‘Stages’ Holds Theatrical Riches

For the performance footage alone, the six-part documentary series “Changing Stages,” beginning Sunday on PBS, shouldn’t be missed by anyone with a passing interest in the theater. Or a failing one, even.

There’s a tantalizing bit of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson from Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land,” an object lesson in dry wit. We’re treated to newsreel footage of the Orson Welles “voodoo ‘Macbeth,”’ a notorious highlight of the Depression-era Federal Theatre Project.

And, in startling close-up, Billie Whitelaw’s lipsticked mouth, surrounded by darkness, nattering away obsessively in the Samuel Beckett monologue “Not I.”

Such archival riches could redeem even a lousy series on 20th century theater. But this one’s good. Pursuing its own areas of interest, acknowledging its bias and incompleteness upfront, “Changing Stages” manages a tough thing. It is general enough to appeal to the masses (at least masses of liberal arts public television types), yet specific enough to rope in avid theatergoers.

The show is written and hosted by Sir Richard Eyre, who for 10 years ran London’s National Theatre. Striding onto the National’s stages, strolling down Broadway, Eyre resembles a mid-level John le Carre functionary on assignment. He’s not a dazzling on-camera presence, but he doesn’t tire you out with his insights either. They come easily and naturally.

His is an understandably Anglo-centric view of 20th century British and American theater. Part one, “Shakespeare,” illustrates the long reach of the British stage’s Mr. Big. Part two, “Ireland,” deals with George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge and W.B. Yeats, among others. At Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, Eyre says, Yeats would routinely berate the audience for “its dimness and bad behavior,” particularly during the run of Synge’s great “Playboy of the Western World.”

There’s an implicit nostalgia in such choice details. Where is the passion today? Eyre wonders if truly electric theater can even be made in our establishment institutions, such as the National. Is this most “humane” of all art forms (Eyre’s word, and I wish he had avoided it) destined, as playwright John Osborne said, simply to keep on dying, “as it has done for centuries”?

Part three gets around to American 20th century developments, chiefly the matter of Eugene O’Neill, a rather overemphasized Clifford Odets and a virtually deified Arthur Miller. Part four, titled “1956,” locates a key year in English drama, when the old world--Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan--gave way to “Look Back in Anger.”

There’s a particularly apt study in contrasts in part five’s “Between Brecht and Beckett,” in which Eyre makes a lovely case for Brecht’s public engagement and Beckett’s private, interior quality. Part six, “The Law of Gravity,” scrambles to cover everything from schlockbuster musicals to the gorgeous images of directors Robert Lepage (of Quebec City) and Simon McBurney (of London’s Theatre du Complicite).

Yet at least Eyre pays attention to these poet-mavericks, along with the many icons interviewed here: playwrights Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Tony Kushner and August Wilson and directors ranging from George C. Wolfe to Peter Brook to Peter Hall.

You can quibble with a fact or two. (“Waiting for Godot” wasn’t Beckett’s first play; O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” here becomes “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”) You can argue with some generalizations. But Eyre, co-author of the very lively and more detailed companion volume, also called “Changing Stages,” can cover intercontinental theater movements with admirable concision.

Contemporary British and American theater, says Eyre, represents a time in which a “shortage of money and political apathy [have] led to a proliferation of small-cast plays set in small rooms.” That’s a succinct, if sobering, description of where we are now. “Changing Stages” shows how we got here.

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“Changing Stages” begins Sunday at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV. The remaining installments continue at 9 p.m. Sept. 2, and 9 p.m. Sept. 9. The network rating is TV-PG for language.