The Theater: Star-Crossed Haters

VIVAT! VIVAT REGINA!

by ROBERT BOLT

To insist on seeing “the new Neil Simon” or nothing is to enlist in New York’s legion of the theatrically self-deprived. In reality, Broadway is a pageant with something to beguile every eye. The latest treat is Vivat! Vivat Regina!, a vivid tapestry of passion, blood, majesty and death.

The play centers on the fierce duel of wiles and wills between Elizabeth I (Eileen Atkins) and Mary Stuart (Claire Bloom). The two never meet, yet each haunts the mind of the other. Robert Bolt writes a number of what might be called “blackboard scenes” to fill in the history, and he manages these cleverly and without pedantry.

He is fascinated by the drama of choice and its costs. In Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More had to choose between his conscience and his King. The queenly star-crossed haters of Vivat! must choose between their hearts and their crowns. Mary counts the world well lost for love and loses her head. Elizabeth enfrosts her sexual urges to make her throne secure. The bitterness and the poignance are that Mary sees in Elizabeth the empire she might have commanded, and Elizabeth sees in Mary the personal fulfillment she might have gained.

Hampered by a simulated French accent, Bloom lacks gravity in certain scenes, but her ravishing beauty is authority enough. With a voice that can raise a welt with a whisper, Atkins is monarch of all she surveys. The rest of the excellent cast helps make the Broadhurst Theater a plot of royal ground.