Onward Christian Slater ... Swimming with Sharks is the star's latest West End outing. Photograph: Stuart Ramson/AP
At last week's press night of The Member of the Wedding at the Young Vic, I was struck by several things, not least the fact that this is the third American play in recent weeks to employ the n-word, following Awake and Sing! and The Emperor Jones. But the electrifying central performance in The Member of the Wedding raises an additional topic. The audience cheered the revelatory work of a visiting African-American performer named Portia in the play's defining role of the family cook, Berenice. Amid the claps, I wondered: why aren't these stalwart American theatre professionals - the ones who are not quite yet stars -seen more frequently in London instead of the visiting celebrity cavalcade?
The answer is embedded in the question: Portia isn't widely known in her own country, much less London, which makes it harder for casting agents and directors in Britain to be aware of her work. It also means that she won't put bums on seats, at least until the reviews come out. It's easier and more commercially judicious to cast a film-friendly name in the West End than it is to search out those true New York theatre talents whose abilities outshine their Hollywood rivals. Some of these movie stars seem to exert a cachet treading the London boards that is unavailable to them back home. When Christian Slater was drafted in alongside Jessica Lange to appear in The Glass Menagerie on Broadway in 2005, New York audiences responded with total indifference and the production faded from view, after receiving not a single Tony nomination.
Broadway seems to get whole hosts of British theatre talents, whether they are well known or not. Simon Russell Beale was by no means a familiar face when he was called upon to replace Tim Curry in the New York production of Spamalot, a task he later undertook very delightfully here. And few can have been as surprised as Janet McTeer and Owen Teale at the rapidity with which they stormed Broadway in the 1997 revival of Ibsen's A Doll's House, especially since both performers at the time were all but unknown outside Britain. The History Boys in New York generated a near-instant buzz around company members Dominic Cooper and Samuel Barnett, just as this season's opening of The 39 Steps may well do for its London leading man, Charles Edwards, who is repeating his performance on Broadway, opening at the American Airlines Theatre in January.
Why, then, isn't the London theatre seeing more American actors of this ilk - the ones who have paid their dues without necessarily becoming a household name via TV or film? Kathleen Chalfant, Judith Ivey, Cherry Jones, Stephen Spinella, Pablo Schreiber, Jason Butler Harner: these are just a few of the talents that a really savvy London theatre might want to cast. In the meantime, the Young Vic deserves credit for handing a role to Portia, just as its artistic director David Lan did previously when he brought over a senior and mightily talented African-American actress, Novella Nelson, to appear in his production of A Raisin in the Sun in 2001 and again in 2005. As for Portia, this fiercely funny and impassioned performer simply must be seen, not least for the way in which she lifts a slice of period Americana into something truly eloquent. The woman with the single Shakespearean moniker may not be a star in London or New York but one can only think to add to that remark one simple word: yet.
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