Roger Allam and Jodhi May in the 2006 production of Blackbird at the Albery. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
After eight shows in six days on the Great White Way, I've found time to venture off-Broadway, only to encounter yet another British play, David Harrower's Blackbird, albeit in an Americanised production that held a potentially rowdy New York public totally rapt. That last statement is well worth heeding in a town where requests for patrons to turn off cell phones have to be made again at the end of the interval, since so many customers leap out of their seats at the first opportunity to participate anew in an ongoing gabfest. At Thursday night's performance of the new August Wilson play, Radio Golf, the man next to me silently sent and retrieved messages on his Blackberry throughout the entire show, every so often looking up at the stage to offer a snort of approval. (I assume he liked the play since he stayed to the end.)
But the Manhattan Theatre Club audience the other evening for Blackbird was another matter altogether: quiet, fully attentive, and far more varied in age than can be the norm in a town where theatre-going has become an older person's game. (One wag some years ago joked of the MTC audience that the midtown venue "sleeps 300".) Not that I clocked anyone dozing at director Joe Mantello's subtly ruthless reappraisal of the same play whose 2006 West End incarnation ended up the surprise winner of an Olivier award. You may remember the scenario: a man approaching 60, Ray, gets an unexpected visitor one day at his drab, debris-strewn office from the twentysomething woman, Una, with whom he had an affair some years back when she was underage.
Among several twists in the scenario, the most immediate is that Una's putative desire for revenge - to lend closure to an illegal act for which Ray has himself done time - turns out to be something else altogether: she has returned in an effort to revive the partnership, only to find that Ray has moved on in a way Una clearly never will. Harrower, the author, is a Scotsman, but his staccato rhythms and mournful reveries transcend locale. The New York cast is led by the fast-ascending young actress Alison Pill, whose rail-thin physique makes her perfect for the child-woman of the text, and The Squid and the Whale's Jeff Daniels, a wonderful actor whose everyman quality is visibly shaded by anxiety as his shameful past resurfaces in his midst.
I did miss the physical coda supplied for the London production by the director Peter Stein; Mantello's New York version concludes with the very abruptness indicated in the script. But amidst a Broadway parade of awards going this way and that to Brits, it's worth taking a moment to laud Harrower and his American collaborators on an evening that manages the toughest task imaginable: it's not easy getting a New York audience to sit still.
