American Eyes on the London Stage : While British and U.S. theater overlap, temperamental differences will always keep the twain apart

“Drowning in dignity,” is how Jackie Mason described this city in an article he wrote last week outlining the differences between London and New York. “I’ll bet they don’t sell half as many upset stomach pills in London as they do in New York.”

Having just completed a three-month London run of his “World According to Me,” Mason should know. There are few things the English do better than maintain dignity, serve tea, write glorious literature and perfect their theater. A recent week in this town only reinforced these impressions.

Consider: The Royal Shakespeare Company is in serious financial and artistic crisis. Artistic director Terry Hands has announced his resignation for 1991, and there are those who feel he should leave sooner so the company can get on with some much-needed regrouping and reassessments.

Financial cutbacks by the Arts Council of Great Britain have also forced the more experimental Royal Court, that upstart of Sloane Square, to close its second theater for six months. Theatre Upstairs is where many young playwrights got their start. Closing it is an unprecedented move--and too American for comfort, according to artistic director Max Stafford-Clark. But you’d never know any of this on the West End where, except for prices inching up, things seem to be purring along, even if a bit staid and overdignified.

Going to the theater in London, you will notice, is becoming as expensive as going to the theater on Broadway. Fifteen English pounds, or about $26, is now the average cost of a ticket, and in terms of the falling dollar, not exactly a bargain. It can also run as high as $40 (for the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, “Aspects of Love”) or as low as $7 (Caryl Churchill’s “Ice Cream,” at the Royal Court). Add to that the purchase of the program (from $1.50 to $2), a Euro-custom not confined to Brits alone.

Yet while British and U.S. theater overlap, temperamental differences will always keep the twain apart. A common language isn’t everything. The British tend to be fascinated by things that we find puzzling and puzzled by the ones we find fascinating. Take David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” and Eric Overmyer’s “On the Verge,” both playing in London now. The British press greeted “M. Butterfly,” with polite admiration, often uncertain quite what to make of it. The ubiquitous “On the Verge” was on the whole more warmly received in London than it has been at home.

When it comes to home-grown product, British theater is older, more seasoned and more inbred than its U.S. counterpart. A visit to “Single Spies,” the twin Alan Bennett bill of carefully scripted scenes from the lives of the “Cambridge spies” at the Queen’s Theatre, turns out to be traditionalism at its most immaculate. Or excessive. The first part, called “An Englishman Abroad” (which was also filmed for television and seen locally on PBS with actress Coral Browne playing herself), chronicles a Moscow afternoon in the life of British spy Anthony Burgess (played by Simon Callow) and actress Browne (Prunella Scales in a worthy approximation of the inimitable Browne).

The second half--”A Question of Attribution”--finds Scales impersonating the Queen (Elizabeth II) as she drops in on Sir Anthony Blunt ostensibly to discuss pictures in her gallery. The conversation that follows epitomizes the British infatuation with dignity. It is a mesmerizing subversion of text by subtext. Nothing means what it says and the only lines that count are the ones found between the lines.

As much as the faint aura of international scandal that infects these pieces, precise timing, meticulous acting and hypnotic words are the main attraction--not only on the part of Scales, who delivers a subtle double tour de force in diametrically opposite roles, but also in Simon Callow’s Burgess (a vivid portrayal of a brilliant man gone to seed), and in author Bennett’s elitist aristocrat as Blunt.

It’s hard to imagine an American company presenting quite so calibrated an evening, especially one so heavily dependent on talk. American audiences willingly sat through the endlessly talky and convoluted “Breaking the Code,” on Broadway because they’ll sit through anything to see and hear Derek Jacobi.

Even Tom Stoppard’s brilliantly conceived “Hapgood,” at L.A.’s Doolittle Theatre, perfectly exemplifies the value the British place on highly cerebral theater. Their delight in rarefied intellectuality and perfectionism almost for its own sake, is simply not part of the American temperament. American audiences are conditioned to more action--and more heart--in their entertainment. It’s what seems to activate their juices.

Perhaps the most “American” British play on the London stage right now (as distinct from genuine made-in-America ones such as Lee Blessing’s “A Walk in the Woods” or Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”) is Alan Ayckbourn’s “Henceforward.” It’s a clever comedy that deals with life after street gangs, the vicissitudes of the creative impulse and simpler domestic problems.

This is not the time to divulge “Henceforward’s” plot, since the play is being considered for the Ahmanson’s next season--further proof, if one needed it, of Ayckbourn’s enormous American appeal. But there are challenging role reversals between Acts I and II, the daunting pivotal part of Jerome, a composer/father desperately trying to regain custody of his child and his creative life (given a masterful performance by Ian McKellen at London’s Vaudeville Theatre), and a mad finale to a chorus of electronic synthesizers that might qualify as fair competition for “The Phantom of the Opera.”

Ayckbourn is uncannily able to zero in on the American sensibility. His plays do well in the United States. “Henceforward” itself began at Houston’s Alley Theatre in 1987. Only Caryl Churchill, among other current British playwrights, seems to have as much luck in America.

“Ice Cream,” her new play at the Royal Court, actually straddles the Atlantic. It’s a deceptive, sparsely written account of an American couple visiting England in search of their roots. When they find them they might well wish they hadn’t. And when, in Act II, the couple’s newly discovered British relatives decide to repay the visit, issues of latent aggression begin popping up everywhere. Yup. It’s a very American subject that seems strangely inert at the hands of its British cast and might be better served by an energetic U.S. production. (If you think American actors have trouble with the British idiom, you should hear the trouble British actors have with ours.)

If Los Angeles theater is as young and diverse and brash as the city, London theater reflects its longer history and can’t always break through its armor of conventions. Seen from that perspective, Joe Orton’s lampoons and a generation of angry young playwrights were all but inevitable. Yet in today’s London, it would be difficult to find the kind of rough-and-tumble experimentation seen in L.A.’s Actors Gang or Reza Abdoh’s “Minamata” (at the Los Angeles Theatre Center) or, going back to the 1960s, in the scrappy inventiveness of the Company Theater or the radical activism of Luis Valdez’s primitive political actos .

Even the Howard Brenton/Tariq Ali nine-performance “Iranian Nights” (also at the Royal Court), a 45-minute seriocomic satire of the Salman Rushdie affair, was witty enough but tame and manicured by Chicano or Actors Gang standards. A mild response to an improbable situation.

Perhaps Jackie Mason was right. Perhaps we Americans are simply more willing to make fools of ourselves. Perhaps we’ve had to because of the way American life works--or doesn’t. Especially American theatrical life, which always goes begging. But with cutbacks from the Arts Council lapping at the great English theaters, they may have to learn to make fools of themselves too. It’s called self-defense. And U.S.-British rapprochement of the unfortunate kind.

In a program note explaining the closure of Theatre Upstairs, the Royal Court’s Stafford-Clark issued a warning as he painted a bleak picture of a future theatrical landscape. In it, he said, the National Theatre “will become a lone bastion of culture in its riverbank fortress, guarded by prestige from attrition. A modest and tame RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) will just about be keeping its head above water, while the rest of us will become well-nigh invisible: No longer able to produce work that would justify our existence.

“Meanwhile, in the upper rooms of pubs, unpaid British actors will appear in yet more productions of Shakespeare in a desperate effort to display their talents.

“I’ve seen this future,” Stafford-Clark concluded. “It’s called New York. It doesn’t work.”

Welcome to the trenches.