Quotes of the Day

The mosquito knows the elephant better than the elephant knows the mosquito. The little guy has to have a more acute view of the big guy: to know his habits, keep out of his way. The odds are disproportionate for the two creatures: at stake is the elephant's comfort, the mosquito's life. Everybody is aware of who can stomp whom.

Analogy alert! Similarly, the rest of the world surely knows America better than we know them — maybe better than we know ourselves. This is partly because everyone else looks in at us: U.S. popular culture has colonized the globe until our movies, music, TV, jeans, magazines are effectively theirs, with our accent. And partly because we don't look out. The distribution in the U.S. of foreign-language films, novels, pop songs is minuscule, irrelevant to the American masses. So when we hear something sassy about ourselves from foreigners — say, the French at, say, the U.N. — it shocks and hurts us. But that's because we haven't been attending to the constant murmur of the talk we provoke. The elephant doesn't hear the buzz either.

Go abroad and you hear it. I do. Each year, as summer approaches, I make a hajj to London's West End to see the latest shows. I was there this year during an unseasonably warm spell. The English are so unused to balmy weather that, when the sun takes a robust turn, they rush outside, roll up their sleeves and flop on a lawn or bench for a London broil. All that fair skin takes a ruthless incinerating; by day's end, the only color anyone's wearing on face and arms is pink. I guess, considering the caustic images of American statesmen and media figures in the shows I saw over there, my face should have been red.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT FOREIGNERS (NORWEGIANS AND LONDONERS)

After the crappiest selection in decades at the Cannes Film Festival, I found a terrific season of London shows. One was actually about London: the musical "Our House." I hadn't hoped for much. Since it's a trunk show of songs from the 80s ska group Madness, and since it's about a young man who splits in two to see whether he'd turned out right if he went bad, the show could have been a mix of the amateur ABBA show "Mamma Mia" and London's longest-running bad musical, "Blood Brothers" (15 years and it hasn't had the grace to close). But the Tim Firth book weaves the songs smartly around a cleverly developed situation, and director Matthew Warchus moves the dense human traffic with lightning precision. Even the dancing's good. Run — fly — to London before the show, which won the Olivier Award for Best Musical, closes. You have two weeks.

A fortuity of Ibsen revivals generated two excellent productions: Trevor Nunn's staging of "The Lady from the Sea," starring Natasha Richardson, and Adrian Noble's "Brand," with Ralph Fiennes. (I missed Patrick Stewart in "The Master Builder"). Fiennes, his thin voice willing itself to fierce majesty, is ideal as Brand the mad priest, so devoted to saving people for God that he destroys them. The piece ends with a literally moving coup de theatre that ... well, go see for yourself. Cheapest round-trip New York-London airfare: $335.

"Lady from the Sea" has a plot that's high Harlequin: a dark and stormy night, a chronically sensitive young wife aching for a strong rogue to free her from the cage of marital propriety — Nunn brought his patented clarity of emotional line within a vigorous visualization. And Richardson virtually channeled her mom: she had all the intensity, and nearly the magic, of Vanessa Redgrave in her early radiance. This show has closed, but there's plenty else to see in London, and when you get there you'll find cheap, cozy bed-sits for under $100 a night.

(AND SOME ITALIANS) (AT LEAST, THEY THINK THEY ARE)

The swankest show in the West End is "Absolutely (Perhaps)," Martin Sherman's adaptation of the Pirandello play usually known in English as "Right You Are (If You Think You Are)." Director Franco Zeffirelli, still sparking glamorous ideas at 80, also designed the production: instead of walls, he has grids of rectangular jigsaw pieces flanked by walled mirrors. The set handsomely visualizes the play's core: a puzzle demanding reflection. On either side of the set are two rows of seats for members of the audience — our surrogates in considering the scandal that unfolds, silent (for the most part) judges in the trial, or magic show, that unfolds before them.

Here's the delicious dilemma Pirandello poses: Three strange characters: a man (we'll say A), his wife (B) and an older woman (C), whom the man has forbidden his wife to contact. A says it's because C is mad: that she believes the man's wife is her daughter, when in fact her daughter was the man's first wife, who died in an earthquake, and B is his second. C says A is mad: that he mistakenly believed his wife had died in an earthquake, and to humor him B pretended to be another woman, whom he then married. You're skipping this paragraph, but my pleasure in recalling this production must overrule your bored befuddlement. The disputants plead their respective cases: individually in Act One, then together in Act Two, then with the mysterious wife at the climax.

Which strand of gossip is true? The townspeople want to know — or do they? As long as the matter is in doubt, they can keep nattering and give their shallow lives the semblance of drama. They want to believe the husband, because he speaks with such fiery protectiveness. They want to believe Signora Frola, because she was the first to speak, and because she clucks with such matronly concern over her daughter and her son-in-law, and because Joan Plowright invests her with such easy dignity. In fact, there are no facts, just testimony. As Laudisi, the one skeptic ion the crowd, says, "Oh please! What can you learn from facts? ... What on earth can we ever know about anyone else? Do you think we know, really know, who other people are, or what they are, or what they do, or why?"

The play may be a surreal charade, a pre-Borgesian construct, but it is beautifully arranged and acted. And in demonstrating how the mind can be fooled, it manages to touch the playgoer's heart. At the end — I've decided you're not going to London just because I recommend it, and if you are you can skip this paragraph — the mystery woman, whose name is either Lina or Julia (or neither), materializes, embracing her mother fervently, kissing her husband passionately. Her gestures take no sides in the dispute; she seems equally indulgent of the contradictory beliefs held by these two people who obsessively, perhaps quite madly, love her.

In a time of minimalist drama, where two or four characters try to occupy a bare stage, it's a joy to set the set filled so profligately with people — 14 in the official cast, plus a few surprises. Each role is attractively embodied, and at the end, when the mystery woman materializes, she (lovely, grave Alice Selwyn) has the star quality the part demands. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Among the patrons in theater lobbies each summer, the prevailing accent is (accents are) American. I always figured they came over to hear how the language ought to be spoken; the English are so good at English. These days, it's heard more and more on the stage, emerging from the wisecracking mouths of some pretty nasty, venal or certifiably nutso characters. A team at the National is attempting a blend of the racy, rickety newspaper comedy "The Front Page" and its gender-switched movie version, the sublime "His Girl Friday." (This new version, by John Guare, keeps too much of the old play, and the show still has rickets.)

The two other hot London items are more corrosive still about the U.K.'s uncouth cousins across the pond. The plays skirt libel; indeed, they miniskirt it. I can't say I was personally offended — I love to hate Americans' brash idiocies as much as the Brits. Still... I wonder if this would fit on the front of a T shirt: "I went to London and all I saw were shows about lousy Americans."

SATIRES AND STRIPES FOREVER

The President of the United States enters (in a Superman costume, holding a teddy bear) to the strains of the "Star Spangled Banner" and exits, two absurdist hours later, to "God Bless America." In between, the Arts Theatre is rife with farce and libel.

"The Madness of George Dubya" has a premise meant to titillate Lefties on either edge of the Atlantic. A satire of the new American monarchy, it imagines George W. Bush as the idiot dauphin who has ascended to the throne and now stumbles into inventing an unjust war against a nonthreatening foe. An extra inducement — given that "Dubya" was first staged last summer, and that each week before, during and after the Iraq War has introduced new evidence of the Bush Adminstration's naivete and perfidy — is that the play, as its producers state, "is kept bang-up-to-the-minute with daily re-writes churned out at a furious pace by the writer Justin Butcher."

Gee. Aristophanes mixed with "The Daily Show." For theater lovers and Bush haters, this is swell. Alas, the play isn't. The production and performances have a broad, ragged tone; it's amateur night in Blighty.

Though the title of the play echoes Alan Bennett's historical comedy "The Madness of George III" (known in the U.S. as "The Madness of King George"), Butcher's direct inspiration is Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Cold War farce "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." Much, much of the film's dialogue is repeated verbatim. The film's Air Force base venue moved from the U.S. to Britain. The characters' names get only the mildest makeovers: Gen. Ripper to Gen. Kipper, Buck Turgidson to Chuck Gorgidson, Group Capt. Mandrake to Windbreaker. No question that the clever screenplay by Peter George, Terry Southern and Kubrick might be smartly tweaked to reflect later anxieties. ("Dubya" has one such twist: the Group Capt., who originally had been tortured by the Nazis in WWII, has here been mistreated by the Argentines during the more benign Falklands conflict.) But the play drags on, and drags down the original.

Still, it's bracing to see somebody, in some field of the arts, bring a little asperity to the events leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq....

WE INTERRUPT THIS THEATER REVIEW FOR A POLITICAL RANT

That's right, folks, another assault from the left-wing New York media — me. (I don't have a lot of company.) But even movie critics and professional nostalgiacs watch the news, have opinions, nurture passions and grudges. I had them in September 2001, when I wrote in this space: "We dwelt in what may seem an Eden of innocence. Or was it ignorance to think we were immune to attack? ... Now we awake to the nightmare that tens of millions of faraway innocents live every moment. September 11 was the day we joined the rest of the world. The real world." The events that followed — events devised and executed by the U.S. this time — persuade me we haven't learned from the obvious lessons of history.

For Americans, tragedy used to be what happened to other people. It was a story that ran deep inside the first section of the New York Times, it described misfortunes befalling people not within our sphere of influence (or interest) and — well, frankly, we were too fat and happy to care.

Sept. 11 changed that, but not in a healthy or therapeutic way. Tragedy was now something that happened only to us. Instead of forging a bond with other, more long-suffering victims of genocide in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Rwanda and too many other spots on the globe, the attack isolated Americans. It pricked the bubble of our invulnerability and made us feel uniquely vulnerable one moment, righteously pugnacious the next. It also afforded us the luxury available to a superpower but not to the rest of oppressed humanity: military vengeance.

In America before the war, far too many commentators — and virtually all Democratic politicians — were cowed by the mass of misinformation the Bush-Dick-Colin crowd shoveled out about Iraq's supposed arms stash. I except, always, "The Daily Show with John Stewart," which bravely hoisted the flag of progressive skepticism four nights a week. It and BBC World Service became the two most reliable news services available before and during the War.

Those of us on the American left saw that Bush's boys cooked up war fever against Iraq because they were frustrated at being unable to find Osama bin Laden. Well, they could find Saddam, and they could destroy him. They were like a man who gets his ego busted all day at the office, then comes home and kicks the dog. Saddam was the dog who could be kicked out. That's why they cunningly confused, in their preemptive pitch to the American people, Saddam's secular thugs in Baghdad with Osama's religious terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Bush wanted to prove America was still the big dog, and Iraq was our chew toy. Indeed, the lunatic profligacy of the enterprise — its needlessness, its expense in lives, money and reputation — was for them the best argument in its favor. The Iraq attack proved we could do ... anything. We weren't the world's sheriff any more; we were the mean hombre who spits tobacco juice in the eye of international law.

Last October, the two sides in the conflict laid out their positions. Tariq Aziz, interviewed on "60 Minutes," told Mike Wallace that Iraq had no nuclear or chemical weapons, but that he feared war was inevitable. Colin Powell, a few days later, told the U.N. he had evidence that Iraq had the means to attack the U.S. Watching the two presentations, I remember feeling creepy that I believed Iraq's pitchman but not America's. Now we know: Aziz (and thus Saddam) told the truth; Powell (and thus Bush) didn't.

Being validated by history gives us peaceniks little comfort. We didn't stop our country from doing to Iraq what the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor: strike at a country on the other side of the world because of a paranoid delusion that it might some day attack us. I guess the left does have the luxury of gloating. (Even the Democrats are developing a spine, eight months too late, suddenly remembering they're the opposition party and raising questions about the Bush-whacking they fell for last fall.) But we'll settle for mocking the people who got the U.S. into this mess and who continue to sink into it as their rationalizations are exposed.

So we'll lap up the progressive satire available four nights a week on "The Daily Show." (This Thursday's deconstruction of the Bush press conference was brilliant. High point: Bush's blaming of the tepid U.S. economy on TV news producers who shook consumer confidence by blaring the phrase "March to War!" from last summer to this spring, thus; and Stewart's observation: "Yeah, why were they doing that? I mean, it's not like some asshole was marching us to war.") And we'll cheer on the idea, if not the reality, of an anti-Bush burlesque like "The Madness of George Dubya."

And with that, back to our review...

DUBYA JEOPARDY

Most English parodies of Americans have a raw edge. We're seen as big, loud and clumsy, and our political and economic power makes our heavy footfalls the topic of fear as well as derision; we can crush other nations without trying, or caring. George W. Bush, under the cartoonist's brush, acquires the malaproperties of Eisenhower, the clumsiness of Gerald Ford, the homey vagueness of Ronald Reagan, the open-faced idiocy of Dan Quayle. (Republican statesmen have screwed up the language and the world. Democrats, like F.D.R., Kennedy and Clinton, just screwed — a priapic predilection that endeared them to Europeans and infuriated many Americans.)

So, in "The Madness," Bush 43 rails xenophobically against "tourists an' brown folks who come to America and do real bad things. So we are having a War on Tourism." He chest-thumps that "I'm the elected President. [Pause.] I'm the President." He approves a Project for the New American Century — PNAC — which is a euphemism for the Plan for Nukin' Arab Countries. His advisers are out of "Reservoir Dogs," tough guys with color-coded names. (Donald Rumsfeld, who calls anyone opposing him "a cheese-eatin' surrender monkey," is "Mr. Black.") They sing "Dixie" with new lyrics: "Look away,/ Look away,/ Let's all play/ Kick Saddam."

In the play, as in the war, Bush the Conqueror abuses staunch allies and critical ones. He treats Tony Blair — Tony Bleer in the play — with the easy contempt any he-man Texan would lavish on any nellie Brit. On hearing that chemical weapons have been found in the Moselle, he sternly advises the French people to "Lay down your weapons, as you did in 1940," and proclaims, "My quarrel is not with you, but with your evil leader, Jacques Iraq." (That pun will be familiar to "Daily Show" viewers.)

The show also notes the Administration's bizarre act of transference, from Osama to Saddam, and nails it to the War Room wall. The play's Bush and his Caligari cabinet of advisers conflate names and nations — "Saddama bin Laden," "Pak-arabistan," "Iraqistan," "Talibanistan" — to demonstrate both their ignorance and their willful distortion of geopolitics.

The play's one original, articulate and provocative moment comes in Act II, when an Iraqi makes a passionate speech about his country's sorrows at Western hands. He describes the creation of his nation as a British whim, and notes that in 1937 (actually the spring of 1941) the U.K. bombed Iraq, forced its ruler to flee and installed a puppet monarch. "Saddam," the man says, "is the child of Western policy." He blames the U.S. for the 80s' Iran-Iraq War, in which, he says, "a million more Iraqis died." (The accepted number is a million from both countries.) He derisively dismisses the charge that Iraq hoarded WMD: "We will shoot down your missiles with, what — a large catapult? UNSCOM took all our fucking weapons."

Now that the invasion is a success, what can Bush (whom the Iraqi calls the "Thief-in-Chief") claim credit for? Two things: "the looting of our hospitals, libraries, museums — 5,000 years of history destroyed, so you can work your imperial delusions." And the assurance of worldwide terrorism. The result, the Iraqi says, will be not democracy but the "crowning achievement of Western civilization: jihad."

"Dubya" has another spokesperson for the Arab side: Yasmina the Cleaner, a terrorist for peace. Yasmina proposes to kill all the Bush biggies unless they agree to her five-part plan: a Palestinian state; the liberation of Chechnya and Vladimir Putin's trial as a war criminal; free AIDS treatment for Africans; U.S. approval of the Kyoto Accord; and fair trade (a bit of an anticlimax, that one). The Bushies refuse, the world blows up and the company sings Tom Lehrer's nuclear-incineration march, "We Will All Go Together When We Go."

There, now, is everyone offended? "George Dubya" closes August 23. But, I'm assured by a source close to the White House, the madness will linger on.

"SPRINGER" FEVER

"Slut junky! Crack whore! Three-nipple cousin-fucker!" Those are some of the epithets flung, and sung, in "Jerry Springer: The Opera," playing to packed houses full of scalped-ticketholders at the Royal National Theatre. One reason the seats are hot is that — all right, the second act takes place in Hell — but also because the National is a repertory theater, and "Springer" has played as few as seven performances a month. (It moves to the Cambridge Theatre in October.) The main reason is that this is a thrilling show, wild and canny, with a point of view under its delight in exposing people who can't stop exposing themselves.

These are the guests on Springer's daily talk show, still on the air after a dozen years of demeaning every standard of propriety, humanity and entertainment. The first half of "JS:TO" is a surreal musical version of the TV show: domestic depravity and depression raised to farce pitched at C over high L. Jerry, the 20-person chorus sings, is "Bigger than Dave Letterman/ Bigger than Bob Hope/ ... As big as the fuckin' Pope." On comes the parade of trailer-park detritus — the lesbian dwarf, the morbidly obese Romeo in a diaper, the ex-lap-dancing post-operative transsexual — all getting in touch with their "inner Valkyries." Though Jerry does muse, "We never had a maggot-eating gimp on this show."

(Spoiler alert: naughty words abound in the next few paragraphs — if you haven't been sent running by my stream of political invective.)

Jerry (Michael Brandon) doesn't sing; everyone else does, to verdantly melodic, torridly gross-out tunes by composer Richard Thomas and his co-lyricist Stewart Lee, who also directed. They put trained voices to such dewy sentiments as "When you're dead and buried in the grass/ I'll dig you up and fuck you in the ass." They belt out hit-sounding numbers, if radio were X-rated, like "I Just Want to Fuck an' Dance" and "What a cunty cunty cunty cunty cunty cunty-cunt!" When Jerry is the defendant in a trial in Hell, he is told he has to put on his show from Hades. And what if he doesn't? He'll get "Tortured and toasted,/ Barbecued and roasted/ And fucked up the ass with barbed wire." Jerry asks if there's an upside, and the Chorus sings: "NOT getting fucked up the ass with barbed wire."

But Thomas and Lee know that obscenity is the flip side of sentiment. These trolls and trollops have dreams as well as outsize quirks. It';s been a while since you've heard lyrics like "O how my heart/ Aches for love" and "I wanna sing something beautiful." The astonishment is, they do: some of the ripest melodies since the ABBA guys' great score for "Chess" in the mid-80s.

Before the "show" begins, the warm-up guy tells his on-stage audience The Rules: "No heckling, no fighting, no throwing things or throwing up." When "JS:TO" opened, the same instructions might have been needed by the staid regulars at the Royal National Theatre. Thomas and Lee say they had rules of their own. One is: "Never write anything over three minutes in length." They break that rule twice in the first two songs, but by then the audience is so hyped, no one's keeping score. That's because the show is so smartly staged: it's a grand idea with attention to wonderful detail. One bickering bride, Sheryl, enters with a train of toilet paper stuck to her shoe heel. (I have a flashback vision of Gilda Radner's Roseanne Roseannadanna telling the "SNL" audience of the time she spotted Jackie Onassis at Elaine's with just such an accessory.) When Sheryl notices her gaffe, she is unflummoxed: she detaches the bathroom tissue, balls it up and sticks it in her bra.

LOVING AMERICA — THE WORST OF IT

Both "George Dubya" and "Springer" go after their subjects with a hatchet. But "Dubya" wants blood for Dubya; "Springer" just wants to give Jerry a scare and a haircut. The difference is partly one of craft. The sloppy "Dubya" goes after its target with the same finesse displayed by the U.S. troops storming the Hussein boys' hideout, whereas a crimson joy spurts out of "Springer." It's rough, not raw, and exhilarating in its inventiveness. The transsexual is described in song as a "Chick with a dick with a heart!" "Springer" is an opera that's improper, but with art.

Attitude counts too. "Dubya" simply hates Dubya. But Thomas and Lee have a fondness, a shout-it-to-the-rafters, spill-it-on-TV hard-on for the lurid, bombastic, melodramatic emotions that are so exhibitionistically exposed on the Springer program. They cherish the TV show for its operatic excesses — what is opera if not a scream sung, a catfight put to beautiful music? — but also because they recognize that cry as the most basic human need. The love that a typical "Springer" guest will do anything to get, Thomas and Lee pour out in their music.

I think they also love "Springer" for what they see as its torrential, quintessential Americanness. They love a thousand things about Americans that I hate. They love it at its worst, in a showbiz era when bad is great and no social defect is too embarrassing not to be a career move. (Am I alone in wanting to love America when it tries its polite, humane, generous best?) Yet I love "Jerry Springer: The Opera." Good theater can toss all kinds of prejudices into a cocked opera hat.

Can't fly to London? The QE2 sails from New York to Southampton on Sunday, August 17. Fares start at $1,899, if you don't mind swabbing decks. But you will hear English spoken, at least by the crew.

• Richard Corliss
• Two notorious Americans — Bush and Springer — dominate a fine season of West End shows