New Life at London's Old Vic

The first image to greet the eye is perhaps the last to linger in the mind: it is the set, vertiginously toppling outward as if to plunge a collapsing world and its demented inhabitants into the audience's laps. The place depicted must have been a palace once. Now the arches have sagged, and the staircases end in midair. The steeply raked floor intersects doorways at crazy angles, as though it were not wood but water, flooding a city where the people too seem to be drowning. This haunted spot is Epirus, home of Pyrrhus, heroic son of the even more valiant Achilles, and the time is soon after the Trojan War.

The nightmare world being enacted is not only ancient Greece but also the courtly France of 1667, where Jean Racine wrote his tragedy Andromaque, and the skinhead London of 1988, whose coarse argot has been chosen by Director Jonathan Miller to lend contemporary clout. The melange of cultures does not always work, although much else does in this hurtling two-hour, no- intermission staging. Yet Miller's production, which opened last week at London's Old Vic Theater, is an event of considerably broader consequence than a re-examination of an austere and little-produced play by one of the theater's ablest and most innovative directors.

The Old Vic for decades housed a company that emphasized Shakespeare and included some of the great British stage names of the 20th century: Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Guinness and Ashcroft among them. Then, from 1963 to 1976, it served as the first home of Britain's National Theater. Thereafter it declined into a mere booking hall, just another space where a producer might launch a commercial production. Now Miller and the theater's owners, Toronto Businessman Ed Mirvish, 73, and his son David, 43, are seeking to bring back the glory days of the classics. Their goal: a commercial troupe to rival in quality the two huge subsidized London ensembles, the National and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

As Miller's controversial reputation would suggest, they will probably be classics with a twist. He has reset an Italian opera in gangster territory, for example, and reimagined O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night as caustic tragicomedy rather than lugubrious apocalypse. Andromache is the first offering of a seven-play season, of which Miller will direct five. With characteristic confidence in his polymathic perversity, he has assigned himself an absurdist British comedy, N.F. Simpson's One Way Pendulum; a Jacobean tragedy, Bussy D'Ambois; a Leonard Bernstein musical, Candide, which Miller says "will have more flavor of the original Voltaire"; and Shakespeare's The Tempest. Also on the roster are Reinhold Lenz's The Tutor, adapted by Brecht, and Alexander Ostrovsky's 19th century Russian comedy Too Clever By Half. "I want to break out of the stale convection current that keeps endlessly recirculating the same old Shaw and Chekhov," says Miller. "We are part of Europe, and there are vast expanses of European literature unknown to London audiences."