With New Year almost upon us, it’s time to reflect on a London theater year just gone, a period during which a near-unknown (Jonathan Slinger) gave a Shakespearean performance for the ages in the Royal Shakespeare Company Richard II and various ensembles—both American and British—eclipsed individual star turns. What follows are my five favorite productions of the year, followed by five singular performances tomorrow. Inevitably, there is a bit of overlap, though the London stage, thank heavens, continues to be sufficiently rich and varied that one could begin naming standout talents and be doing so well into 2009.


BEST SHOWS OF 2008
The Lover/The Collection


Two Harold Pinter one-acts came together to make for a scintillating evening of theater that served as one of several showcases for the fast-rising young director Jamie Lloyd, who delivered up every bit of the teasing, sometimes bruising quality of Pinter at his most cunning. In a year rife with faultless company playing, this show’s quartet of performers raised the bar high from the start, Gina McKee and Richard Coyle finding the full Albee-esque quotient of passion and pain in The Lover, joined by Timothy West and Charlie Cox as lovers of a particularly innuendo-laden sort after the intermission. Cox’s chest hair, for what it’s worth, caused a flurry in certain circles, but it was only at year’s end, with Alistair Robins in A Little Night Music, that the same physical distinction constituted an actual visual punchline.

Speed-the-Plow
With all due respect to the beleaguered ongoing Broadway revival of a play that saw a revolving door of Bobby Goulds, it was Matthew Warchus’ London take on David Mamet’s text that confirmed a 20-year-old play as a contemporary classic. Playing Hollywood studio buddies whose friendship is put to an acid test made especially scalding by Kevin Spacey’s rivetingly coked-up, ferocious Charlie Fox, Spacey and Jeff Goldblum constituted the double-act of a playgoer’s dreams; onetime Mary Poppins, Laura Michelle Kelly, completed the trio of schemers possessed of varying degrees of self-awareness. If there exists a film ever to be made of this material, surely Spacey and Goldblum should be its stars.

Richard II
Director Michael Boyd’s cycle of Shakespeare history plays joined the subsequent RSC Hamlet in a strong showing for the Bard in the capital from the U.K. theater troupe most devoted to him over the long term. As always, it was invigorating to see these eight plays in sequence, so that one clocks, for instance, the way in which Richard III acts as an exemplary sequel to Henry VI, Part III. But amidst a superlative ensemble that found Richard Cordery, Katy Stephens and many others at the top of their game, a young unknown emerged with startling clarity and force in Jonathan Slinger’s Richard II: part dethroned queen, every bit a wounded, mournful manchild. This was acting at its most emotionally (and even, on occasion, physically) naked. From a group of players who were quite properly listed alphabetically, a star undoubtedly was born.

The Norman Conquests
A splendid year for the Old Vic was capped by my production of the year, which was actually a trio of productions if one counts Alan Ayckbourn’s 1974 triptych, under the masterful direction of Matthew Warchus, as three separate shows. In the event, it was hard to separate out any one part of The Norman Conquests from its alternately biliously funny—and unabashedly bilious—whole, no matter in which order one saw Round and Round the Garden, Living Together and the ironically titled Table Manners, the last of which features one of the great dinner table scenes in a year full of them (consider by way of comparison The Family Reunion and August: Osage County, just for starters). This was exactly the sort of production one was sorry to see go, which is why news of its potential reemergence next fall on Broadway gives at least one cause for hope in the undoubtedly grim times ahead.

The Pride
New plays did exist during 2008, but one sometimes had to look away from the mainstream to find the most fully satisfying ones. Roy Williams’ Days of Significance at the Tricycle Theatre took a Shakespearean template in Much Ado About Nothing as a springboard for a biting tragicomedy about the binge drinking culture in a country at war both abroad and, on this evidence, also at home. And actor-turned-writer Alexi Kaye Campbell with his cunningly structured and wrenchingly acted The Pride brought a busy Royal Court year to a beautiful close in his depiction of London gay life circa 1958 and now. His conclusion: liberation doesn’t necessarily mean an end to loneliness. The expert director, meanwhile, was (once again) Jamie Lloyd. Watch for both men to make further waves.

Watch this space: performances of the year coming tomorrow!