Regime Change Amid the Salvos

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/arts/31iht-lon31.html

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LONDON — If you’re taking over the reins at a much-admired London playhouse, what better way to begin than with a play about the theater?

That decision is among the many bracing aspects of “Red Velvet,” the hugely accomplished if imperfect play from the actress-turned-writer Lolita Chakrabarti with which the director Indhu Rubasingham has begun her regime as artistic director of north London’s Tricycle Theatre. This opening salvo augurs well.

The setting is a theater from a bygone age, the proscenium arch on view weathered by the years, but Ms. Chakrabarti’s real-life topic resonates in all manner of directions toward the here and now. Her concerns have to do with race — as well as gender and styles of theatrical performance, too — as refracted through the grievous scenario in 1833 when the young black American actor Ira Aldridge took to the stage of the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden to play the title role in “Othello.”

The legendary Edmund Kean has taken ill as the Venetian Moor, and so the theater’s French manager, Pierre (played niftily by the Irish actor Eugene O’Hare), pursues the radical measure of bringing Aldridge in to assume the role in the very year in which slavery was abolished in Britain. The plan ends woefully for all concerned, not least Aldridge who is largely reviled by the English press and is seen some years later in the play’s framing scenes preparing to play Lear in whiteface. Not in London, but in the Polish city of Lodz.

Ms. Chakrabarti lays before us a milieu whose tensions continue to reverberate today, perhaps even within a household that has seen her husband, the actor Adrian Lester, break ground as a black Henry V at the National Theatre and Bobby in the musical “Company.” (He was superb in both.) And with Mr. Lester on hand to play Aldridge, “Red Velvet” has a galvanic leading man who will play Othello himself at the National next year and who is here to anchor his wife’s plushly titled play with passion and wit.

“Red Velvet” informs and entertains without ever lifting placards, which is no minor achievement given the hot button issues involved. And in the same vein of multiple rewards, Jez Butterworth’s new play, “The River,” at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, tantalizes and teases and whets an audience’s appetites: An extended scene finds Dominic West preparing in real time a sea-trout dinner for two that should lead to a jump in sales for any fish merchants in or near the Chelsea playhouse.

Mr. Butterworth’s first play since “Jerusalem” in 2009 seared its way into the collective English cultural conscience, winning leading man Mark Rylance a second Tony Award along the way, “The River” provides a contrast in almost every way. This one takes place in a single continuous act, not three, and traffics in silence rather than making a furious noise. What it shares with its predecessor is a belief in the numinous and in personalities that defy ready analysis. One exits the theater asking questions, and enriched.

It’s perhaps best to regard this as only an interim report on what is sure to be the first of many experiences of this play and of Ian Rickson’s characteristically empathic staging of it. The tiny playing space seats a scant 93, and so intense has been demand that the Court is selling tickets only on the day, either online or in-person at the box office. Let’s just say that any effort to get in is abundantly repaid.

The pleasures begin with a bearded Mr. West playing (brilliantly) a sensualist and aesthete who inhabits a remote cabin near which runs the river of the title, as heard at the start and during scene changes. But just as waterways rarely follow a straight path, neither does a play that gradually accrues in pain and deception, self-directed as much as not, though to say much more would spoil the skin-prickling finish, which prompts a reconsideration of all that has gone before. I can’t wait to see it again.

If “The River” gives off the feel of a play-as-poem that is sure to offer up fresh meanings with each viewing, Howard Brenton’s “55 Days,” at the Hampstead Theatre, is more or less summed up by its characters’ gaits. Here’s a drama in which a large cast (more than 20) spend much of the time striding on and off with an almost belligerent sense of purpose. And when they do speak, it is through clenched teeth and lowering eyes, as if the merest hint of levity would disrupt the solemnity that Howard Davies’s production wears like a badge of honor.

Telling of the convulsive period leading up to the beheading of Charles I at Westminster Hall in 1649, this latest work from the prolific Mr. Brenton (“Anne Boleyn” “Never So Good”) combines courtroom drama and history play in a manner that succeeds mostly in suggesting other, greater texts. One hears echoes of “The Crucible” and “Danton’s Death,” “Mary Stuart” and Shakespeare’s “Richard II,” that last-named also concerned with a monarch who considered himself God’s anointed.

So as (presumably) to shake off any fustiness associated with the distant past, the production boasts a slimlined feel — Ashley Martin-Davis’s set resembles a basketball court — and finds its mostly male ensemble in 20th-century garb. We could be watching a “Mad Men” convention, even if Dominic Muldowney’s score would be right at home in “Homeland.”

The exception, to both the sartorial dictates and that hell-for-leather stride, is Mark Gatiss, who plays the Stuart king with flashes of dry wit and a sly, suggestive walk to match. And I love Mr. Brenton’s notion that when Charles I and Oliver Cromwell (Douglas Henshall) finally meet near the end — an encounter along the lines of Schiller’s comparable face-off between adversaries in “Mary Stuart,” not rooted in fact — they talk about the weather. How English is that?

The choices elsewhere seem less judicious, and it’s not Mr. Henshall’s fault if he seems stymied by the one-note intensity of his part. At one point, a retinue hellbent on regicide start to laugh in forced, hysterical tones that only amplify the complete absence of mirth elsewhere. Isn’t there a limit to how much self-seriousness an evening can take?

Red Velvet. Directed by Indhu Rubasingham. Tricycle Theatre. Through Nov. 24.

The River. Directed by Ian Rickson. Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. Through Nov. 17.

55 Days. Directed by Howard Davies. Hampstead Theatre. Through Nov. 24