‘Man Who Came to Dinner’ to Have London Revival

LONDON —  The rehearsal room fills with British accents as actors break for lunch after spending a recent morning trying to sound as American as apple pie.

It’s all in a day’s work at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is reviving the classic 1939 American comedy “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

The RSC had a 1979 hit with Trevor Nunn’s production of Kaufman and Hart’s “Once in a Lifetime,” which went on to a commercial West End run.

“The Man Who Came to Dinner” opens at the Barbican Theater on July 20, and runs in repertory through September 12.

“This play is superlatively well put together. With any luck, it’s one of those wonderful comic machines,” said John Wood, the Englishman who plays the irascible dinner guest, Sheridan Whiteside.

The supporting cast includes such RSC stalwarts as Richard Haddon Haines and Marjorie Yates as Whiteside’s hosts, the Stanleys, and Ralph Fiennes as the local newspaperman, Bert Jefferson.

Whiteside, a wicked caricature of the celebrated wit and theater critic Alexander Woollcott, is a New York radio celebrity who ends up housebound with an Ohio family when a dinner invitation becomes a comedy of misadventures.

Monty Woolley originated the part in New York and in the 1941 film, and Robert Morley was its first London star. Morley’s son, theater critic Sheridan Morley, was born that year, and was named after Sheridan Whiteside.

The play is ripe with Whiteside’s acid-tongued lines.

Whiteside in introducing his secretary to Bert Jefferson: “This aging debutante, Mr. Jefferson, I retain in my employ only because she is the sole support of her two-headed brother.”

The play was most recently seen in New York in 1980 at Circle in the Square, directed by and starring Ellis Rabb.

The latest revival marks the RSC directing debut of Broadway veteran Gene Saks, who is most often associated with the plays of Neil Simon. His staging of Simon’s farce, “Rumors,” is a current Broadway hit.

Saks had only worked in London once before, restaging his Broadway musical hit “I Love My Wife” for the West End, when the RSC approached him.

“I found this offer very flattering,” said Saks in an interview. “They said, ‘We wanted an American to do it and who knows more about American comedy than you do?’ I said, ‘Well, now I’ll have to do it.”’

Saks came to London in March to meet with John Wood, whom he knew socially during Wood’s longtime residency in New York starring in “Deathtrap,” “Travesties” and “Amadeus.”

He called Wood “a very special, tremendously talented and experienced actor who can teach anybody a lot.”

Wood stars as Prospero in “The Tempest” at the RSC, and will play the doomed Halvard Solness in Henrik Ibsen’s “The Master Builder,” opening there Sept. 26.

The actor said he responded with some diffidence to the offer to play Whiteside, adding that the role’s unusual demands require a masseur.

Whiteside is wheelchair-bound for much of the play, having slipped and broken his hip. “This is lower back pain on an operatic scale,” said Wood.

Saks liked the lesser pressures and diminished intensity of working at the RSC, where shows are guaranteed a run, as opposed to New York, where they can close overnight.

“I’m always shocked at the reaction of the (New York) press and of some of the public,” said Saks, who, besides his string of Neil Simon hits, directed two recent Broadway flops: Bob Larbey’s play “A Month of Sundays,” and the musical “Rags.”

“I want to say, ‘It’s after all only a play. If you didn’t like it, that’s your prerogative, but let’s go on to the next one.”’

Instead, New York failures are, he said, “left like a street accident with blood all over them.”

The RSC reminded Saks of the Actors’ Studio, where he trained as an actor in the 1940s.

“There’s a real revolution against phony, traditional acting,” he said. “They all seem to want to be truthful and get underneath things, the same as good actors are doing in America.

“There’s less and less difference between the two.”