Gone West

It is easy to forget, given the huge burgeoning in recent years of both the quantity and quality of Irish professional theatre, that Irish theatregoers have the advantage of having one of the largest and most rewarding English-language theatre capitals in the world on their doorstep.

As with New York in recent decades, London's main-stream commercial theatre has seemed to be in significant decline, however. There has been a more recent resurgence though, in both the quality and variety of choice of both plays and musicals showing in the West End and, of course, there has, for decades past been the continuous creative input of the subsidised Royal National and Royal Shakespeare theatres, plus the existence of such stalwart innovators as the Royal Court (now at the Duke of York's theatre in St Martin's Lane), the Bush Theatre in Shepherd's Bush, the Almeida in Islington, the Hampstead, the Donmar Warehouse and others like them to spice the theatrical mix.

At the Comedy theatre - in Panton Street in the mainstream West End - one can re-visit two richly and originally comic plays by Tom Stoppard (The Real Inspector Hound) and Peter Shaffer (Black Comedy). And in the Geilgud theatre (formerly the Globe) on Shaftesbury Avenue one can discover Alan Ayckbourn's Things We Do For Love, not one of his best but still deeply darkly and seriously funny with a fine edgy performance by Jane Asher as the landlady who falls for the fiance of her old school chum who, with her betrothed, becomes the tenant of her upstairs flat.

But the purpose of a recent brief trip to London was to look at the musical representation in the West End, still dominated by the hugely commercially successful productions (and promotions) of what this reviewer perceives as mechanistic and blandly undemanding shows for persons with short attention spans where it does not matter to your understanding of the drama if you doze off occasionally or miss chunks of dialogue or

?????recitatif because you've gone to the bathroom or are admiring the vast scenery. Les Miserables is still in the Palace on Shaftesbury Avenue, Phantom of the Opera still at Her Majesty's in Haymarket, Miss Saigon in the Drury Lane Theatre Royal, Cats at the New London, and Disney's Beauty and the Beast is at the Dominion in Tottenham Court Road.

There was time on this visit to see only three of the more recent musical new-comers to the West End and two of them, as it happens, were imports from Broadway. The most interesting was the much-garlanded Rent (at the Shaftesbury Theatre) by the late Jonathan Larson who before his death had written book, lyrics and music and tragically succumbed to an aortic aneurysm before the opening performance by the New York Theatre Workshop of the show which was to go on to win the 1996 Pulitzer Prize, four Tony Awards and six Drama Desk awards among other American accolades.

It is hard to tell just how many of these awards were motivated by the author's premature death at almost 36 years of age - a posthumous recognition, perhaps, more of his promise than of his achievement (his was without question a prodigious talent), but the performance in London achieved a huge cheering standing ovation, something this reviewer has never previously seen in a city whose theatre audiences are not noted for the spontaneous generosity of their response.

Much of that response on this occasion may have been for the excellent playing, massive energy and huge commitment of the youthful cast, and some may have been for the author's skillful use of music (not overwhelmingly tuneful, it must be said) with light revue-type numbers where it was necessary to hear the words and heavy driving loud rock where the expression of energy was more important than the furtherance of the literal plot. But some of the response may have been for the attempt to address issues of deprivation and isolation on the fringes of urban society.

On too many occasions, the story is dramatically undermined by a cloying sentimentality, but there is still clearly a dramatic thread telling us that love, whatever its pains and pleasures, whether between gay people or people in heterosexual relationships, even within families, can be redemptive without destroying individual ambitions and desires. Outstanding is a performance by Wilson Germaine Heredia as Angel, the AIDS-infected drag queen beloved of Jesse L Martin's straightforward Tom Collins. Well worth a visit, if not a Pulitzer.

Much more comfortably and lushly entertaining is Harold Prince's revised version of Jerome Kern's and Oscar Hammerstein II's Showboat to be found at the Prince Edward Theatre. Some of the book and songs, omitted from the original and subsequent productions for socio-political reasons, have been reinstated -most notably in the revival of the haunting melancholia of Misery's Comin' Aroun', plaintively put across by Gretha Boston's Queenie - which gives the first act in the South on the paddle steamer great social authenticity and authority. It is easy to see why this was the show that prepared the path for the later Oklahoma! which turned vapid American musical revue into coherent drama of which music was an integral part.

The second act was (and still is) a reversion to earlier staged Americana with its inconsequential plotting and its parade of Chicago. Nothing happens here because dramatically it has to, but because the authors needed it to in order to bring the show to a close. But it is still comfortably and richly rewarding without ever being too dramatically demanding and makes a great night out on the West End, albeit imported from Broadway.

Infinitely less rewarding is the one indigenous staging (at the London Palladium) of Saturday Night Fever which is bland beyond belief, utterly inconsequential and played at all times, whether in speech or music, at decibel levels that are physically uncomfortable. One hears as much through the spine and the rib-cage as through one's battered ears as the whole theatre reverberates with unwanted waves of sound. There is none of the grit of the original movie (it has all been verbally and visually sanitised), none of the sense of the Brooklyn locale (even the glossy stage settings are wrong) and absolutely no sense of character.

Much livelier, much funnier, much more tuneful is Chicago which (again imported as a reproduction of the current Broadway version) still works well despite its being staged, at the expense of some excellent Bob Fosse choreography, with the band on stage. Even the new production at the Victoria Palace of Neil Simon's, Cy Coleman's and Dorothy Fields's Sweet Charity (although it received some pretty mixed reviews) would certainly be more fun than is to be found at the Palladium. But then the West End of London doesn't, in each show, set out to please everyone. It is from the mix on offer that everyone can find something to please the individual taste.

Contact the British Tourist Authority office on 01- 6708000 for booking information.