On Sunday, a dizzying constellation of actors, writers, producers, directors, and generous patrons of the performing arts on both sides of the pond gathered to celebrate the legendary London theater, now in its 70th season.
March 22 has long been an auspicious date within the transatlantic theater community, marking the birthday of both Stephen Sondheim and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. But on Sunday, when a dizzying constellation of actors, writers, producers, directors, and generous patrons of the performing arts on both sides of the pond gathered at the Greenwich Village home of Anna Wintour, it was in celebration of yet another towering, agenda-setting force within that world: the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square.
Together with the actor John Lithgow and director Nicholas Hytner, Wintour hosted a jovial fundraising cocktail for the Royal Court, which is now in its 70th season—its third under the leadership of artistic director David Byrne, himself an accomplished director and playwright. Not long after 6 p.m., the parlor floor of Wintour’s Greenwich Village townhouse was teeming with guests , among them, Louisa Jacobson, Ivy Getty, Huma Abedin, Charles Porch, Robert Denning, Indré Rockefeller, Sophia Herring, Paul Henkel, JK Brown, Eric Diefenbach, Robert Soros, and Jamie Singer Soros. Also in the crowd were members of the cast and creative team behind Giant—Mark Rosenblatt’s thrillingly provocative, Olivier Award-winning play about the children’s author Roald Dahl and his trenchant antisemitism—starring Lithgow, Aya Cash, Elliot Levey, and Rachael Stirling. After debuting at the Royal Court Theatre in the fall of 2024 and transferring to the West End’s Harold Pinter Theatre about a year ago, it was set to open on Broadway, at the Music Box Theatre, the very next night. Speaking to one of the show’s producers, Fiona Rudin, Lithgow—standing side by side with his wife, the historian Mary Yeager—likened the shifts in Giant’s cast over its three stagings to “a kaleidoscope—you change one stone and everything changes.” Rudin, in turn, noted that she’d never seen director Nicholas Hytner—who last helmed a Broadway show in 2012, when One Man, Two Guvnors also played at the Music Box—quite so relaxed. Others were feeling a little more nervy. “I’m very pleased to be here because it stops me sitting at home, fretting,” Levey told me, laughing. Rosenblatt was just as admirably frank. “I am feeling very tense, generally,” he said. “It’s a strange thing because we’ve done it twice already, but each time you have to kind of prove yourself.” His wife, journalist Amy Abrahams, on the other hand, seemed markedly less worried. “All you get from transferring is that everyone is just deeper in it,” she observed. “Every performance is just wiser—and it was wise anyway.” When, after some 30 minutes of mingling, the party moved downstairs, Wintour stood before her assembled guests to deliver some welcoming remarks. “To scan the list of plays that have had their debut at the Royal Court Theatre is to marvel at the range of British theater, from Rocky Horror to Top Girls, from Not I to The Ferryman,” she said. “But as David Hare recently reminded me, it was Arthur Miller who said that until the Royal Court Theatre and Look Back in Anger, which premiered there in 1956, the British theater was ‘hermetically sealed from life.’ Perhaps that was because Mr. Miller was just fed up with the London papers calling him Mr. Monroe.” She went on to salute the Royal Court for “highlighting work with a new kind of realism that brought in all classes, all races, all areas of life, which had never been on stage before. It’s been the essential powerhouse of the British theater for 70 years, and now under the brilliant leadership of artistic director David Byrne, it is proceeding healthily towards another 70.” In his own speech, Byrne said that “in England, we have three major theaters. We have the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is mainly concerned with preserving our incredible history, particularly Shakespeare, and making sure it’s still got a place in our cultural life today. We’ve got the National Theatre, which is about the state of the nation; it’s a broad church and it’s a theater that’s there for everybody. And then the third theater—and I’m very biased in saying this—I think is the most thrilling of the three, and that’s the Royal Court,” Byrne continued. “We are the writers’ theater. Founded 70 years ago by George Devine, we were set up, as Anna said, to bring around an end to the malaise of the postwar theater scene—to cut through those dusty plays and to put something on our stage that spoke not just to now, but where we might be going.” He urged the importance of continuing to support that urgent work, and called out some of the exciting productions the theater had forthcoming, including Godot’s To Do List, by the very young playwright Leo Simpe-Asante, revivals of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Manfred Karge’s Man to Man . The evening was rounded out by a delightful medley of performances. First came a reading, by Lithgow, of the hysterically naughty prologue to The Libertine by Stephen Jeffreys . Next, husband and wife Morgan Spector and Rebecca Hall got up to do a scene from Mike Bartlett’s Cock, which premiered at the Royal Court in 2009—reminding one and all just how criminally long it had been since they last did a play together. Finally, Leslie Odom Jr.—who, after reprising his role as Hamilton’s Aaron Burr on Broadway last fall, will soon do the same in London—made the room swoon with an acoustic rendition of Sam Cooke’s 1964 ballad “A Change Is Gonna Come,” accompanied by Steven Walker on guitar. “This, one of the great American pop songs, is really a reminder in execution and in message of what we’re all trying to do, I think,” Odom mused, “make something unforgettable.” From the roar of applause he recieved, the audience sure seemed to agree.
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