Three or four things I know about Harold Pinter who died in London on Christmas Eve, age 78:

To visit him in his Holland Park home was to enter unwittingly into a Pinter play. After greeting me at the door of his office—which was in a separate cottage in the grounds of the house where he lived with his wife, Antonia Fraser—he triple-locked the door behind him with great, deliberate care, like a jailor.

He was a coiled figure, politely wary and restrained, as if hiding something. I found myself absurdly feeling like a Pinter character. Was he locking me in? If not, who was he locking out? Dressed in black, he sat with marked stillness peering at me from behind his glasses.  read more »

Broadway must be the only industry in America that hasn’t noticed the country is in an economic crisis. Its powerful producers and theater owners aren’t just refusing to acknowledge reality. They’ve even got the chutzpah—or the manic greed—to increase ticket prices.

Take the price of an orchestra seat for the new hit musical Billy Elliot. It’s currently an extortionate $146 for the holiday season. The public subsequently catches a break in the New Year, but the cost of all its orchestra seats will still be a record $126.50 (which increases magically to $136.50 on Saturday nights).

Crisis? What crisis?

I VERY MUCH ENJOYED the fun and wit of Shrek, which has just opened at the Broadway Theatre, and I’d happily recommend it to anybody.  read more »

I went to see four Christmas and Chanukah shows recently, and I trust I won’t be revealing any bias—kayn aynhoreh—in anything I say about them.

Take Slava’s Snowshow, now at the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway. The masterly Russian clown’s production brought out the Grinch in me in this crucial respect: For the remainder of its limited run, the tickets are an extortionate $111.50 with the cheapest seats going for $69.50.

There are no reduced prices for children.

Furthermore, Snowshow is only just over an hour long: 90 minutes, including the interval.

Give us a break!

It’s a children’s show.  read more »

Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate, which has made a very welcome transfer to the Booth Theatre on Broadway, couldn’t be timelier.

Mr. Foote’s gentle, comic parable about self-interest and desperation over the fate of a family estate in the playwright’s imagined small town of Harrison, Texas, first premiered at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in 1989. With the rising anxiety about our economic future, the celebrated play and its genteelly feuding Southern characters have become more poignant. But only the prescient Mr. Foote, who ranks among America’s greatest playwrights, would make his point so charmingly in the unobtrusive manner of Chekhov.

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I urge you to see the new production of Martha Clarke’s Garden of Earthly Delights at the Minetta Lane Theatre, not least because the signature piece that Ms. Clarke created almost 25 years ago is so transparently lovely and sexy.

While her troupe of dancers is beautiful and utterly natural in its near-nudity, the work as a whole achieves a miraculous theatrical purity. As with the naked simplicity of Peter Brook’s 55-minute The Grand Inquisitor, Ms. Clarke’s 60-minute production is complete and amounts to a revolutionary statement.

There’s isn’t—praise be!—a video screen in sight. Garden of Earthly Delights isn’t yet another movie effect or virtual reality in the horror vacui of today’s desperate techno-theater.  read more »

Billy Elliot is the best thing to happen to Broadway for a long while. The hit West End show about a working-class boy in a doomed North of England coal mining town who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer pulls off a remarkable trick: It’s the first musical I’ve seen to successfully combine a huge dollop of sentiment with social fury.

The groundbreaking Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change (2004) had the fury, but—too bad for its chances of Broadway success—was too emotionally refined. Billy Elliot takes no prisoners. It’s an unabashed tearjerker and a fairy tale, an unusual hybrid of stardust and coal dust.  read more »

In last week’s column I argued in favor of the awesome simplicity of Peter Brook’s production of The Grand Inquisitor—that its complete lack of video effects amounted to a revolutionary statement nowadays. Mr. Brook has steadfastly avoided using the fashionable technological stuff (the computer-generated illusions, film projections, video images, infrared cameras, scrims and so on) in favor of an unmediated, utterly natural stage magic.

For a generation, Mr. Brook has been described as a guru of theater and one of its greatest directors. But no one appears to be listening to him.

It’s almost impossible not to see a new production today that isn’t in some way trying to be an onstage film—an alternative reality, or a simultaneous video.  read more »

It’s been 40 years since Peter Brook wrote in the opening to The Empty Space, his famous manifesto, “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

In his production of The Grand Inquisitor, adapted from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a man—the Grand Inquisitor—walks across an empty space while someone else—Jesus—is watching him. And so the play begins.

Mr. Brook, you might say, has arrived at the point where he began.  read more »

The 20th anniversary production on Broadway of David Mamet’s famous dissection of Hollywood, Speed-the-Plow, raises a burning question: In publicizing the play, has Mr. Mamet finally gone off his rocker?

His quite recent public conversion from a self-described “brain dead liberal” into some kind of neo-conservative pedagogue isn’t at issue here—except for his espousal of free market self-interest and greed. Profit (at any cost) is the theme of Speed-the-Plow, though the renowned dramatist put it differently in his Sept. 3 New York Times article, “Drama that Brings Home the Bacon,” which rationalized and plugged his play, and left me wondering about his sanity.  read more »

Simon McBurney, the avant-garde theater director, is the only director I’ve ever seen to take a bow not only after his own shows, but before. It wasn’t always so in the earlier days of Complicité, his London-based troupe with the French name. But the more successful Mr. McBurney has become, the more his vanity has gotten out of hand.

His preening custom of introducing his own productions before the curtain rises manages to upstage his cast and has been known to include embarrassing requests for audience participation. I’ve also seen him called up onstage post-performance to take a most reluctant bow along with his actors (thereby upstaging them once again).  read more »