Feeding an Attack of Geriatric Nostalgia with London Theater

London's theater managers must wonder whether there will ever again be enough bums on seats. This summer the pusillanimous tourists stayed away because of the foot-and-mouth epidemic. Why? No human being has ever been affected by foot-and-mouth disease, and the theaters have anyway always discouraged patrons from bringing their bovine and equine pets to performances. Now it is international terrorists who are keeping patrons glued to the telly. Where is the spirit of the London Blitz? I remember when the Luftwaffe bombs smashed everything above ground and the brave Irish terrorists then placed their bombs below ground among the huddled masses of women and children. Yet London theaters proudly displayed the defiant slogan "WE NEVER CLOSED."

I am having another attack of geriatric nostalgia. That is just as well, since the best plays this season have been revivals. When I say revivals I don't mean Aeschylus and Euripides. They were before my time. I mean revivals of plays first performed in my youth. What could be more nostalgic than Noel Coward's Private Lives, his best play? Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan are simply superb, and it is such a relief to see a production that has not been messed up by some "postmodern" whiz-kid director. Equal praise and another dose of nostalgia for Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes at the brave and always imaginative Donmar Warehouse Theatre. In the film Bette Davis' greedy Southern belle had personified evil. Penelope Wilton in this revival gives a lower-key interpretation of the role of Regina, with an aloof detachment, which makes the play more realistically powerful. Old pinko Lillian, who all her life competed with Dr. Goebbels for the Pulitzer Prize for mendacity, would have been delighted by the "Rent-A-Crowd" demonstrators complaining about her play "promoting fox-hunting."

That great actor Ian Holm plays the father in the revival of Pinter's The Homecoming and is quite excellent in this play about domestic territorial imperatives. Ian Hart takes the role of Lenny, a part once played by Pinter himself. The two of them manipulate the ice-maiden Lia Williams into a life of prostitution, a role she adopts with the enthusiasm of an Oscar-winner thanking the audience. The ambiguity and menace, normally Pinter's trademarks, are barely noticeable. Just as well, since CNN gives us that daily from the Taliban boys.

But ambiguity and tragic black humor are not missing from A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. There was a time when several plays on Broadway were about the disabled, either the blind or deaf & dumb, or paraplegics. I was a coproducer then with the late Roger Stevens of the deeply moving play Wings, by Arthur Kopit. We opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington, then Broadway, and finally the Royal National Theatre in London. Unanimous rave reviews, which to this day make me feel that I have achieved something worthwhile. But the play failed with the public. The main character had been disabled by a stroke, and that is a threat to every human, whereas, for instance, blindness fortunately is not. Joe Egg, Peter Nichols' extraordinary play, is about a spastic child and his parents. It breaks your heart, and, so as to confuse your emotions, the dialogue is brilliantly funny. I saw the play first 40 years ago, and to this day, including its revival at the New Ambassadors Theatre, I find it deeply disturbing and wonderful.

After shooting off all my fireworks in praising this quartet of brilliant revivals I find it difficult to comment about a transatlantic import, Jitney, by August Wilson, now staged in the huge Lyttelton Theatre at the National. The decor is wonderful, but it is still a derelict garage in a black American ghetto, so the stage drowns the action. The actors are all quite excellent and convey the hardship of their lives as tired, disillusioned cab drivers. You would like to buy them all a drink, indeed a full hot meal. But in my view human sympathy is not the same as good theater. If the venue and the characters had been poor white folks no producer would have touched the script. I dislike myself for saying this, but I was provoked by the hyperbole of a critic comparing August Wilson to Chekhov.

Last month I praised the big surrealist show in the huge setting of the Tate Modern gallery. Inspired by this I drove down to Farley in Sussex, the home Roland Penrose shared with his beautiful American wife, Lee Miller. The house is now run by their son, Antony, as a museum. It is full of memorabilia from Picasso, Miro, Man Ray, Henry Moore and many others. Quite fascinating. Penrose almost singlehandedly introduced the surrealists and the great painters of early 20th-century Paris to the insular British. He came from a family of prosperous and austere Quaker bankers, who naturally disapproved of Bohemian artistes. The joke was of course that Penrose ended up with a greater fortune hanging on his walls than any of his surly banker relatives had. Penrose gave most of his treasures away, but what is left in his old home is still worth the journey.