It’s often said that Britain and America are two nations separated by a common
language, but when the theatrical import-export business is at issue, the
differences seem far greater than a matter of conflicting pronunciations of
“tomato”.
Why did the musical Rent and Master Class , Terrence McNally’s
play about Maria Callas, triumph on Broadway and fail here? Conversely, why
was Alan Bennett’s History Boys a New York hit and, despite
getting as strong a production as in London, David Eldridge’s stage version
of the Dogme film Festen a New York flop?
With transatlantic swaps becoming more frequent, this is a topical enough
question, but especially so right now. Will David Auburn’s Proof
, which won a Pulitzer and several Tonys but strikes me as shallow stuff,
have the success at the Arts Theatre that it enjoyed when Gwyn-eth Paltrow
was playing the maths whizz at its centre at the Donmar in 2002? What are
the prospects for Edward Albee’s Lady from Dubuque , which is
about to take Mag-gie Smith to the Haymarket yet lasted only 12 performances
on Broadway in 1980? And how will Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll
, Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon and the revival of R. C.
Sherriff’s stiff-upper-lip, trench-war play Journey’s End fare
when they hit New York in the spring?
Divergent tastes obviously count for much. Robert Fox is one of many British
producers who thinks that audiences on Broadway, that land of few straight
plays but many standing ovations, are more open-minded, generous and keen to
discover and celebrate hits than their counterparts here. British audiences
are more spoilt for choice, so more picky, more blasé, maybe more cynical.
We’ve never taken Neil Simon’s wise-cracking, feel-good work to our hearts
any more than New Yorkers have embraced Alan Ayckbourn’s darker, feel-bad
comedies.
A different sense of humour is often a factor in explaining failure. Kim
Poster, the Brit-ish-based American producer, thinks London audiences are
more appreciative of irony, nuance and intellectual complexity. They don’t
terri-bly like brash work — here she might have cited David Lindsay-Abaire’s
raucously bad-taste Fuddy Mears , which got Sam Mendes’s Scamp
company off to a disastrous theatrical start in 2004 — yet they also resist
anything remotely mawkish. “There’s an embracing of sentimentality in
America that is scorned or derided here,” says Poster, echoing the British
producer Nick Salmon, who thinks American audiences are “more welcoming,
less demanding, tending to like the more schmaltzy”.
You can’t read the reviews and recall the fate of many American imports
without agreeing. Wendy Wasserstein and Tina Howe are big names in New York;
yet Wasserstein’s Sisters Rosenweig , in which Janet Suzman
and Maureen Lipman were cast as Brooklyn-born siblings, was dismissed as
“synthetic”, “dire” and “cosily trivial”, and Howe’s comedy about Boston
brahmins, Painting Churches , as “cute”, “maudlin” and “like being
slowly submerged in a vat of lukewarm treacle”. A. R. Gurney’s Sylvia
, in which Zoë Wanamaker played a friendly dog, got even shorter shift. It
was “nauseating”, “inane”, “twee, pseu-do-sophisticated rubbish” and
“witless”, a word that regularly turns up in British reviews. Pity the
producers of Jackie , a cartoon celebration of the Kennedy family,
who saw its London transfer proclaimed “witless, tasteless, tedious” and
“stupefyingly inept”.
But that play’s problem was also that its subject matter was too local, a
limitation that hasn’t helped our own exports and may explain Ayck-bourn’s
Broadway woes. Americans aren’t interested in our national obsession, the
class system. Nor are we enraptured by the likes of Denis McIntyre’s National
Anthems , a play about Detroit suburbia and Michigan macho that Kevin
Spacey brought to the Old Vic in 2005. They resist British dramatists’
persistent attacks on their own society. We resist American plays set on the
back porch and involving warfare between fathers and sons.
But of course some work, such as the plays of Pinter or Tennessee Williams,
has the universality to traverse oceans. For Cameron Mackintosh this also
explains why musical plays such as Les Mis or Phantom of the Opera
have triumphed in both theatrical centres while musical comedies, which tend
to involve more transitory subject matter, travel less well and are less
enduring. But sometimes work just finds its moment. The Sound of Music
can cross any pond because, Mackintosh jokes, “nuns and Nazis never seem to
go out of fashion”, but Chicago , which was no great success at
its British premiere in the 1970s, has been running in a slick, cool revival
in London for more than nine years — “it was too cynical at first but
cynical enough now”.
One trouble is that the Zeitgeist is never quite the same in both
theatre capitals at once. Another is that shows that achieve cult status in
one city seldom carry it over to the other. Why did the Mae West play Dirty
Blonde or the transvestite monologue I Am My Own Wife falter
here? Because their stars, Claudia Shear and Jefferson Mays, meant nothing
in London. Why did Jonathan Larson’s variation on La Bohãme, Rent
, not begin to match its New York success? Because of its sentimentality,
perhaps, but also because we hadn’t seen it grow from off-off-Broad-way
beginnings to become the most talked-about show in town. It would, thinks
the impresario Howard Panter, have been better if it had started its British
life in the Theatre Upstairs instead of the Shaftesbury — “it could have
grown organically instead of getting blown up big too soon”.
Yet another problem for much American work is that there’s nowhere in the
British commercial theatre to go except the West End, where it is
frighteningly exposed. That was surely the case with Margaret Edson’s Wit
, which concerned a Donne scholar dying of cancer and combined strong
feeling with an intellectual bite rare in American theatre. The twin
troubles were that it transferred from off-Broadway to the Vaudeville and
that its lead actress was the brilliant but unknown Kathleen Chalfant.
Sadly, it failed to repeat its New York triumph.
Wit ’s fate suggests that commercial imports need stars. For Sonia
Friedman, whose successes include bringing Woody Harrelson to the West End in
On an Average Day , “they give you the kick-start you need before
word of mouth takes over”. The sold-out houses achieved by Matt Damon in
Kenneth Lonegan’s This is Our Youth and David Schwimmer in Neil
LaBute’s Some Girl(s) would seem to prove her point. Yet stars
bring no guarantees. Patti Lupone replaced the unfamiliar Zoe Caldwell for
the London production of Master Class , gave a less astringent
performance as Callas, and a decent play imploded.
As for New York, both production costs and Equity rules, which limit the
number of foreign actors crossing the pond, add to the difficulties. Would
Broadway see more good British plays if the price of staging one wasn’t some
$2.5 million as opposed to the £400,000 that’s nearer the average here? And
would Charlotte Jones’s fine Humble Boy not have died in New
York if it had had the original National cast, which included Simon Russell
Beale and Diana Rigg, rather than a local one?
True, work sometimes needs adjusting if it’s to thrive in new environs. Poster
extracted the four-letter words from her revival of Amadeus for a New
York audience whom she considers more puritan, less tolerant both of bad
language and nudity, than its British counterpart. But change can go too far
and spoil work. The producer David Pugh attributes the failure of that huge
London success The Play What I Wrote to an Americanisation that
meant it no longer involved Morecambe and Wise — “perhaps we should have
celebrated its Englishness rather than hidden it, because, as it was, we
lost everything”.
The problems are many and various, extending to the critics themselves. Though
the make-or-break power of The New York Times is said to be
dwindling, it is still greater than that of British reviewers, who are,
however, regarded on Broadway as unsympathetic to American work and even a
bit xenophobic. And yet the overall picture is far from negative. How could
it be when more and more work is crisscrossing the Atlantic — and, after
seeing her transfers of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off , Peter
Nichols’s A Day in the Life of Joe Egg and Brian Friel’s Faith
Healer all flourish there, the influential Friedman can say she regards
New York as “a second home — and I’m going to initiate work there”?
Again, the impresario Nica Burns thinks that, thanks to shared TV and travel,
the two cultures are becoming more in sync. Witness the triumph in both
centres of the Americanisation of a very British Monty Python film, Spamalot
.
Or the success here of LaBute, whose murder trilogy Bash! has just been
revived at Trafalgar Studios. With Tony Kushner, the author of Angels in
America, he’s prime proof that American dramatists of the postHowe,
postGurney generation are getting tougher, less sentimental, broader in
their horizons and more congenial to British audiences. True, their work has
mostly been seen in smaller, subsi-dised theatres, primarily the Theatre
Upstairs, Almeida and Donmar, which in 2002 presented a well-received season
of American work by little-known playwrights. But it’s an encouraging
development and there are others in New York. Bill Kenwright says that
people thought him mad to take Medea, Ionesco’s Chairs and,
especially, the unknown Janet McTeer in Ibsen’s Doll’s House
to Broad- way; but they won awards galore and even made money. Martin
McDonagh’s harsh comedy The Pillowman also proved profitable
and came within a whisker of a Tony.
And the New York audience that once rejected James Mason in Faith Healer
embraced Ralph Fiennes in the same clutch of monologues, convincing Friedman
that it’s now hungry for bolder work.
But there will always be unpredictability in the export- import game. Why has
that mawkishly right-minded musical Wicked been warmly received in
London, and why did McNally’s defiantly gay play Love! Valour!
Compassion! , which won awards and plaudits galore in New York, receive
only a brief showing in an obscure fringe theatre? How did The History
Boys , which asks its audiences to ponder British culture and education,
achieve such success in New York? Why did El-dridge’s Festen surprise
every- one by failing to repeat its London triumph on Broadway, even though
its producer, Bill Kenwright, is convinced the production was just as strong?
He calls that “a bowel-churning, gob-smacking, bewildering event” but still
feels that in the end a producer must rely on one thing, and that’s not
calculation, but instinct: “Do a play in London or New York only for money
and it will fail. Do it because you believe in it deep inside — and maybe it
will succeed.”
