London Theater Journal: That Born in a Trunk Tribe

Johan Persson “Trelawny of the Wells,” a portrait of journeyman actors in the Victorian theater.

The topic was work and its instability - chasing jobs, landing jobs, losing jobs. It’s a common enough subject, especially these days. But the patois of the people sitting behind me at the Charing Cross Theater the other afternoon instantly identified them as members of an ancient and eternal tribe.

Excitedly discussing auditions and callbacks and workshops and tours, they sounded fond and fretful, extravagantly supportive and subliminally competitive. “Ah, young actors,” I thought, “just starting off and full of hope.” And then I turned around and saw that eery one of this group of four or five had to be well past 60.

I’ve been thinking about those performers, wondering, for example, if that woman with the cane had gotten the role in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” after all. Certainly, they came to mind a few nights later as I watched the Donmar Warehouse production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s “Trelawny of the Wells,” a portrait of journeyman actors in the Victorian theater.

For really, the talk in this amiable, creaky comedy from 1898 wasn’t all that different from what I’d heard in the row behind me a few days earlier. Pinero’s characters trafficked happily in the same giddy trade gossip, the same sense of being a breed apart and, above all, the same odds-defying hopefulness.

Did any of the actors on whom I had eavesdropped try out for one of these parts, perhaps Maybe that of the once exa! lted, now elderly and underemployed actress who said she would scrub the floors if it kept her in the theater It would have been hard to top Maggie Steed, the actress I saw in that role, who performed with both rueful dignity and devastating timing.

When it comes to sentimentalizing and sending up their own, there’s no people like show people. I can see why the film director Joe Wright (“Pride and Prejudice,” “Atonement”) chose “Trelawny” for his stage debut. His parents ran a celebrated puppet troupe in London, so he grew up among theater folk, and his affinity for that realm was evident in the theatrical artifice of his recent “Anna Karenina.”

His “Trewlany,” though high-spirited, never quite settles on a consistent tone of voice. As adapted by the playwright Patrick Marber (“After Mss Julie” and “Don Juan in Soho” at the Donmar), Pinero’s original script has been amended to emphasize a generational conflict between old-school, floridly histrionic and newer, more naturalistic approaches to acting. But that clash isn’t really carried through credibly in the performances here.

Still, all the cast members have a fine old time cutting loose in that special way that is granted to actors playing hammy actors, whether the show is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” or Noel  Coward’s “Hay Fever.” And Ron Cook is pure bliss alternating between the roles of the theater boarding-house landlady and the hidebound uncle of the dashing but timid young man (Joshua Silver) who loves our exquisite leading ingénue.

She is played by Amy Morgan, a ringer for the young Meryl Streep, who by the way made her Broadway debut in another role in “Trelawny” in 1975; it was Mary Beth Hurt who played Ms. Morgan’s role, while! Mandy Pa! ntinkin was…. But I’m getting carried away, and I don’t even have the excuse of begin an actor.

And when unlikely, problem-vanquishing benedictions were finally rained down upon these ever-striving, ever-hoping creatures of the theater â€" via a play-within-a-play no less - there wasn’t a dry eye, as they say (such clichés are appropriate here), including mine.

Eric Richmond Betty Buckley in “Dear World.”

I was moved in a more complicated way by Betty Buckley’s performance in “Dear World,” the 1969 Jerry Herman musical which is only now receiving its London premiere, in a production by Gillian Lynne at the tiny Charing Cross Theater. Ye, that was where I overhead the silver-headed actors talking about their trade.

A notorious flop on Broadway, where it starred that ultimate trouper Angela Lansbury, this adaptation of Jean Giraudoux’s “Madwoman of Chaillot” has maintained a steady cult following.

That’s largely because of the score, which features some of Mr. Herman’s most delicate melodies.

The plot, like anything by or derived from Giraudoux, is clotted with a Gallic whimsy that it’s all too easy to be suffocated by. And Ms. Lynne (the choreographer on “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera”) doesn’t avoid a feeling of liqueur-like stickiness in her scaled-down, attractively designed interpretation.

The story, after all, pits crazy old ladies, led by Ms. Buckley’s Aurelia, against corporate meanies out to destroy post-World War II Paris for their own greedy purposes. The songs are heavy on swelling accordion strains and lyrics about seizing the day and how a single person can change the wo! rld.

Ms. Buckley, who is made of sterner stuff than the fey Aurelia, didn’t seem all that convinced by herself when she had to spread sunshine and lead parades. But as anyone who saw her in “Cats” or “Sunset Boulevard” knows, she’s terrific at probing through song the minds of the lost and broken.

Hearing her nuanced interpretations of “I Don’t Want to Know” and “And I Was Beautiful,” in a raw and wispy voice that transcends nostalgia, was a welcome reminder of her distinctive gifts and of the subtler skills of Mr. Herman, who is best known for the brassier charms of “Hello, Dolly” and “Mame.”

Afterward, I was eager to eavesdrop again, and find out what the group sitting behind me thought of the show. As far as I could hear, though, they were still chattering about their own job prospects. Actors, god bless ‘em.