“Prttt-prttt-prttt-prttt-prttt.” The thwacking sound, as regular as a metronome, started (and seldom stopped) during the Saturday matinee of “Duet for One” at the Vaudeville Theater. Since the play – about a violinist (Juliet Stevenson, in a wheelchair) coming to grips with multiple sclerosis with the help of a shrink (Henry Goodman, with German accent) – was set in London, imaginative theatergoers could pretend, perhaps, that the noise belonged to the street outside the psychiatrist’s office.
Well, not really. Tom Kempinski’s two-character drama from 1980 (made into a 1986 film starring Julie Andrews) is hermetically sealed in its conventions – those of a psychological mystery, propelled entirely by the question-and-answer rhythms of its participants. A tight and closed chamber piece, “Duet for One” isn’t built to accommodate the unexpected. Ms. Stevenson and Mr. Goodman, actors of unshakable proficiency, continued in their expertly calibrated performances without missing a beat.
This of course is what actors normally do under such circumstances. And on Broadway, they have mostly resigned themselves to acting through the repeated ringing of cell phones (a sound I have blessedly yet to hear in a London theater on this trip). But it said something to me about the nature of “Duet for One” that when the thwacking started – and though I couldn’t swear to it, I’m pretty sure it came from helicopters – I didn’t experience one of those dizzying moments when the walls between a theater and the city that surrounds it fall. I didn’t think, “Is the London of the play under some sort of military attack that will bond Ms. Stevenson’s and Mr. Goodman’s characters in crisis?”
I wouldn’t have thought about this twice, except that the same night I attended the new revival of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” at the Haymarket Theater Royal a few blocks away from the Vaudeville. Sean Mathias’s production, which stars Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart as Beckett’s immortal tramps on the cusp of eternal night, features an intricate and subtle sound design (by Paul Groothius) in which distinct but ambiguous noises – suggesting the cooing of pigeons, a tinny recorded band, traffic, celestial chords and wind – hover fleetingly, like aural memories that slip away before you can identify them.
So when a siren began to wail toward the play’s conclusion, I assumed it was part of the production. It wasn’t, as it turned out, but it could well have been. As stylized and abstract as “Godot” is, it also takes place in the universe we all, on some level, know. So even though Mr. McKellen and Mr. Stewart (and their co-stars, Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup) inhabit what looks like an abandoned cityscape (designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis), it is filled, as Didi and Gogo observe, with the rustle of dead voices, of what the city once was. That could easily include a phantom siren or two.
There was nothing ghostly about the full-bodied and sustained applause that came with the curtain calls. Some 50 years after its confounding London debut, greeted mostly by the sounds of discontented head scratching (and occasional “boos”), “Godot” is a big, fat popular hit (even more so than Anthony Page’s current, and also highly entertaining, production now on Broadway).
If I had thought I was inhabiting real (or realer than real) life while I was at the Haymarket, I was soon disabused of that impression. Once on the streets again, moving toward Leicester Square, I found myself caught in a river of scores of loud young women, all in skimpy party dresses, and their escorts, screeching and pushing and smoking and crying real tears and perfumed in alcohol. (The vomiting, a weekend tradition around Leicester Square, comes later.) Ah, the West End on a Saturday night. Suddenly, Beckett’s empty and barren world, where sounds were so tantalizingly faint, felt like a place I wanted to stay.
