant humor. In an excellent cast, David Bamber is the poor, fussy, spinsterish host who must endure everyone else's blurted confessions of getting it on with Reg, and John Sessions gives a performance of self-devouring intensity as Reg's Rabelaisian but ultimately devastated lover.

Transatlantic equivalences of a different sort are the point-counterpoint of Richard Nelson's bracing New England, which has just completed a successful run at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Barbican Pit. Nelson, a New York-based American, portrays a ferociously articulate family of Britons who live in various parts of the U.S. Assembled in a Connecticut farmhouse in the aftermath of their father's suicide, they ostentatiously deplore the English penchant for putting down America, then in the next breath rail at their big, dumb, PC-riddled adopted homeland.

But these people are as dislocated morally as they are geographically ("How did we get to here?" are among the father's last words). Grief is put on hold as they squabble over the Chinese takeout, gang up on a sibling's spouse and expertly rip the scabs of old family wounds. The RSC's production impeccably fulfilled Chekhov's famous dictum that events onstage should be "just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up."

New England may be presented in New York next season--American goods imported from Britain--and it deserves to be. Meanwhile, during the remainder of this Broadway season, things may be looking up slightly for homegrown products. From now until the May 3 cutoff for Tony nominations, at least six new plays are planned, including yet another by McNally. Still, opening-night mortality rates being what they are, theater pros know better than to predict a resurgence of plays on Broadway. "Two or three," says Jujamcyn Theaters president Rocco Landesman, "would be an avalanche."

--With reporting by Stacey Perman/New York

With reporting by STACEY PERMAN/NEW YORK