WHEN TERRENCE MCNALLY'S Love! Valour! Compassion! transferred from off-Broadway's Manhattan Theatre Club to the Walter Kerr Theater last month, it instantly took on a special status: it became the sole new straight play on Broadway, and only the third to open there all season (out of 15 new productions in total). McNally rightly saw the distinction as dubious. "I take very little pleasure in it," he told a luncheon of the American Theater Wing shortly afterwards. "I wish there were 30 new plays on Broadway."
To find a thriving scene like that, McNally and other theater lovers can only look to London. There, not 30, but no fewer than 14 new plays are currently on mainstream stages. A total of 26 new plays opened in London during 1994, in contrast to 12 on Broadway during the '93-'94 season. The year before that, the tally was 24 in London, against just nine on Broadway.
Musicals, revivals, fresh stagings of the classics, all are vital to a robust theater; but new scripts are its lifeblood. What accounts for London's superiority in nurturing them? Lower production costs, a larger number of subsidized theaters, and a more informed audience are among the usual factors cited-and 400 years of theatrical tradition doesn't hurt either. Arthur Miller, one of several American playwrights who of late have been more warmly appreciated in England than at home, points out that the London theater allows plays to survive and even flourish in a middle range between hit or flop-the only fates available on Broadway. "Here," he says, "it has to be the Second Coming or it's nothing."
Just how rich and varied that middle range can be is shown by a sampling of recent openings in London. The best of the lot: Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard, whose brilliant 1993 Arcadia is still going strong in London (and opens on Broadway next week). Like Arcadia, Indian Ink interweaves two time periods and settings, in this case present-day England and 1930 India. Also like its companion piece, the new play is framed as a quest by a careerist academic who is loaded with data but doesn't have a clue. Here it's an American scholar researching the life of consumptive English poet Flora Crewe-in particular, whether Flora posed nude for an artist named Nirad Das while traveling in India for her health some 60 years ago, and if so, whether the portrait was the token of a love affair.
In Peter Wood's staging, the play glides cinematically among Indian scenes, Flora's letters home, the scholar's footnotes and reminiscences by Das' son and Flora's surviving sister (Margaret Tyzack) to create a tenderly comic rumination on the ironies of history and colonialism, of creativity and eros-all unexpectedly mellow for the pyrotechnical Stoppard. Art Malik catches Das' contradictory yearnings, caught up in India's independence movement yet in thrall to Dickens and all things English. Felicity Kendall wittily and poignantly plays the free-spirited Flora, who shows Das that only by being true to himself and his own culture can he find communion with her in the realm of art.