AND STILL they come . . . Glenn Close has just opened at the National in A Streetcar Named Desire. The X-Files star Gillian Anderson makes her London stage debut on November 7 in a new play, What the Night is For. Colin Hanks (son of Tom) and Kieran Culkin (brother of Macaulay) lead another Hollywood-centric West End cast of This is Our Youth from November 13.

Why are so many big American names bursting to play London, especially since a brief Equity flap over the summer suggested that the enthusiasm isn’t always reciprocated? At the time there were grumblings from the actors’ union that the National had been remiss in failing to cast Britons in three of Streetcar’s four principal roles: in addition to Close’s Blanche DuBois, Mitch (Robert Pastorelli) is American, while director Trevor Nunn’s chosen Stella, Essie Davis, is Australian. That leaves Iain Glen’s Stanley Kowalski having to fly a lone flag among the leads when it comes to British talent.

The Streetcar furore quickly died down, a victim of inconsistency as much as anything else: why single out this production when Nunn’s revival of South Pacific last Christmas had no Britons in any of its four leading parts? Close, too, is a theatre-trained performer with three Tony Awards to her name, so it is hardly as if one of the American theatre’s defining roles were being played by, say, Madonna.

The controversy ignored one crucial fact that helps to explain the appeal of the London theatre to Matt Damon et al — Americans tend to fare better treading the boards here than they do in their own country.

Close, to be fair, divided critical opinion this week, but the raves had a breathless quality that the US press reserves for the likes of, say, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. And more than one Streetcar review seemed as overwhelmed by the sheer physical presence of Close herself — look: a walking, talking, five-time Oscar nominee! — as by anything in her performance.

Recently several critics couldn’t contain their glee over Woody Harrelson’s West End turn in On an Average Day, an exercise in fervent hand-wringing that US critics might consider, well, average (assuming that the play ever gets to New York). The same actor was better on Broadway a few seasons ago in the N. Richard Nash play The Rainmaker, yet his reviews at the time weren’t nearly as good.

This phenomenon is nothing new. In 1986, Jack Lemmon and a then unknown Kevin Spacey appeared in London in a Long Day’s Journey into Night that had just flopped on Broadway after indifferent reviews. In London the show became a sellout, with Lemmon fêted in a way that he had not been in New York.

The perception among many American stars is that the critical piranhas lie mercilessly in wait on Broadway, where seeing a film star on stage isn’t such a novelty (but seeing Dench and Smith is). The Oscar-winning Jessica Lange made her Broadway debut as Blanche DuBois back in 1992 but earned an Olivier nomination for Streetcar four years later in the West End.

Gwyneth Paltrow made it clear that much of the attraction of opening in London in Proof was doing it away from the Broadway glare. In New York, where she has never been on stage, Paltrow would undoubtedly have been compared to her mother, Blythe Danner, a Broadway veteran. In London Paltrow could benefit from the astonishment among London theatre critics that seems to set in when a US movie name is able to walk across a stage without falling over. (Woody Harrelson, take a bow.)

Oddly, the American performers who do less well in London are often the New York theatre veterans who are beloved on home turf but lack any film profile. Two years ago the admired New York actress Kathleen Chalfant repeated her much-lauded Off Broadway performance in Wit in the West End, where the play quickly closed, cruelly eclipsed by The Graduate, with Kathleen Turner’s aura and its attendant nudity having taken the town.

It surely helped Turner’s eventual Broadway transfer in The Graduate that she did play London first, since the same show in New York would never have done as well as it has without a London imprimatur to boost the Broadway box office. Yet the US reviews exemplify how critical responses to American celebrities on stage in London and New York diverge. “The Graduate is a huge success for Kathleen Turner,” enthused The Observer when the play opened on Shaftesbury Avenue. Across the Atlantic, The Village Voice reacted to Turner’s New York performance as Mrs Robinson with: “The desperate can probably find younger and more beautiful women available for closer inspection at the same price.”

Glenn Close should be happy that she’s here.

• Matt Wolf is London Theatre Critic for Variety. A Streetcar Named Desire runs until Nov 23 at the National Theatre (020-7452 3000)
  
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