Noma Dumezweni in Julius Caesar, Royal Shakespeare Company.

“All the world’s a stage,” a hoary cliché, is also, it’s worth remembering, the start of a soliloquy in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. In New York these days, it threatens to shift from Shakespearian metaphor to Shakespearian fact.

So what to think about a British company that comes to town to put on yet more Shakespeare—and even ships over its own theater?

This city lately feels nearly overrun by the Bard. There is of course the Public Theater, né New York Shakespeare Festival, mounting high-gloss stagings of his work in the park each summer and an occasional but increasing number of them at its Lafayette Street home. There’s a higher-gloss staging on Broadway roughly once a season. There’s BAM and Sam Mendes’s Bridge Project, bringing a steady stream of transatlantic Shakespeare to BAM Harvey, and there is also solo BAM, which imported three British Bard productions this year without any help from Mr. Mendes.

Shakespeare’s Globe plays at Pace University. New York Classical is mounting Henry V on Governors Island. The Cell and the Hive Theatre are offering a gay Midsummer Night’s Dream in Chelsea. There is Shakespeare in the Parking Lot on the Lower East Side and Shakespeare on the Sound in Connecticut. In the spring, the Classic Stage will deliver Bebe Neuwirth—Bebe Neuwirth!—in another Midsummer’s Night. (This one will be straight, but presumably it will be high-kicking.)

So when news came a year ago that the Royal Shakespeare Company would visit New York for this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival, bringing along a full-size replica of its new theater in Stratford-Upon-Avon, which it would assemble inside the vast Park Avenue Armory—when all the world is a stage, so too, by definition, are its century-old drill halls—there were several reactions.

First came excitement. A troupe from what is arguably the world’s premiere Shakespeare company, an ensemble of performers who have been working together on these plays for three years, was coming to town, bringing 41 actors, 21 musicians and 10 stage managers to stage 44 performances of five legendary plays over six summer weeks. And they were bringing their own theater. This was to be an event of such overwhelming scale, prominence and snob appeal as to immediately become a lead contender for Cultural Event of the Season.

The second reaction, more cynical—this is, after all, New York—was to detect a hint of unbecoming vainglory in this exercise. It is indeed lovely to have the R.S.C. in town, just as it is always lovely to have foreigners visiting. But, what, our theaters aren’t good enough? You need a stage? We’ve got dozens. And more to the point, in this time of tightened private belts and strapped public budgets—elsewhere at Lincoln Center, City Opera has become a destitute nomad and the Philharmonic has cancelled its free summer concerts—spending $1 million to transport a bespoke theater seemed excessive, if not obscene.

The Royalists overran the Armory as Independence Day approached—the first performance was July 6—and the press was invited for a preview as the portable theater was unpacked and assembled. Michael Boyd, the R.S.C.’s Britishly charming and wry artistic director, and Alan Bartlett, its head of technical design and construction, led the tour, and, as artists do, they provided another frame for considering the enterprise. This 975-seat piece of luggage, constructed in Stratford and schlepped to New York in 46 shipping containers is, they argued, not an extravagance but a necessity. To come to town, spend a mere 15 days in preproduction, and then mount five fully staged plays in repertory—this couldn’t be done without a prebuilt, preset, prelit, preblocked stage. Despite the attention it’s getting, the theater’s not the thing; the plays are. The theater is logistics.

And so finally, perhaps still skeptical but also now disarmed, a theatergoer arrives for opening night, ready to climb aboard this towering assembly of logistics for As You Like It, the first of the five plays. And one starts to be reminded of some of the things Mr. Boyd had said during that press preview: that the Elizabethan-style theater, with its thrust stage extending deep into the audience and three levels of seating on three sides of that stage, provides a deeply intimate setting, with no one more than 15 yards from the stage. That he loves the sense of community, of actor and audience, achieved when theatergoers see both the performance and, past it, the rest of the audience across the stage, reacting.

Then the play starts, and it is wonderful. The actors are excellent, and they are so close you can nearly touch them. They are unamplified, and their voices echo through the wood-covered theater. (If there’s a quibble, it’s that the space is too echo-y, sounding like it comes with built-in reverb.) There are theatergoers leaning forward on the railings of the mezzanine and balcony, raptly engaged. The air-conditioning is operating suboptimally, so the ushers have given out cheap Chinese fans, and the audience members are sporadically waving them. It feels almost like you’re in some Olde English time. It feels at least unlike sitting in any other theater in New York.

The theatergoer has been converted.

A few nights later, you’ll be back for a wrenching Romeo and Juliet, dark and gothic, but with the titular lovers anachronistically dressed as modern, headphones-and-Converse kids, the better to emphasize their teenage impetuousness. The air-conditioning will be working better that night, so no Chinese fans, and you’ll miss them, miss catching the motion in the corner of your eye, miss that visual reminder than you’re part of a bustling, actively engaged, neo-Elizabethan crowd.

Get thee to an Armory.

editorial@observer.com

The crowd, composed almost exclusively of  financiers under thirty,  hobnobbed around the stainless steel espresso machines, sharing Shakespearean sentiments.Young couples walked around and dreamed about adding Nespresso contraptions to their wedding registries while singles mingled with other arts-loving eligibles.

Waiters deftly made their way through the narrow showroom with trays of crab cakes, tartar and goat-cheese topped watermelon squares.

Soon, the prim party was bustling with loud British voices…The actors had arrived. We noticed a man peering through tinted ray-ban eyeglasses wearing a patterned blue shirt open far below the accepted American buttonhole and decided he must either be a pimp, a European or a thespian. It was, in fact, a European thespian by the name of Clarence Smith who played Duke Senior in the performance.

We attempted to make an introduction, only to notice Mr. Smith was juggling a champagne glass and another drink. “You can tell I’m a Britt, I have drinks in both hands!” exclaimed Mr. Smith. The performance was held at the Park Avenue Armory in a replica of the Royal Shakespeare theater in Stratford-upon-Avon.  The full-scale model theater, Mr. Smith claimed, shows “what you can get done with a little bit of British know-how and a lot of American money.” We commented on the mod venue. “Yes there seem to be all these little bijouuuuuux around New York,” Mr. Smith observed.

We left the Nespresso’s boutique gem around midnight. While bankers were preparing to leave with their Lily-Pulitzer clad girlfriends, champagne corks were still popping, barely audible above the jovial din.

Now, it could well be that there are better plays than The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Mr. McDonagh has written at least one of them (last season’s fantastic tall story and modern Grimm’s fairy tale, The Pillowman). But no play I’ve seen in years of theatergoing begins to approach the mad daring of Inishmore. Put simply, this is the first farce about terrorism in the history of the whole wide beautiful world.

I cannot help laughing now, as I recall the outlandish cheek of it all. I found Inishmore a very funny play indeed, if a bit sick, and the more outrageously over the top it became as the bizarre evening progressed, the funnier it was. Be warned, though: There comes a point in the grotesque proceedings when the stage appears to be swimming in rivers of blood, along with various heads and limbs that have yet to be severed in half for convenience sake.

If, therefore, you possess little or no appetite for the sorrowful, savage humor of the gallows that Mr. McDonagh inherited from his early mentor, J.M. Synge (and to a lesser extent, from the milder dark ironies of Beckett), The Lieutenant of Inishmore is not for you. There’s always Barefoot in the Park.

Mr. McDonagh is the postmodern heir to the socially subversive Joe Orton a thousand years on. (Orton’s 1965 classic, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, has just opened at the Laura Pels Theatre.) They share a similar appetite for thoughtful ironies when someone has just been bludgeoned to death.

“I should have asked for references,” says the boss of the murderous chauffeur who’s just killed his old dad in Entertaining Mr. Sloane. “I see that now.”

As two characters hack away at the body parts in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, they have a matter-of-fact conversation as if chatting over a pint:

“Won’t your mam be upset, your Mairead joining the paramilitaries, Davey?”

“She knew it was coming some day,” Davey says. “I think she’ll have resigned herself to it, though I think she’d have preferred it to be the I.R.A. if anybody. Y’know, they’re more established.”

“They are. And they do travel further afield than the INLA.”

“The I.R.A. do get a good bit of traveling done, aye.”

“They do. They go to Belgium sometimes.”

For anyone to skip the Grand Guignol pleasures of Inishmore would be a pity, for its singular playwright has us laughing at our blackest fears and unspeakable events. Yet we have nothing to compare his bloodthirsty play to, except, perhaps, to the Jacobeans. But the twisted Jacobeans were child’s play compared to this. Mr. McDonagh’s terrorist farce is nothing less than a graphic satire on torture and the Irish Republican Army.

The psychotic terrorist, Padraic, for example, has a love of sadistic death matched only by his love of cats. (A dead cat known as Wee Thomas, which might have been run over deliberately, plays a pivotal role). In an early scene, Padraic is torturing a whimpering drug dealer who’s strung upside-down when his cell phone rings. “Hello? Dad, ya bastard, how are you?” says Padraic warmly. “ … I’m grand, indeed, Dad, grand. How is all on Inishmore? Good-oh. Good-oh. I’m at work at the moment, Dad, was it important now? I’m torturing one of them fellas pushes drugs on wee kids, but I can’t say too much over the phone …. ”

The gossip with his dad continues a while as the drug pusher twists on the rope: “I haven’t been up to much else, really. I put bombs in a couple of chip shops, but they didn’t go off. ( Pause) Because chip shops aren’t as well guarded as army barracks. Do I need your advice on planting bombs? ( Pause) I was pissed off, anyways. The fella who makes our bombs, he’s fecking useless. I think he does drink. Either they go off before you’re ready or they don’t go off at all. One thing about the I.R.A. anyways, as much as I hate the bastards, you’ve got to hand it to them. They make a decent bomb.”

Even the brazen act of writing the play was to tempt fate (or scream for a response—evidence that a playwright counts for something). “I was trying to write a play that would get me killed,” Mr. McDonagh has said of Inishmore.

He’ll have to settle for being alive and collecting an Academy Award recently for his short film (Best Live Action Short). But then, the essential message of The Pillowman was that spinning a good yarn to the limit is a glorious pursuit for its own sake, and, paradoxically, that writers count for something and must be silenced. “We like executing writers,” announces Pillowman’s cool prosecutor, Tupolski. “Dimwits we can execute any day, but you execute a writer, it sends a signal, y’know?”

The Lieutenant of Inishmore was initially silenced in England and Ireland. In the midst of the current uproar caused by the cancellation here of the Royal Court’s My Name Is Rachel Corrie, it’s salutary to recall that The Lieutenant of Inishmore was turned down by three theaters that had staged Mr. McDonagh’s plays in the past—the Royal Court, the National and the Druid in Galway.

The insidious, hidden underbelly of official censorship is self-censorship. Our playwrights and nonprofit theaters are living in fear (and are cravenly caving in to it). Only Cromwellian despots and fools close down mere plays. In any event, Mr. McDonagh lived to tell the tale when the Royal Shakespeare Company stepped in to produce The Lieutenant of Inishmore. But time and a truce have caught up with it. The peace process in Northern Ireland has made the extraordinary play not politically toothless, but fairly harmless. Mr. McDonagh’s yokel Irish living in the lower depths of blighted Inishmore are all as thick as two planks. His dim Irish are caricature Irish jokes in themselves, and quite comforting in their way.

And yet when the drums sounded during the play, I was reminded that I have seen proud Irish men and women with lives as hard as nails in a crucifix marching to the drum in Londonderry and I have felt afraid. So the play still unsettled me although it made me laugh. The cast is magnificent. Scott Pask’s hellhole of a set in craggy, unforgiving Inishmore is exactly right in every threadbare detail. It represents Mr. McDonagh’s beloved Ireland—or home, sweet home.

As for the exceptional playwright, he might have written himself into obsolescence. There’s no further he can go, for The Lieutenant of Inishmore already goes to the anarchic outer limit. His plays have all come in a youthful flurry, as if they were written in a fever, as if blessed. I loved one of the earliest, The Cripple of Inishmaan; was disappointed by the predictable, easy tricksiness of later plays like The Beauty Queen of Leenane; and have been again enthralled by his last two plays to be produced here, Pillowman and Inishmore. Now he’s talking ominously of an end to playwriting, at least for the immediate future.

Martin McDonagh knows himself. “I want to just write for the love of it,” he told Fintan O’Toole in the New Yorker. “And also grow up, because all the plays have the sensibility of a young man.” True, but I hope we don’t lose him to the movies. You can’t grow up writing movies, only age badly. Besides, when was the last time anyone went to a movie for a great story?

Now, it could well be that there are better plays than The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Mr. McDonagh has written at least one of them (last season’s fantastic tall story and modern Grimm’s fairy tale, The Pillowman). But no play I’ve seen in years of theatergoing begins to approach the mad daring of Inishmore. Put simply, this is the first farce about terrorism in the history of the whole wide beautiful world.

I cannot help laughing now, as I recall the outlandish cheek of it all. I found Inishmore a very funny play indeed, if a bit sick, and the more outrageously over the top it became as the bizarre evening progressed, the funnier it was. Be warned, though: There comes a point in the grotesque proceedings when the stage appears to be swimming in rivers of blood, along with various heads and limbs that have yet to be severed in half for convenience sake.

If, therefore, you possess little or no appetite for the sorrowful, savage humor of the gallows that Mr. McDonagh inherited from his early mentor, J.M. Synge (and to a lesser extent, from the milder dark ironies of Beckett), The Lieutenant of Inishmore is not for you. There’s always Barefoot in the Park.

Mr. McDonagh is the postmodern heir to the socially subversive Joe Orton a thousand years on. (Orton’s 1965 classic, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, has just opened at the Laura Pels Theatre.) They share a similar appetite for thoughtful ironies when someone has just been bludgeoned to death.

“I should have asked for references,” says the boss of the murderous chauffeur who’s just killed his old dad in Entertaining Mr. Sloane. “I see that now.”

As two characters hack away at the body parts in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, they have a matter-of-fact conversation as if chatting over a pint:

“Won’t your mam be upset, your Mairead joining the paramilitaries, Davey?”

“She knew it was coming some day,” Davey says. “I think she’ll have resigned herself to it, though I think she’d have preferred it to be the I.R.A. if anybody. Y’know, they’re more established.”

“They are. And they do travel further afield than the INLA.”

“The I.R.A. do get a good bit of traveling done, aye.”

“They do. They go to Belgium sometimes.”

For anyone to skip the Grand Guignol pleasures of Inishmore would be a pity, for its singular playwright has us laughing at our blackest fears and unspeakable events. Yet we have nothing to compare his bloodthirsty play to, except, perhaps, to the Jacobeans. But the twisted Jacobeans were child’s play compared to this. Mr. McDonagh’s terrorist farce is nothing less than a graphic satire on torture and the Irish Republican Army.

The psychotic terrorist, Padraic, for example, has a love of sadistic death matched only by his love of cats. (A dead cat known as Wee Thomas, which might have been run over deliberately, plays a pivotal role). In an early scene, Padraic is torturing a whimpering drug dealer who’s strung upside-down when his cell phone rings. “Hello? Dad, ya bastard, how are you?” says Padraic warmly. “ … I’m grand, indeed, Dad, grand. How is all on Inishmore? Good-oh. Good-oh. I’m at work at the moment, Dad, was it important now? I’m torturing one of them fellas pushes drugs on wee kids, but I can’t say too much over the phone …. ”

The gossip with his dad continues a while as the drug pusher twists on the rope: “I haven’t been up to much else, really. I put bombs in a couple of chip shops, but they didn’t go off. (Pause) Because chip shops aren’t as well guarded as army barracks. Do I need your advice on planting bombs? (Pause) I was pissed off, anyways. The fella who makes our bombs, he’s fecking useless. I think he does drink. Either they go off before you’re ready or they don’t go off at all. One thing about the I.R.A. anyways, as much as I hate the bastards, you’ve got to hand it to them. They make a decent bomb.”

Even the brazen act of writing the play was to tempt fate (or scream for a response—evidence that a playwright counts for something). “I was trying to write a play that would get me killed,” Mr. McDonagh has said of Inishmore.

He’ll have to settle for being alive and collecting an Academy Award recently for his short film (Best Live Action Short). But then, the essential message of The Pillowman was that spinning a good yarn to the limit is a glorious pursuit for its own sake, and, paradoxically, that writers count for something and must be silenced. “We like executing writers,” announces Pillowman’s cool prosecutor, Tupolski. “Dimwits we can execute any day, but you execute a writer, it sends a signal, y’know?”

The Lieutenant of Inishmore was initially silenced in England and Ireland. In the midst of the current uproar caused by the cancellation here of the Royal Court’s My Name Is Rachel Corrie, it’s salutary to recall that The Lieutenant of Inishmore was turned down by three theaters that had staged Mr. McDonagh’s plays in the past—the Royal Court, the National and the Druid in Galway.

The insidious, hidden underbelly of official censorship is self-censorship. Our playwrights and nonprofit theaters are living in fear (and are cravenly caving in to it). Only Cromwellian despots and fools close down mere plays. In any event, Mr. McDonagh lived to tell the tale when the Royal Shakespeare Company stepped in to produce The Lieutenant of Inishmore. But time and a truce have caught up with it. The peace process in Northern Ireland has made the extraordinary play not politically toothless, but fairly harmless. Mr. McDonagh’s yokel Irish living in the lower depths of blighted Inishmore are all as thick as two planks. His dim Irish are caricature Irish jokes in themselves, and quite comforting in their way.

And yet when the drums sounded during the play, I was reminded that I have seen proud Irish men and women with lives as hard as nails in a crucifix marching to the drum in Londonderry and I have felt afraid. So the play still unsettled me although it made me laugh. The cast is magnificent. Scott Pask’s hellhole of a set in craggy, unforgiving Inishmore is exactly right in every threadbare detail. It represents Mr. McDonagh’s beloved Ireland—or home, sweet home.

As for the exceptional playwright, he might have written himself into obsolescence. There’s no further he can go, for The Lieutenant of Inishmore already goes to the anarchic outer limit. His plays have all come in a youthful flurry, as if they were written in a fever, as if blessed. I loved one of the earliest, The Cripple of Inishmaan; was disappointed by the predictable, easy tricksiness of later plays like The Beauty Queen of Leenane; and have been again enthralled by his last two plays to be produced here, Pillowman and Inishmore. Now he’s talking ominously of an end to playwriting, at least for the immediate future.

Martin McDonagh knows himself. “I want to just write for the love of it,” he told Fintan O’Toole in the New Yorker. “And also grow up, because all the plays have the sensibility of a young man.” True, but I hope we don’t lose him to the movies. You can’t grow up writing movies, only age badly. Besides, when was the last time anyone went to a movie for a great story?

I'd got him onto the subject that is his personal crusade, his virtual obsession in the realm of Shakespearean playing: just how to speak the speech, or "verse-speaking," as it's known in the trade. It's a crusade he's now brought to the New York stage: He's just come from a casting session to see if he can find New York actors capable of embodying his particular version of verse-speaking. Which does not , he emphasizes, have anything to do with British accents; Sir Peter believes, in fact, that American speech accents are, if anything, closer to Shakespeare's Elizabethan English than current British pronunciation. But it does have everything to do with meter and line structure.

Over dinner at a cozy Hudson Street place called the Treehouse, Sir Peter has been slapping the table to beat out the iambic-pentameter rhythm of the Shakespearean line; he's been clapping his hands to point up the line-ending pauses, crucial to the "line structure" of certain passages he'd been quoting. Line structure is a feature of verse-speaking at least as important–and far more disastrously neglected, he believes–as the emphasis on meter that has come to be called, by some, "iambic fundamentalism."

He's been singing the praises of a largely forgotten fin-de-siècle Shakespearean producer and director, William Poel, and "the Poel principles" that Sir Peter says were the "foundation stone" of his own tremendous achievement: founding the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Stratford-based troupe that changed, perhaps forever, the way that Shakespeare is spoken and played. He's been lamenting the fact that so few get it right anymore.

Verse-speaking–a virtual lost art he fears may be disappearing for good–has got his adrenaline going, he says, though he hardly seems the sort to need any artificial boost in adrenaline levels. Now 70, he is still a whirling dervish of theatrical fecundity. When I had dinner with him back in December, he'd just flown in from Denver, where he'd premiered his massive 10-play, 10-and-a-half-hour Greek-myth marathon known as Tantalus , which was written by his long-time R.S.C. collaborator John Barton. (The two of them had made the R.S.C. famous in the early 60's with another kind of marathon–their epic staging of Shakespeare's history plays under the rubric The Wars of the Roses .)

And after a casting session for Troilus and Cressida here, he would fly to L.A. to direct Romeo and Juliet at the Ahmanson Theatre, after which he returns to New York to rehearse Troilus for an April 15 opening at the American Place Theatre (previews begin April 3).

Jeffrey Horowitz, artistic director of the Theater for a New Audience, which is producing the play, had asked me to join him and Sir Peter to discuss the play over dinner.

Troilus , of course, is perhaps the most brilliantly bitter play Shakespeare ever wrote. It's been a minority taste until recently because it's so vicious and dark, but really, who in our time could not love a play that ends with a dying pimp (Pandarus) wishing his venereal diseases upon the audience: Til then I'll sweat and seek about for eases, / And at that time bequeath you my diseases .

It's a play so relentlessly caustic and corrosive, so bleak and melancholy, it's almost as if Shakespeare opened a vein and black bile rather than blood spilled out upon the page. But it's fun, too, to see all the piety that Western culture has lavished upon the Greek mythic heroes lampooned so wickedly and savagely by Shakespeare in Troilus . One way to think of Troilus is as Shakespeare's disillusioned and hostile rewrite of the romanticism of Romeo and Juliet , played by a cast of fools and degenerates.

As Sir Peter sums it up: "Troilus is in many respects a fool, Cressida a manipulative tart, Ulysses a very scheming, amoral politician. Agamemnon's a fool; Ajax is a dope; Achilles is a narcissistic, irresponsible queen. I mean, one could go on. You know, if you asked a Broadway producer whether we should do this, he'll say no. He'll say …."

"Where's the love?"

He laughs. "Pandarus–I mean, please, that last speech …."

I asked Sir Peter for a reaction to a question I've always had about Troilus : "Do you think Troilus reflects some sort of Shakespearean nervous breakdown into a kind of utter, bitter bleakness, as some scholars claim, or is it the play when the mask drops and the bleakness that was always there in Shakespeare makes itself apparent?"

"I think that's the reality, yes," he says. "I think it's the reality. I think he wrote two plays with an absolute, arrogant indifference to the public or whether the public liked them or understood them. And one is Troilus and the other is Hamlet . I mean, Hamlet lasts four hours 15 minutes. And he didn't care a fuck. 'Really,' he said, 'this is what I want to write.' And with Troilus ...."

"He gave Pandarus that last speech, wishing venereal disease on the audience."

"Oh, amazing," he says. "I mean, that is a man who hates his audience. Really."

"So this is the naked Shakespeare, do you think?"

"I think it is the naked Shakespeare, yes. Because there's something of the same note in Timon of Athens . But there's nothing bleaker, I think, in the whole canon than Troilus . The 18th and 19th centuries couldn't abide the play. I mean, the Enlightenment–[ Troilus ] reduces the whole of human life to lechery and war, and the Victorians were shocked out of their minds by it."

The naked Shakespeare: Perhaps we'll never know if this Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of Troilus , is a more true and authentic Shakespeare than the one of Romeo and Juliet or As You Like It , or just another mask. But there is a way, Sir Peter believes, to get closer to the language in which that nakedness is clothed. If dreams are "the royal road to the unconscious," as Freud maintained, thenverse-speaking,line structure–those "Poel principles" Sir Peter devoutly believes in and crusades for–are the royal road to Shakespeare's soul. In any case, it was the Royal Shakespeare Company's route for the 15 years Sir Peter presided over it–a period that transformed the way Shakespeare was played–until he left to take over the National Theatre from Laurence Olivier.

Shakespearean verse-speaking: It's something I've become quite fascinated with lately, having come to the conviction that there is a level of speare that can only be accessed by a disciplined effort to speak it aloud oneself. That reading or seeing or hearing it spoken by others can only take you so far. That learning to embody the sound can take you farther. A conviction further confirmed recently when I sat in on a couple of terrifically enlightening verse-speaking classes taught (at the Shakespeare Society) by the distinguished actor Barrie Ingham, who's played a number of lead roles for the R.S.C. (Mr. Ingham said that my rendition of the Ghost's speech in Hamlet was "very scary," which I think was a compliment.)

Anyway, for Sir Peter, it all comes down to the Poel principles: "There are about 50 actors in England who know the Poel principles and about a half-dozen directors, and that's it. The actors are all avid for it; directors aren't. Directors tend to pretend to know about verse when they don't."

William Poel was the stage director who, at the turn of the last century, did much to divest Shakespearean staging of the Victorian encrustations that had encumbered it: the massive sets and painted scenery that took so much time to roll on and off that it imposed a leaden pace on plays originally played on bare stages with lightning-like scene changes that anticipated cinematic cutting. Poel also sought to divest Shakespearean staging of the lumbering pomposity of much verse-speaking, to restore to it something more of Hamlet's swift-footed ideal: to "speak the speech trippingly on the tongue."

Enter Peter Hall. He was born in 1930, the son of a railway stationmaster, which I find fascinating for someone famous for wanting to make the verse run on time, so to speak; to make it follow a rhythm he might have become attuned to from the iambic beat of the steam-engine pistons, the click-clack of the tracks. It turns out that his father's occupation was crucial to his finding his calling in Shakespeare: A free rail pass permitted him to travel to London at an early age to see theater, and his life changed when he saw John Gielgud's legendary Hamlet .

"I saw Gielgud play Hamlet in 1942, when I was 12, and that was what fixed me." That and Ralph Richardson's Falstaff, which he calls "Probably the best performance I've ever seen. He was great–the greatest actor I've ever seen."

(Recently, I attended a rehearsal, in Harold Bloom's apartment, of the reading he gave as Falstaff for the Shakespeare Society, and Mr. Bloom told me that seeing Richardson's Falstaff at 16 was his transformative Shakespearean moment.)

Charged up by these electrifying performances, Sir Peter went to Cambridge as an undergraduate to learn how to direct Shakespeare. There he encountered two major literary figures who would influence the way he'd do it: F.R. Leavis, who inculcated an attentiveness to the text, to close reading; and George Rylands, who founded the influential Cambridge Marlowe Society.

"It was started in 1907, the idea being to speak Shakespeare as Poel taught it and bring Shakespeare back to the clarity Poel preached. George Rylands, by the time I got there, which was 40 years later, was the don in charge, and he taught all of us–John Barton, Trevor Nunn, Jonathan Miller, Richard Eyre–the principles of Poel's verse-speaking."

There are two elements to the Poel principles of verse-speaking, and Peter Hall is known far and wide for the first one, for what some have called "iambic fundamentalism": his stress on respecting the five-beats-to-a-line, da-DUM-da-DUM meter in speaking Shakespearean verse. And he hasn't retreated from that one bit. But during dinner, his emphasis was less on the stresses and more on what he calls "line structure": respecting the integrity of the single line of Shakespearean verse as an organic poetic unit.

The principles of line structure "are very simple," he said, when I brought the subject up: "You breathe on the end of a line; you never breathe in the middle. You think of it as a whole line, not as a series of words. You find where the meter makes your accent, which is usually alliterative."

To explain, he intones Antonio's famous opening line from The Merchant of Venice : "'In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.' So you see, 'sooth' and 'sad' are the accented words."

Such dictates are not designed to regiment reading in a metrical straitjacket, but to allow the internal dynamics counterpoised within the line to emerge , to allow the relationships between sound, stress and sense implicit in the ordering to blossom as they were intended to, to allow words to chime as chords rather than jangle in discord. Indeed, Sir Peter prefers to refer to the Shakespearean text as "the score" or the "scoring" (he's directed a lot of opera as well), and it's only proper verse-speaking that, he believes, can unlock the musical treasures in the line.

"You can't appreciate Mozart if you play the wrong notes or the wrong tempo; you've got to start by getting that bit right. Why should it be different for Shakespeare?"

And a delicate pause at the end of each line is essential to line structure: "Gielgud said he didn't need to take a breath for three lines, but you notice, if you listen, he takes a tiny breath at the ends of his lines."

He cites the opening lines of Troilus and Cressida as an example:

In Troy there lies our scene. From isles of Greece

The princes orgulous, their high blood chafed

Have to the port of Athens sent their ships.

"Now if you run on around the line ends, you don't understand it."

He recites it running around the ends of the lines, and it does become a kind of jumble.

"I remember, about 1961 or '62 in the old rehearsal room at Stratford, suddenly knowing that I knew and that I would always know what the line structure was when I heard a Shakespearean speech. Just from listening. And that's because I had done so many years of it that it was ingrained in me, and I remember it clicked and I thought, ' Christ! ' And the consequence is I can hardly watch most Shakespeare, because it irritates me when it's not used. I've done this for 40 years, and if you do it right, it always, always works!"

You must give the man credit. His urgency is genuine. With all his achievements, all his laurels, his knighthood, you sense that Sir Peter feels deeply embattled , fighting what might be a losing war on a question whose stakes are immensely high: recovering, rescuing from obfuscation the naked Shakespeare–or at least the most fully embodied Shakespeare. Releasing, unleashing from the line structure the full power, depth and musicality of an artist who is inexorably slipping further and further and further from our grasp across the abyss of centuries.

Yes, slipping away: Sir Peter spoke of attending a conference on verse-speaking sponsored by the National Theatre the previous year, in which it was generally agreed that we are perhaps the last generation for whom Shakespearean speech will be immediately intelligible at all –as opposed to intelligible only through the kind of half-translation we perform on Chaucer's Middle English. That precarious intelligibility he believes is what makes the precarious and disappearing art of verse-speaking even more vital, since the One True Way is known now to but 50 actors and a half-dozen directors.

It may sound fanatical, and it should be said that many scholars and directors dissent from the Poel principles, but I know I've profited immensely from Peter Hall's method. I know I found exposure to the Royal Shakespeare Company verse-speaking style transformative when I first experienced it at Stratford, when I saw, back-to-back, two amazing R.S.C. productions: Trevor Nunn's Hamlet and Peter Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream .

I was just out of college, had only seen a few American productions before then, so nothing prepared me for the astonishing offhand clarity of the verse-speaking. It wasn't conspicuously acted or emoted; it was expressed as if the actors were thinking it up for the first time. It was like experiencing Shakespeare for the first time. Not all R.S.C. productions have always hit those perfect notes, but after Hall, Barton and Nunn left, the sparkling clarity of the verse-speaking has been maintained at a consistently high level by their longtime associate Cicely Berry (author of the widely used verse-speaking book, The Actor and the Text ), whom I was privileged to meet recently, and who is the R.S.C.'s in-house voice and verse tutor.

And I loved talking about Troilus with Sir Peter. It's a play that I've found more and more depths to each time I've reread it. It's a play he's wanted to do again for nearly four decades, he told me, ever since he did it at Stratford in a run that derived added frisson when it coincided with the Cuban missile crisis.

But it's more than an anti-war play, he suggests: "It's a play about lust in all its forms"–warlike lust for blood, the lust for power, as well as plain old lechery and the war between the sexes.

One of the things that occurred to me while rereading Troilus this time was that there was a deeper connection between Peter Hall's verse-speaking obsession and a preoccupation close to the heart of this particular play.

Consider the most famous and controversial speech in Troilus , Ulysses' apotheosis of "degree." It occurs in the context of a confab between the Greek generals, who are trying to figure out what's gone wrong, why after a decade of besieging the walls of Troy they seem no closer to conquering the city and retrieving Helen.

Ulysses, cleverest of the Greeks, claims he knows the problem: neglect of degree, neglect of the proper ordering of the affairs of men, the proper regard given to hierarchy and true value as opposed to mere show.

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark what discord follows …

Force should be right, or rather right and wrong … .

Note that "degree" here is not mere hierarchical dominance. Degree in Ulysses' vision protects the weak from the predations of the strong; it's about justice as opposed to power and force. Power exercised without a sense of degree, of justness, reduces human community to pure predation, he says:

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself .

A stunning vision of self-consuming power, unchecked by degree, that results in an apocalyptic reabsorption of all Being into Chaos and Nothingness, the void before Creation. And that ain't good.

Of course, one can look at the speech ironically; it comes, after all, from Ulysses, the trickster. But still, reading Ulysses' degree speech this time, it struck me how it was as much a meditation on order and structure in art as it was on statecraft.

The invocation in the degree speech of "Insisture … proportion … [the] line of order" could be Peter Hall talking about the importance of line structure or metrical regularity. "Insisture" carries connotations of persistence and regularity. That these are aesthetic as much as political preoccupations is signaled by the central metaphor in the degree speech, which comes from music: "Take but degree away, untune that string …."

The metric structure, the line structure that Sir Peter insists on, is not repressive and confining, but expressive and liberating, like the expressive masks he used in Tantalus . The grace of the ballet depends on the base of rhythmic structure from which the graceful leaps, the spins and pirouettes take off. Improvisation in jazz arises not from nothing, not from noise , but from a melodic or rhythmic base. "Untune that string," the degree speech concludes on an apocalyptic note, and "the bounded waters" of the earth will overflow "and make a sop of all this solid globe"–return it to the formless mud which preceded creation.

But this is a rather grim, apocalyptic defense of poetic line structure. I came across a rather more playful and seductive one later on in Troilus . It's at the heart of one of the most controversial moments in the play. Troilus and Cressida's Romeo and Juliet -like rendezvous has been interrupted: She must be taken from Troy and from Troilus to join her father in the Greek camp. Unlike Romeo, Troilus doesn't put up much of a fight, and unlike Juliet, Cressida doesn't try to remain faithful 'til death.

Instead, when she gets to the Greek camp, she exchanges repartee and kisses with the Greek generals who greet her; soon she'll become the concubine of one of them.

Here's how Ulysses characterizes Cressida's flirtatious behavior:

There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip

Nay her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out

At every joint and motive of her body.

So ostensibly it's about seductive behavior by a woman–but couldn't it also be seen as evoking the seductive power of language? There's "language in her eye," "her foot speaks ." And perhaps that last phrase, "her foot speaks," suggests that it's about a particular kind of language, poetic language–whose unit is the line made up of iambic "feet," the technical term for a da-DUM unit of iambic pentameter. It could suggest an analogy between the way a woman deploys the "line structure" of her body ("every joint and motive") and the way the body of a poem deploys the line structure of verse: Each releases "wanton spirits," seductive energy.

The seductiveness of language and the language of seductiveness in those lines about Cressida subverts Ulysses' official disapproval of her behavior. It suggests that both he and Shakespeare are really on her side, seduced by Cressida's poetry in motion, almost against their will.

Over dinner, Sir Peter talked about Shakespeare's apparently hostile attitude toward sex in some of those bleak, middle-period, "nervous breakdown" plays.

"I believe he was betrayed very badly. And I believe he tried to hate sex. And I believe he couldn't."

It's the very dynamic that seems to be going on in Ulysses' description of Cressida's "wanton spirits." He tries to condemn her, but he can't. The seductiveness of "line structure"–in every sense of the phrase–is just impossible to resist.

It will be little consolation when I say with absolute certainty that Mr. Sher could scarcely begin to play Frasier. His urgent, electric talent is for the psychotic killer rather than the lovable shrink. The Grammer Macbeth closed after only 13 regular performances, and the number 13-let alone the legend of bad luck associated with the play-can't be entirely to blame. The worst that has happened to Mr. Sher-all fingers crossed-is that he lost his voice and had to miss a couple of performances.

Double, double toil and trouble;

Broadway bursts Kelsey's bubble.

You can do many things with Macbeth -there is even a renowned Zulu Macbeth -but it is almost impossible to make it dull. At roughly two hours in length, the dark, murderous play goes at a clip (except for the invariably wearisome Malcolm-and-Macduff discussion on kingship), and it's the shortest tragedy in the Shakespeare canon. Look at the potent brew the Bard has cooked up for us: witches and ghosts, sex and ambition, murder and mayhem, evil unto evil, all the things we really enjoy. Yet the cut-price, underpopulated Broadway production directed by Terry Hands, of all distinguished people-Mr. Hands ran the Royal Shakespeare Company for many years-never moves or inspires us in its flat, encircling Stygian gloom. If we are not horrified by Macbeth , it is no Macbeth .

Mr. Grammer is an ungainly stage presence, with his feet splayed at 10 minutes to two in his big, spongy moon boots. His black Gap T-shirt, hinting at gangster swank, was unbecoming. His monotonous baritone delivery is confident but starved of poetry. With all his soliloquies-except for the dignified resignation of "Tomorrow, and tomorrow"-it was a race to the finish, as if merely to get through, to have a bash, is good enough. As Macbeth himself says of his own kingly power: "To be thus is nothing; / But to be safely thus.… " Mr. Sher, incidentally, memorably spits out the word "nothing." All power is for nought unless secure, and all murderously acquired power like Macbeth's will in turn kill its possessor.

"He can become a king, so he must become a king," wrote Jan Kott, most perceptive of all drama critics and Shakespeare scholars. "He kills the rightful sovereign. He then must kill the witnesses of the crime, and those who suspect it. He must kill the sons and friends of those he has killed. Later he must kill everybody, for everybody is against him." Macbeth will hang those who even talk of fear. "In the end, he will be killed himself. He has trod the whole way up and down the grand staircase of history."

Alas, Mr. Grammer does not suggest terror, but weakness and confusion; his Macbeth is less haunted to the marrow of his bones, more hysterical. His conscience won't kill this king. When Mr. Grammer emerges with bloody knives from Duncan's bedroom, he intones "I have done the deed" with all the tortured, murderous conviction of "I've put the cat out." There's no terrifying chemistry between this sleepwalking Macbeth and the Missus. But then, Diane Venora's nondescript Lady M. doesn't begin to connect to the part's ecstasy of evil. Her mad scene is the first I've witnessed in which Lady Macbeth compulsively washes one hand because her other hand is holding a candle.

Let it all pass. (It has.) The Kelsey Grammer Macbeth was no worse in its vain way than the Alec Baldwin Macbeth of two or three seasons ago. Mr. Baldwin's was hairier. We tire of movie and TV stars who, without much training or commitment, play Shakespeare's tragic heroes from time to time as if "all is but toys." And to that I cry: To New Haven!

The achievement of Gregory Doran's Royal Shakespeare Company production with Anthony Sher is to get the murderous center of the play right. In one of their rivetingly fresh scenes together, Mr. Sher and Harriet Walter, his stunning Lady Macbeth, literally dissolve into uncontrollable laughter at the mention of the word "sleep." Sleep is impossible for these two butchers. Sleep no longer exists. Their world is nightmare.

Is Macbeth , I wonder, solely a tragedy of ambition? Ambition and terror make the murderous nightmare possible. But the entire action from start to finish lives and drowns in blood, and blood is on the hands of the innocent as well as the guilty. " Macbeth has been called a tragedy of ambition, and a tragedy of terror. This is not true," wrote Jan Kott. "There is only one theme in Macbeth : murder. History has been reduced to its simplest form, to one image and one division: those who kill and those who are killed."

Mr. Sher and Ms. Walter play elemental forces of evil, and their Macbeths are true partners in crime whose "toys" are a kingdom gone insane, an unreal plaything, without conscience or remorse. The two stars perform brilliantly together-reminding us there are two great roles in Macbeth (and then there's the rest). The sexual infatuation between the happy couple is usually overstated-power as aphrodisiac-yet Lady M. could be sexless. Ms. Walter's uncompromised coldness is unearthly enough for swooning triumphs, her wonderfully focused mad scene a pinnacle of unhinged ambition. Why doesn't Lady Macbeth ever ask her compliant husband what the witches are like? Because she is a witch! In her demonic weird spirit, she's both of the bloody earth and poisoned air.

Does Mr. Sher move a shade too soon into Macbeth's possessed, vaulting ambition? It's debatable. He enters the action like a heroic journeyman soldier held aloft in triumph by his army buddies. And at the witch's prophecy (or warning)- "All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!"-Mr. Sher's eyes are transfixed by the glittering prize of the crown. He's the psychopath whose flame of ambition has only to be ignited, rather than the good soldier who's willed to murderous ambition solely by his bossy wife. They're like hypnotic whispering co-conspirators, high and giddy with terror. His squat, sardonic thuggishness actually suggests the seductive hold over Macbeth, not of ambition, but of murder for its own sake. "I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far," says Macbeth, "that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er. " The die is cast-why trouble to turn back?

Mr. Sher's Macbeth is rarely introspective-he'sa rarely introspective actor-but his relish for the poetry is a pleasure. There's an uncharacteristic lapse with his ultimate "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more. " Mr. Sher-already seen in shadow, lest we miss the message-abandons the stage to point at its emptiness from the audience. But the "nothing" that's signified in this "tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury" surely isn't the stage, but the futility of Macbeth's life, and perhaps our own, on the way to "dusty death."

It's a director's lapse, and part of the blatancy that has spoiled touring R.S.C. productions of late. I'm thinking of their recent disco-erotic A Midsummer Night's Dream , in which the actors fought for laughs like desperate comedians on a Saturday night at the Comedy Store. So this otherwise compelling Macbeth has a Porter who for some ingratiating purpose performs a so-so impersonation of President Clinton; or the symphony of drums to announce the knocking at the gates; the screaming bag-lady witches; the pacifier that Macduff finds in his pocket, the better to milk the memory of his slaughtered children; or the catch-all costumes through the ages, from school-play papal to Bosnian chic to a Macbeth in black tie and suspenders. As is customary by now, the production also takes place in minimalist semi-darkness. How good and refreshing it would be to see a new Macbeth performed in brightest, shining light. But if I may, let it be not yet.

His latest play, first produced two years ago at his de facto home, the Royal Shakespeare Company, couldn't be less safe. (The troubled heart of this family drama concerns incest.) The wry Anglo-American culture clashes of Mr. Nelson's Some Americans Abroad , or his wickedly affectionate portrait of those aliens from another planet, the English in America, didn't prepare us for the ambiguous tragic resonance of Goodnight Children Everywhere .

Exile-both literal and emotional-has been a haunting preoccupation of this dramatist. And with all themes of displacement and loss comes the yearning for a sense of place, for those attachments we cannot always rationalize but know as home. In Goodnight Children , the safe harbor of home has been dynamited by war.

Mr. Nelson takes as his starting point the England of September 1939, when, at the beginning of war with Germany, one and a half million people were evacuated from their urban homes to the countryside-750,000 of them children unaccompanied by parents. Some were sent to relatives in America or Canada, others were raised by foster families until the war ended. They became orphans of war.

Goodnight Children is set in a South London apartment in 1945 when four siblings are at last reunited after six years apart. Betty, who's the eldest at 21, remained home during the war. Her two sisters, Ann, now 20, and Vi, 19, were boarded with a Welsh family. In an opening scene of awkward, giggly excitement that is wonderfully real and exact, the sisters await the return from Canada of their kid brother Peter, who's now 17.

"I used to bathe you," Betty says, looking with loving amazement at the self-conscious adolescent who could be a stranger. "He's a man," she adds. "Look at you. Look at you. Look at you," Ann announces proudly at the scene's end. But who do they actually see? And who-Mr. Nelson is asking-have they all become in the trauma of war and separation?

The natural order has lost its moorings, and nothing is quite as it seems. The siblings have grown up too soon, and Peter will travel from adolescence to manhood virtually overnight. The brother becomes the incestuous lover; a sister, the surrogate mother; a husband, the father in this fractured family in search of itself and a role to play.

It takes a bold, or foolish, dramatist to build a modern drama around three sisters (and a brother), for someone has done so before. But Mr. Nelson has pulled it off admirably. The restrained naturalism of the production of Playwrights Horizons struck me as unusual in its shifting, authentic emotion and spontaneity. In that wholly alive, understated sense, it's "Chekhovian." So much so that I looked in my Playbill after the first few scenes to check who the director could be. It was Richard Nelson, who's scarcely directed before.

But the direction is half the play, whose strength resides in its emotional subtext and nuance. It surprises me that some reviewers have found the production's rhythm too self-conscious. It's as if stage naturalism is now so rare that it's seen as unnatural. Mr. Nelson's touch is sure. The erotic confusion and love between Peter and his pregnant, married sister, Ann, for example, is so well acted that even their incestuous attraction for each other seems dangerously reasonable.

Everyone in the cast is excellent-particularly Robin Weigert's touchingly unconfident Betty, heading in her early 20's toward the half-life of a spinster-nurse; Heather Goldenhersh's Vi, caught between adolescent freshness and the certain future of a worldly failed actress; the besotted, incestuous Ann of Kali Rocha is a testing role made very humane by this talented young actress; and Chris Stafford's Peter is, at 17, a taciturn mess, both brother and lover, boy and man, living now in tragic double exile. Most troubling of all in Mr. Nelson's memorable Goodnight Children Everywhere , Peter, the prodigal son, has returned home to live in exile from himself.

To go from such an intelligent, shaded piece to a second-rate yuppie farce by Richard Greenberg is a stretch, and too much of one for me at the best of times. It's said even by Mr. Greenberg's ardent fans that he writes two kinds of play: good ones and bad ones. Hurrah at Last , a production of the Roundabout, at the Gramercy Theater, isn't a good play.

It's a self-important drag, actually-though it wants to be loved and worse, seen as "lovable" in a neo-farcical "madcap" kind of way. That's why it has an enormous, dull dog in it. Dreyfus, the 200-pound English mastiff who plays frolicsome Thunder, is just big and dull and bored, exhibiting no appetite at all for the role. He puts in a token appearance, lumbering onstage to stare balefully at the audience. Then he's sort of pushed into the wings to eat all the offstage antiques.

Dreyfus is meant to signal adorably serious fun, like the play. He needn't be in the play. His performance is so lackluster that in a sense he isn't there. We long for his understudy, Eve, to bound on and make something happen-wreak havoc, be pugnacious, be alive, wake us up, dare to take risks, shock us, astonish us, anything but the predictable yuppie beat of Mr. Greenberg's deadening hero, a failed novelist who's gay, embittered and obsessed with money.

Also appearing: our hero Laurie's sister, who is infertile, and her husband, an inconsequential Irish multimillionaire; Laurie's wealthy Jewish parents, the usual coarse stereotypes; and Laurie's friend and film adapter, a successful dramatist-though God knows how-who's in love with Laurie for some reason and married to a child-bearing woman who speaks no English.

In the first act, it takes Mr. Greenberg what seems like many hours to set up a lame visual gag in which the successful dramatist strips for Laurie to reveal all-rather than reveal how much money he makes. Geddit? In the second act, our hero ends up in the hospital having poisonous delusions. There was time enough to step back during his delirium to assess how comically likable the "witty" hero really is.

Let's see: He hates his dumb ma (naturally), while seeing his old dad as a beaten borscht belt comic in disguise; he's contemptuously ungrateful to sympathetic sis; he loathes and envies the successful; he's consumed by other people's money; he feels the world owes him a living; a failure, he is narcissistically impressed by no one except himself.

He's less an interesting comic hero, more a tedious whiner. The talented director, David Warren, has shrewdly dressed up this nonsense as a spiffy farce out of a Williams-Sonoma catalogue. No fool he: If your attention drifts, you can shop. The cast-including Peter Frechette as the near hysterical Laurie and the delightful Dori Brenner keeping a very straight face as his mum-is accomplished. The dog isn't.

To which the English, hurrying home with sacks full of awards and cash, reply: "No, thank you ."

I don't think I've ever quite experienced such a shocking display of Anglophilia as the conversation among the three theater critics of The New York Times -Ben Brantley, Vincent Canby and Peter Marks-in the Feb. 21 Arts and Leisure section. I'm sorry, attention must be paid.

Messrs. Brantley, Canby and Marks, a vaudevillian act, were part of a special theater section on British theater ("Why London Now Dominates New York," "A Parade of British Imports," and so on). The Times celebration is part of the problem. If I were an American working and struggling in American theater, I'd be inclined to jump off Brooklyn Bridge with the farewell words: "Give us a break!"

When was there ever a celebration of the enormous achievements and creativity of American theater? Messrs. Brantley, Canby and Marks-Anglophiles to a man-see only the superiority of London over New York as if they're still colonized subjects. "Part of our embrace of the English is that in some ways we haven't got over England," said Mr. Marks, and no one disagreed.

Gentlemen, get over it! The War of Independence was won some time ago. And all is by no means so rosy in England, or as dire here. Let me comment on a few of their points.

Compared to the "energy" and "buzz" among English audiences, Broadway audiences "go anesthetized" and "they leave anesthetized." Oh, really? Are the shaken New Yorkers coming out of, say, Death of a Salesman or Electra suffering from anesthesia? Hardly. In fact, the reverse is the truer picture: The dominantly middle-class audience in England is by no means as animated as its American counterpart. Every British director and actor I know pays tribute to the vibrant, un-English enthusiasm of New York audiences.

Jonathan Kent, who runs the Almeida Theater in North London, is the director who brought the Ralph Fiennes Hamlet to Broadway, and the Diana Rigg Medea , among others. Here's what he told me about American audiences: "We English too readily want to believe that Americans are less sophisticated than us. It's nonsense . It's just possible they're less jaded than we are. English audiences have a certain knowledge, a heritage. We're not as demonstrative as Americans, but then we're not a demonstrative nation. But New Yorkers want to be there. They want to be part of the event. It's not their 25th Hamlet this year. And it gives the play an exciting immediacy ."

Then again, is American theater "conservative," and English theater "fresher" and "younger"? Well, I wouldn't say that the work of Tony Kushner, Wooster Group, Susan Lori Parks, Danny Hoch, Ellen Stewart's La Mama, Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater or Hedwig and the Angry Inch -to name a few-is conservative. Let it pass. The last thing English theater adds up to is "younger."

Would Messrs. Brantley, Canby and Marks say that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Oklahoma , in repertory in the two main houses of the Royal National Theater, are young ? To be sure, the Royal Court import Shopping and Fucking was young. But was it fresh? Was it any good?

We tend to see the best of English theater in New York. Is it all great-as great as we are led to believe? This season alone, more than a few of us have found David Hare's The Blue Room no masterpiece; Martin Crimp's modern version of The Misanthrope makes one wonder how they get away with such silliness in England; Beautiful Thing , Jonathan Harvey's slice of London working-class life and adolescent gaydom, is little more than a cozy TV sitcom compared to Diana Son's Stop Kiss ; and the pseudo-chic prestige import of Phèdre with Diana Rigg disappointed in its 19th-century acting histrionics.

Of course we get to see some terrific English actors and writers. But why this craven need to overcelebrate them at the cost of American theater? One hundred and fifty years ago, New Yorkers caused an anti-British riot about theater. (I am encouraging another today.) The notorious 1849 Astor Place riots concerned a xenophobic rivalry over two productions of Macbeth . One starred the leading English thespian of his day, William Charles Macready; the other starred the American idol Edwin Forrest. Whether the riot was purely anti-English or against English hams on tour, I leave to scholars. Either way, there were 34 deaths and 100 injuries. You see, New Yorkers felt American theater counted in them days.

The riots were the subject of a wonderfully funny Richard Nelson play, Two Shakespearean Actors . Mr. Nelson, an American, has had some half-dozen of his plays commissioned and subsidized by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The British system of Arts Council subsidy went unmentioned by Messrs. Brantley, Canby and Marks-yet it accounts for the most crucial difference in our two systems. Virtually every British import has originated in its subsidized theater-from Tom Stoppard's plays to David Hare's, to Conor McPherson's The Weir , to Patrick Marber's Closer .

Tony Kushner's seminal Angels in America was produced at the National Theater before New York producers brought it home to Broadway. That says as much-if not more-about unimaginative, Anglophile ruling elites of Broadway. They shop-buying anything stamped with the English good housekeeping seal of approval. Broadway producers should invest in American talent, risk far more, and trust the intelligence of American audiences.

But look a little closer at the British scene: Its Arts Council is under serious attack from the anti-elite populist Cromwellians of the Blair government. Cutbacks in subsidy have meant the decimation of the once-thriving English regional theater. The American regional powerhouses of Chicago, Washington, Seattle and the West Coast axis are, in fact, producing more and far better theater than their English counterparts.

To which one might also add that the proud Royal Shakespeare Company is in financial and artistic crisis; that a new generation of English actors and directors is in revolt against the stiffly rhetorical, emotionally dead acting style of its peers; and that no major theater in London reflects multiethnic England in the dynamic way that the Public Theater truly reflects New York.

They have a theater culture, we don't! I don't think so. They say tomah-toe, we say tamay-ter. Let's call the whole thing off. Meanwhile, may I ask Messrs. Brantley, Canby and Marks to raise their right hand and repeat after me: "We do solemnly swear never to genuflect before British theater again. We'll cool it. We agree Anglophilia is blind. We have seen the error of our ways. We faithfully promise to celebrate American theater. Because it is worthy of celebration, too. Because it is the right thing to do."