Theatre in London

Broadway, in case you're wondering, is second to none when it comes to buzz, and to audiences that, as Ian McKellen remarked when he won his Best Actor Tony for Amadeus in 1981, 'lift you so high that sometimes you feel you want to fly for them'. But you can't compare a city with (in a good year) 40 openings a season - and perhaps as many again in the major off-Broadway venues - to a capital like London that can open well over 250 shows in a year, from big musicals to agitprop, site-specific experiments to star vehicles, and reclamations of unfamiliar plays to soul-stirring reappraisals of time-honoured ones. And always, always, there are the actors to populate them, more often than not, extraordinarily well.
Why does Britain do theatre so successfully? One is likely to come across as many answers to that question as there are registered members of Equity: between 20,000-25,000, of whom one-third are generally thought to be working at any given time. But for every cod-psychological theory about why a country in thrall to irony, argument and dressing up should find a natural artistic outlet in the theatre, comes a less sophisticated explanation pertaining, say, to the weather - a culture with so unpredictable a climate is bound to thrive on what can take place indoors. Everyone keen on the theatre here has their own treasured shortlist of great performances over time. Mine include Derek Jacobi's Cyrano and Lindsay Duncan's Amanda in Private Lives, Racing Demon's Oliver Ford Davies and the Rufus Sewell/Emma Fielding double act in Arcadia