Theater: Looking for the Real Thing

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London offers a flock of new plays and charming revivals

If Margaret Thatcher did not exist, the British avant-garde might well have invented her. The Conservative landslide that extended her lease on 10 Downing Street has also renewed her reign as the favorite gargoyle of the London theater's left wing. In the suburban pubs and fringe theaters that form London's equivalent of off-Broadway, playwrights have been declaiming for months against Thatcherism and for the nuclear freeze. Two provocative British plays that recently made it to Manhattan, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls and Steven Berkoff s Greek, include oblique denunciations of the Tory leader. A new West End musical, the earnest, tuneful Blood Brothers (book, music and lyrics by Willy Russell), charts the plight of twin boys separated at birth, one raised in the fetid poverty of the post-welfare state, the other by a scheming rich woman whom theatergoers will have no trouble recognizing as a caricature of the Iron Lady. However these dramatists voted last Thursday, they must be grudgingly grateful that their pet beastie will be around for a few more years. She is the noose they can pull around their tight little island.

Meanwhile, in the political and geographic center of London theater, the Old Guard holds forth with style and swagger. Early this month the bedroom farce No Sex, Please—We're British notched its 5,000th performance; Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap is cadging tourists in its 31st year; Andrew Lloyd Webber still has three musicals running (Evita, Cats and Song and Dance), with a new show promised for the fall. Peter Ustinov has donned a peruke and a music-hall German accent to star in his own caustic comedy, Beethoven's Tenth. London's two major repertory companies are concentrating their energies on the Bard and other English classic playwrights. The Royal Shakespeare Company has mounted a characteristically bustling production of Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl, a feminist comedy from 1610, starring Helen Mirren and Jonathan Hyde. The National Theater, the slicker and more conventional of the rep houses, is presenting Sheridan's The Rivals, with sumptuous scenery by John Gunter, all of it devoured by a cast that includes Michael Hordern and Tim Curry. Also at the National: Eduardo de Filippo's Inner Voices, starring that foxy grandpa of British acting nobility, Sir Ralph Richardson.

Younger stars are doing their bit too.

Stephanie Lawrence, who played Eva