Brits on Broadway: Orlando Bloom, Daniel Craig et al take over New York

Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry — homegrown talent is all over the New York stage this season, says Matt Wolf
New York bound: centre, real life couple Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz add extra frisson as stage spouses in a revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (
(Picture: AP/WireImage/Getty/Nigel Norrington/Alastair Muir/Johan Persson)
Matt Wolf25 August 2013

When Orlando Bloom steps onto the stage of New York’s Richard Rodgers Theatre on Saturday, as Romeo in a production of the Shakespeare tragedy directed by British director David Leveaux, the event will represent more than simply the Broadway debut of the Pirates of the Caribbean star. Bloom’s shift of gear also heralds the most Brit-dominated season that Broadway, on or off, has seen in an age. Or as Sonia Friedman, the London-based producing veteran of the West End and Broadway, puts it, “We’re all looking at each other and going, ‘Wow’.”

Wow, indeed, even by comparison with New York’s affection of late for the likes of James Corden, Rufus Sewell, Eve Best and Richard Griffiths, all of whom either won a Tony or were nominated within the past decade.

The line-up of UK acting talent on Broadway this season alone constitutes a Who’s Who that extends from Bloom and Mark Rylance (in the Friedman-produced pairing of plays from Shakespeare’s Globe), via Broadway newcomers Rachel Weisz, Rebecca Hall and Kenneth Branagh to such New York veterans as Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. Oh, yes, and Daniel Craig.

Bloom’s evident box-office appeal notwithstanding, the arrival of Mr and Mrs Craig in a fresh Broadway production of Betrayal is the hottest ticket of the season. Directed by Mike Nichols, it promises to ensnare both admirers of Harold Pinter’s compelling triangular drama (Rafe Spall completes the cast) as well as those who want merely to gawp at a famous acting couple, cast as a pair whose marriage is rent asunder when the wife (Weisz) has an affair with the best friend (Spall) of her husband (Craig).

Betrayal has been seen on Broadway twice before, both times without a Brit in the cast. (The two women who previously filled Weisz’s shoes were Blythe Danner — now better-known as Gwyneth Paltrow’s mum — in 1980 and Juliette Binoche in 2000). One wonders whether Pinter’s cunning reverse-chronology scenario would prove such an attraction without James Bond above the title. As it is, the 14-week run is expected to sell out before its first preview on October 1 at the Barrymore Theatre.

Barely will Betrayal be into its stride before two repertory seasons heave into view in a city that, unlike London, can go for years without ever embracing the classics. The last Broadway venture to try rep was, in fact, the 2009 transfer from the Old Vic of The Norman Conquests, produced by Friedman.

Starting Broadway previews within a fortnight of one another are Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry in the Globe’s all-male versions of Twelfth Night and Richard III (at the Belasco Theatre from October 15), followed soon after by Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart reprising their 2009 West End alliance in Waiting for Godot and pairing that with a new production of Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Sean Mathias, McKellen’s one-time partner, directs both (at the Cort Theatre from October 26).

So how much Shakespeare and Pinter can this town take? With the right names attached, apparently quite a lot, while Rylance’s famously fluttery take on Twelfth Night’s grieving Olivia could well nab him a third Tony to go with his trophies for Boeing-Boeing and Jerusalem.

Not every British visitor to Broadway ends up acting opposite his or her countrymen. Anne-Marie Duff moves from an American classic in London (Strange Interlude at the National, closing on September 1) to her own Broadway debut opposite Ethan Hawke in Macbeth, previewing from October 24 at the Lincoln Center. And Rebecca Hall is sure to find an American or two joining her in the yet-to-be-cast revival of the 1928 Sophie Treadwell play Machinal, with which Hall makes her first Broadway foray just before Christmas. An expressionist cornerstone of the American repertoire, Machinal will be directed by Lyndsey Turner, whose production of Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica opened in the West End on August 15.

Hall’s previous New York stage outings have found the ever-ascendant screen star acting Shakespeare and Chekhov at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is to say, away from Broadway.

So it is that off-Broadway is furthering its own embrace of the British, away from the commercial hurly-burly that is expected to find prime Betrayal seats going for $500 or more. Playwrights Roy Williams and Dennis Kelly form part of the forthcoming seasons at the Atlantic and the Manhattan Theatre Club: two prestigious not-for-profit venues mounting American productions of Williams’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (adapted from the Alan Sillitoe story) and Kelly’s Taking Care of Baby, about a woman accused of killing her children.

Still off-Broadway, the adventurous St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn has two transfers from London: the Donmar’s all-female Julius Caesar (from October 3), directed by Phyllida Lloyd and once again starring Harriet Walter, Frances Barber and Cush Jumbo, and the Tricycle’s much-lauded Red Velvet (previews March 25), written by Lolita Chakrabarti and starring her husband, Adrian Lester. Earlier than both of these, Josie Rourke’s production of Matt Charman’s Manchester International Festival entry, The Machine, starring Hadley Fraser and Francesca Annis, plays at the Park Avenue Armory (September 4-18), the same capacious Upper East Side venue that is confirmed next summer to house the bloody Macbeth, also from Manchester, that won Branagh such rave reviews.

By the time the Scottish play rolls into town, Broadway may well have hosted spring openings of Helen Mirren in The Audience and Luke Treadaway in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, though neither is as yet confirmed.

“It’s incredibly exciting but also challenging,” Sonia Friedman concludes of the gathering of Brit plays, productions and stars that even she finds remarkable. Does that mean simply that the British do it better? Susan Feldman, the founding artistic director of St Ann’s Warehouse, has an apt reply: “It’s not that the British are doing these shows better; it’s that they’re doing them. These are some of the best shows around.”

New York, it seems, is poised to drink to that.

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