No Good at Being Bad

Some of the most challenging work on the London stage these days is to be found not in the West End but behind the doors of two tiny fringe theaters. One is the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, headed by Sam Mendes, whose film debut American Beauty won him last year's Best Director Oscar. The other is the Almeida Theatre in Islington, steered by director Jonathan Kent and actor Ian McDiarmid — familiar to movie fans as the Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars series. These two hotspots have assumed a place-to-be-seen buzz among theater-goers.

The more ambitious...