We'll take Manhattan: why New York is buzzing with new British plays

First it was our star actors, now it's our award-winning dramatists who are set to storm Broadway, says Matt Wolf, as a host of British plays transfer from London to the New York stage
Play away: Dominic West and Miranda Raison in The River © Alastair Muir
Matt Wolf10 September 2014

When The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time starts performances at the Barrymore Theater on Broadway tonight, excitement surrounding the play will be amplified by a more general awareness in New York that the new British play is back.

Last season there wasn't a single new British play on Broadway, despite a now customary strong British line-up of actors on the New York stage (Mark Rylance, Ian McKellen and Daniel Craig, just for starters), all in revivals of plays by Pinter, Shakespeare and others.

Although the revivals continue this season as well — Ewan McGregor makes his Broadway debut on October 2 opposite Maggie Gyllenhaal in a new staging of Tom Stoppard’s 1982 play, The Real Thing — it’s the pile-up of new British plays that has New York abuzz. (Off Broadway, too, with Simon Stephens’s Punk Rock and Stoppard’s own Indian Ink leading the charge there.)

Curious Incident, about a 15-year-old maths prodigy who is happier with numbers than he is with people, has no star names on board for Broadway, preferring to let the title be the attraction in a culture that is as familiar with Mark Haddon’s source novel as we are here. The fact that the National Theatre production has already been shown in American cinemas via NT Live seems only to have heightened expectations. Marianne Elliott’s much-lauded production is now something of a London fixture — as her NT co-production with Tom Morris of War Horse has long been — and Broadway will itself be curious to see if lightning strikes twice, given that the American premiere of War Horse swept the Tony Awards in 2011, beating Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem for Best Play and winning in all five categories in which it was nominated.

Curious Incident is a more actor-centred piece, and it will be interesting to see if this new incarnation makes a star out of its unknown London-born leading man, 25-year-old Alex Sharp, the way the original did of Luke Treadaway, who won an Olivier for his performance.

Stage delight: Luke Treadaway in The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time (Picture: Alastair Muir/Rex Features)

Some British plays receive an exposure across the Atlantic that simply wasn’t possible back home. The River, Butterworth’s mysterious post-Jerusalem chamber play about love, loss and trout-fishing, was sold out before it started performances at the Royal Court in 2012, and its run in a 93-seat studio venue (starring The Wire’s Dominic West) meant it was experienced only by a privileged few. The play’s American debut, from October 31 at Circle in the Square, will also take place in one of Broadway’s smaller venues —though few New York playhouses are large enough for its star, Hugh Jackman, who has for some time been the biggest box-office draw on the American stage.

Quite what Broadway playgoers investing several hundred dollars to see their favourite song-and-dance man will make of a (beautiful) play that is as elliptical as it is spare remains to be seen. Whatever happens, expect the New York iteration of Butterworth’s deeply personal meditation on desire and deception to be the hottest ticket of the autumn.

A second play that began within the confines of the Royal Court’s studio space, Nick Payne’s Constellations, will grab the New York spotlight just before Christmas. Jake Gyllenhaal makes his Broadway debut in Payne’s emotionally heady two-hander about a couple’s intersecting lives, which won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play in 2012. Gyllenhaal inherits a role originated by Rafe Spall opposite a female co-star yet to be named.

Things really kick into gear with the approach of spring, as happens regularly in a city in which so much scheduling is directly awards-driven. The rush every year is to open shows within easy sighting of the late-April cut-off date for the Tonys, in much the same way that Hollywood saves a large share of its Oscar hopefuls for December premieres.

Royal rumble: Helen Mirren in The Audience (Picture: Johan Persson)

That explains the arrival in February of Peter Morgan’s The Audience, directed by Stephen Daldry, whose revival of David Hare’s Skylight starring Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan also opens the following month. With The Audience, Helen Mirren as the Queen will get the chance to add a Tony to her haul of trophies. There’s been some nail-biting about the willingness of an American public to sit out a play about Elizabeth II’s weekly meetings with a parade of mostly unfamiliar prime ministers but the hope is that Mirren’s star wattage and Americans’ ongoing fascination with all things royal will carry the day.

Also circling New York in varying states of readiness are King Charles III, written by Mike Bartlett, and Shakespeare in Love, both with American producers involved with their London runs, as well as a hoped-for Broadway transfer for the Wolf Hall/Bring up the Bodies pairing that would require the sorts of New York resources usually reserved for big musicals.

How these Broadway aspirations will play out remains to be seen but one thing seems certain: we can expect to hear more than a few British accents from the podium come the Tonys next June.

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