‘THE MYSTERIES’ OF THE WEST END BOOM

While Broadway whimpers, the West End booms. Especially in the summer, when the American tourists descend on London, making little cries of delight at how cheap theater tickets are (seldom over $20).

Linda Joffee of the Christian Science Monitor reports that 46 of the 47 West End theaters are offering shows this summer--everything from Deborah Kerr in “The Corn Is Green” to Anthony Hopkins in “Pravda,” Howard Brenton’s study of a British press lord of acquisitive mien, possibly patterned after Rupert Murdoch.

Plus the usual line of American musicals, thrillers, rowdy farces, classical revivals (Alan Bates in “Dance of Death”) and Shakespeare (“Twelfth Night” outdoors in Regent’s Park). But the show of the summer for Joffee’s money is “The Mysteries.”

British critics agree. Like “Nicholas Nickleby,” this is one of those epic theater events that only a state-supported theater could initiate--in this case, the National Theatre of Great Britain. It’s an all-day compendium of medieval Biblical plays, starting with the Creation and ending with the Last Judgement. Believers and non-believers alike have found it enthralling.

The plays are adapted from those that were once presented by various guilds in towns like York and Wakefield during religious holidays. Adapted by Tony Harrison and staged by the National’s Bill Bryden--who has been working on the project for eight years--the plays struck most observers as being both transcendent and earthy: nothing at all like an evensong service at Canon Chasuble’s church in the dale.

Michael Billington of the Guardian: “The plays are always human and concrete. When the God of Doomsday appears to lament the prevalence of sin and his disappointment in his creation. . . , He sounds like a grieving father rather than a pompous divine.”

John Barber in the Daily Telegraph: “The whole is longer than the Oberammergau Passion Play and artistically superior: better written, closer to its medieval inspiration and blessedly free of pompous reliosity, though not of frightening power.”

Carol Woodis in City Limits had some problems with the “patriarchal bias” and anti-Semitism of the original texts, but found the production “by any standards a stunning theatrical achievement”--the most exciting theater marathon since the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Nicholas Nickleby.” Another critic, the Financial Times’ Michael Coveney, thought that it outstripped ‘Nicholas Nickleby.”

“The Mysteries” began at the National’s experimental stage, the Cottesloe, but has now been transferred to the West End’s Lyceum Theatre, where the plays can be seen one at a time during certain days of the week, or in one sitting. An American tour would seem to be very much in the picture, considering the National’s recent budget cuts at the hands of the Thatcher government.

What the West End--and Broadway--would be without theater events originated in the non-profit sector is the obvious question these days, and Billington devoted a column to it recently in the Guardian. Thanks to “candle-end government economies,” he warned, “the British theater right now is on the brink of losing everything achieved in 30 years.”

But this summer, at least, it’s riding high.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Martin Richards, producer of the recently departed “Grind,” to the UPI’s Frederick Winship: “Maybe the thing that’s wrong with Broadway is that there are too many people asking what’s wrong with it.”