Matt Wolf

LONDON — Few acting legends in their 80s would make a stage comeback with a one-person play lasting 100 minutes without a break. Oh, and dealing with no less momentous a topic than the banality of evil.

But it’s fair to say that history is being made just now at the Bridge Theater here. Maggie Smith, the 84-year-old star seen lately as the Dowager Countess on “Downton Abbey,” is revisiting the medium in which she began. And her performance as the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ largely uncomprehending secretary in “A German Life” represents a new high in a six-decade career with no shortage of peaks.

Christopher Hampton’s play, at once bleak and exhilarating, is running through May 11. Tickets are tight, made more so by the (understandable) absence of matinees, given the demands on its lone performer.

You can imagine Smith at this stage in her career choosing to be part of a Wilde or Coward comedy, in which she wouldn’t have to carry the play. But here, the role of Brunhilde Pomsel draws upon every aspect of her seemingly limitless art. The audience knows it is witnessing something special: Not in a long while have I encountered a crowd so attentive that it seemed hardly to draw breath. A rogue cellphone — hell, even a cough — would be unthinkable.

Smith is one of a handful of great British actresses of her generation who have recently been giving the theater another go. Glenda Jackson has starred on Broadway two seasons running (currently as King Lear and last year in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women”), while Diana Rigg, Eileen Atkins and Vanessa Redgrave have all done shows on one side of the Atlantic or the other in the past season.

In her last London outing, as the mysterious title figure in Albee’s excellent “The Lady From Dubuque,” Smith didn’t appear until just before the intermission — and that was in 2007. Does she still have enough stamina? Hampton’s script plays ingeniously with our concerns right at the start.

Pomsel, it seems, tends to forgets things, so you pause for a second to consider whether the actress playing her might, too. “Let’s see how it goes,” the modest-seeming woman seated onstage says to conclude her introduction, before launching into her own narrative, during which she never once leaves her chair or even reaches for water. (A pair of tightly clutched spectacles is Smith’s only accessory.)

The strange and singular life of an unremarkable woman in remarkable times was chronicled in an Austrian documentary of the same name, filmed when its subject was 103. (She lived to be 106.) Pomsel was born into an ordinary German working-class family. As a stenographer for the Nazi propaganda ministry, she had a ringside seat to observe the workings of the Final Solution, and after World War II, she spent five years as a Russian prisoner of war, when she was held for a time in Buchenwald.

Boyfriends appeared now and again over the years, as did several named friends, one of whom, Eva, a Jew, died in Auschwitz. But Pomsel mostly carried on with just herself for company: The result allows Smith to communicate a sense of loneliness that she also brought to her indelible turn in Alan Bennett’s “Talking Heads.”

What did this equivocal witness to history — Goebbels is said to be sartorially splendid one minute and a “demented midget” the next — make of such seismic events as they were happening? Pomsel may refer to herself more than once as stupid, but “A German Life” is smart enough to ponder whether that’s a legitimate defense, either then or now.

Speaking in a gentler vocal register than the querulous pitch she can adopt on cue (as in “Downton”), Smith never overplays her hand, preferring to keep us guessing as she moves toward and away from any real grasp of events. “I knew no more than the local greengrocer,” she insists — the words “concentration camp” merely a synonym for “re-education,” or so she thinks at first. But with advancing age comes clarity of sorts from an unreliable self-chronicler whom this mercurial performer and her observant director, Jonathan Kent, bring brilliantly to the boil.

By play’s end, Pomsel isn’t convinced there is a God, but she believes thoroughly in evil. And as Anna Fleischle’s gently sliding set moves ever more downstage, as if to bring Smith into the live equivalent of a movie close-up, one particular sentence from earlier in the play resounds afresh. That is Pomsel’s rumination about “the things you can’t remember, and the things you’ll never forget.” Count this actress’ performance among the latter.

Katherine Kingsley doesn’t have anywhere near the profile or résumé of Smith, but the fast-rising actress excelled as a high-style vulgarian in the recent sequence of Harold Pinter one-acts here. Having also starred in many a London musical, she is in prime form once again in the distinctly nonsinging role of Marlene in “Top Girls,” the 1982 play from Caryl Churchill that is being revived through July 20 at the National Theater.

”Top Girls” was famous when it premiered for skewering the political top girl of the age, namely Margaret Thatcher, but director Lyndsey Turner’s production suggests this spiky play’s applicability to Brexit-era Britain and to families poleaxed by political differences, not just those of money and class.

The opening scene remains an extravagant wonder in its fantastical bringing together of women throughout history (a pope and an explorer among them) for a dinner party presided over by the successful but hard-bitten businesswoman Marlene, whom we later get to know at work and at home. Kingsley deftly navigates the shifts in both style and tone and gets a great laugh early on when she demands profiteroles for dessert “because they’re disgusting.” In lesser hands, Marlene might be, too, but Kingsley makes of Churchill’s antiheroine a blowzy, sharp-witted delight.

“A German Life”

Directed by Jonathan Kent. Bridge Theater, through May 11.

“Top Girls”

Directed by Lyndsey Turner. National Theater/Lyttelton, in repertory through July 20.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/theater/maggie-smith-a-german-life.html" id="a880c237-0405-320a-a428-091b401a976a">The New York Times</a>.

(London Theater Reviews)

On the London Stage, 'Top Girls' and a Grande Dame

The image is one of desperation, as befits Malkovich’s character, a film mogul by the name of Barney Fein who has been laid low by his own sexual malfeasance. That name suggests a certain Harvey Weinstein, but Fein’s struggle to get to his feet can’t help but make a playgoer think of Mamet himself, a titan of stage and screen whose finest work seems to be receding from view.

Word that Mamet was working on a play in response to the #MeToo movement emerged in early 2018. But little was said about the project, leading to rampant speculation about how Mamet — a playwright not known for delicacy — would approach the story of Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct. The program for “Bitter Wheat” may insist on its story as “a piece of fiction” whose self-evident equivalencies are “entirely coincidental,” but curiosity has loomed large as to how that role of one powerful, wealthy man in the #MeToo movement would play out in the hands of another powerful, wealthy man.

“Bitter Wheat” is unlikely to reverse the prevailing feeling that Mamet has skidded off course of late, despite the attachment of big names to his works — like Al Pacino, who starred in the poorly received “China Doll” on Broadway in 2015, or Malkovich, on hand on this occasion as commercial catnip. Mamet has always seemed to be an equal-opportunity offender, with targets ranging from vegans to Jews to the mother of Fein’s (unseen) children. But “Bitter Wheat,” bilious to a fault, also feels scattershot and lazy, problems exacerbated by Mamet’s surprisingly slack direction. Two scene changes in the first act slow the proceedings just when the tension should be ratcheting up, notwithstanding the presence of an A-list design team in Christopher Oram (sets and costumes) and Neil Austin (lighting), both of whom are Tony winners.

A duologue in a restaurant merely reminds you how much crisper and tenser were the comparable exercises in coercion in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” the Mamet masterwork that had its own world premiere in London, in 1983. And as a study in the daily depredations meted out by Hollywood heavies, “Bitter Wheat” has nothing on “Speed-the-Plow,” a savage comedy from 1988 that reappears fairly regularly on the London stage. (Lindsay Lohan led its last West End revival, in 2014.)

But what of Barney Fein as a character study: an ego in extremis who has everything in the world except, the play rather laboriously makes clear, self-love? Malkovich certainly commands attention as a tuxedoed tyrant who at the start eviscerates a writer (played by Matthew Pidgeon, Mamet’s brother-in-law) whose work makes him “puke,” to co-opt Fein’s chosen word. (A fair amount of the play’s language is far less easily quoted.)

The sorry fact is that Fein never deepens or darkens as the (relatively brief) two acts unfold. The character is reprehensible well before he meets Yung Kim Li (Ioanna Kimbook), a Cambridge-educated Korean actress to whom he proffers stardom in return for a neck rub and more. As satirical gambits go, the notion of casting her in a gay retelling of the Anne Frank story must rank somewhere pretty low. It’s either that, we’re told, or an Asian reboot of “Gone With the Wind.”

Kimbook, making her professional theater debut, adroitly communicates a gathering wariness giving way to fear, and there’s not nearly enough of Doon Mackichan, who plays Sondra, Fein’s intriguingly complicit personal assistant. Alas, the playwright isn’t interested in either female character. Sondra, for example, exists to inform her boss of his own mother’s birthday or of that same ailing woman’s death at the hands of an illegal immigrant. (One takeaway from the play might well be the perils of shopping at Bergdorf Goodman.)

After the intermission, the play loses what scant energy it had and takes a self-pitying turn that does neither Fein nor his creator any favors. Malkovich, his signature gift for vocal insinuation intact, takes particular delight in invoking Hannibal Lecter when he says the name Clarice — a secret code borrowed from the “Silence of the Lambs” heroine. The actor’s spidery fingers exert their own chill as they trace the ease with which such predators take control.

Fine actor though he is, not even Malkovich can ride out the faux-psychology of Fein’s climactic lament. “I molested various actresses, as who has not,” Fein says by way of defense, as his accusers grow in number and Oscars are revoked. A “deeply flawed human being” adrift in a “wicked” world, Fein, we’re meant to understand, might have been a more humane and decent person had he been able to lose weight. Really? A diet would have put everything right?

I’m not at all sure that Fein’s story, or that of the man who inspired him, is as simple as that, but “Bitter Wheat” would be considerably better were it more fleshed out. That’s assuming, of course, that it had to be written at all.

LONDON — There’s no more telling sight in “Bitter Wheat,” the David Mamet play that opened Wednesday at the Garrick Theater in London, than a moment during the second act in which John Malkovich is flat on his back, flailing like a drowning man gasping for air.

A huge mamet misfire in a #metoo drama

LONDON — Tragedy is the order of the day on the London stage right now, and by the end of the uninterrupted 100 minutes of Mark Ravenhill’s “The Cane,” an intimate, tightly contained drama has acquired a seismic force.

The three-character play, and director Vicky Featherstone’s pitch-perfect production, are on the main stage of the Royal Court Theater through Jan. 26. And yet a continued life seems all but guaranteed for this latest offering from the writer of “Shopping and ... ,” the provocative play with the unprintable title that began at the Court in 1996 before moving to the West End and off-Broadway.

A domestic drama, a societal indictment and a report from the battered front line of education, “The Cane” charts a trajectory from celebration to vilification. Edward (Alun Armstrong, bruised and bruising) is preparing for his retirement party at the state school where he has worked for nearly a half-century. No teacher, Edward’s fretful wife, Maureen (Maggie Steed), informs us early on, has been so loved.

If Maureen’s comment is to be believed, how then to explain the gathering hordes (unseen) of student protesters who have arrived at the couple’s home in such numbers that neither spouse feels able to go outside? Edward’s crime, it seems, is to have administered caning back in the day when that time-honored British custom was still the norm. (The practice was outlawed in state schools in 1986 and in private institutions more than a decade later.)

The past has come to haunt the aging Edward’s present, specifically in the form of his daughter, Anna (Nicola Walker, characteristically superb), a one-person mob of her own. The sort of ever-enraged child who once took an ax to the featureless room in which the family has assembled (the wall bears the scars of her rage), Anna is a justice-seeking fury. She would be right at home among the Greek tragedies that “The Cane” comes to resemble.

Ravenhill knows his theater, and you feel not just the influence of the Greeks but also Ibsen and Beckett stalking the treacherous confines of his play.

The presence, crucial to the unfolding narrative, of a tall if rickety ladder contains shivery echoes of Ibsen’s “The Master Builder,” another play in which a female outsider sends a male protagonist toppling to his doom. And there’s more than a trace of Beckett’s famously absent Godot to the Head, Edward’s boss, whose arrival is keenly anticipated, although how he would get through the marauders outside is anyone’s guess.

“The Cane” anatomizes a world rife with and alive to violence at every turn and disturbs in a way that Ravenhill’s more obviously confrontational early work didn’t quite manage; this is a far more assured piece of writing. And arriving as it did at the end of a year notably lacking in good British plays, “The Cane” has set a commendably high standard for the year ahead.

Across town, at north London’s Almeida Theater through Feb. 2, director Joe Hill-Gibbins is also exploring suffering. He has cracked a canonical Shakespeare play wide open, to deliver the mercilessness and anger at its luxuriantly worded heart.

I’m referring to “The Tragedy of King Richard the Second,” which is the elaborate title here given to a frequently performed history play that usually goes by “Richard II.” (That, indeed, will be the name when it is revived in a separate production next month at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and performed entirely by women of color.)

Hill-Gibbins, true to his own idiosyncratic, arresting form, has put the text through a shredder and come out with a heavily filleted version. Performed in modern dress within a cell-like space containing buckets labeled “water” and “blood,” the production starts near the end of the expansive original and compresses an incident-packed narrative into 100 minutes performed by a gender-blind, stern-faced cast of eight, many of whom take multiple roles.

The self-evident calling card is the appearance of the great Simon Russell Beale in the title role, a part for which he might seem too old on paper — Richard II was 33 when he died and Russell Beale will soon be 58 — but that he inhabits with the naturalness and ease with verse that are his long-cherished trademarks.

Hill-Gibbins makes you aware of the tensions coursing through this portrait of a divinely anointed king who learns too late what it is to be a human. But when his leading man steps forward to ruminate upon Richard’s lonely and too-brief life, the prevailing aggression of the production — this is the most physical “Richard II” in years — gives way to a glimpse of a fallen monarch with the soul of a poet.

Another, yet more seasoned director — Trevor Nunn, who will turn 79 this month — has cast his keen eye on an enduring musical title, “Fiddler on the Roof,” for a very fine revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory through March 9. No stranger to either musicals or the classical theater, Nunn has located within the show’s depiction of familial strife a rending portrait of dislocation that reaches well beyond the early 20th-century shtetl of Anatevka, where the storied 1964 show is set.

Yes, you are here attuned as ever to the travails of the hard-laboring milkman, Tevye (Andy Nyman), and his determinedly patient wife, Golde (the gossamer-voiced Judy Kuhn, a visitor from Broadway). But what most sears the memory is the stage picture near the end of a shrouded ensemble being herded away from the home they love — an image of dispossession with resonance the world over.

And at the closing moments, when the onstage fiddler plays the final passage of the composer Jerry Bock’s landmark score, the last note is left unheard. That silence haunts the air and evokes a landscape of loss for which there are no words.

“The Cane”: Directed by Vicky Featherstone. Royal Court Jerwood Theater Downstairs, through Jan. 26.

“The Tragedy of King Richard the Second”: Directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Almeida Theater, through Feb. 2; NT Live broadcast on Jan. 15.

“Fiddler on the Roof”: Directed by Trevor Nunn. Menier Chocolate Factory, through March 9.

This article originally appeared in <a id="b5216b8f-6987-49a4-be59-abf4db76f9a4" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/theater/the-cane-royal-court-richard-ii-almeida.html">The New York Times</a>.

On London stages, the atmosphere is tragic

The three-character play, and director Vicky Featherstone’s pitch-perfect production, are on the main stage of the Royal Court Theater through Jan. 26.

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Matt Wolf

Articles written by the author

On the London Stage, 'Top Girls' and a Grande Dame

A huge mamet misfire in a #metoo drama

On London stages, the atmosphere is tragic