London’s Season to Feature Plays by Pinter and Mamet

New plays by Harold Pinter and David Mamet as well as Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” are among the highlights of the National Theatre’s upcoming 1988-89 season.

“I couldn’t possibly be more enthusiastic or optimistic about our artistic future,” said Richard Eyre, the new artistic director of the three-theater complex on London’s south bank.

The 45-year-old director, whose production of the musical “Guys and Dolls” was one of the National’s greatest successes, begins his five-year contract Sept. 1, succeeding Sir Peter Hall as head of one of Britain’s two leading government-subsidized theaters.

Of principal interest in the National’s upcoming roster are the world premieres of new plays by Pinter and David Hare, two leading contemporary British playwrights.

Michael Gambon, now starring in a commercial production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” will star in Pinter’s “Mountain Language,” a 20-minute play opening Oct. 20. The work marks the first stage piece in four years from the author of such acknowledged modern masterworks as “The Birthday Party,” “The Homecoming” and “Betrayal.”

Hare, whose plays “Plenty” and “A Map of the World” were successful in New York, will open his new show, “The Secret Rapture,” on Oct. 4.

January will see the British premiere of Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” directed by Gregory Mosher, who staged the hit production on Broadway, which featured Madonna.

Star-watchers will keep an eye out next March for Eyre’s own production of “Hamlet,” which marks the return to the National after three years of Daniel Day Lewis, the gifted young star of the films, “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

Dame Judi Dench will play Gertrude to his tortured Danish prince. The Shakespeare play ties Eyre’s regime to his predecessors, Hall and Laurence Olivier, each of whom directed “Hamlet” during his first year as artistic director.

Other plays on the horizon are “Indivisibles,” a Tony Harrison play due next spring to feature opera star Teresa Stratas; the British bow of Joshua Sobol’s “Ghetto,” set in a Jewish ghetto in Lithuania, and a new adaptation by novelist Angela Carter of Frank Wedekind’s 19th-Century piece, “Lulu.”