Birth Pangs, Royal and Otherwise

Childbirth issues provide an unexpected link to a second, less satisfying London theater opening this week. That would be the Royal Shakespeare Company production of “Queen Anne,” which premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon (the RSC’s home base) late in 2015 and reopened — partly recast — on Monday at the Theater Royal Haymarket, for a West End run through Sept. 30.

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Telling of the last Stuart queen, who acceded to the throne in 1702 only to die twelve years later at the age of 49, Anne is remembered (if at all) for having no surviving children, despite 17 pregnancies. Much the closest relationship in her sorrowful life is thought to have been with her friend and confidante Sarah Churchill, who became the Duchess of Marlborough and the outspoken power behind the throne.

It’s a shame, then, that a tantalizingly ripe slice of distaff history — the full extent of Anne and Sarah’s “friendship” has long been subject to speculation — should go so underdeveloped in Helen Edmundson’s windy but not especially illuminating play.

The attempt here is an equivalent of sorts to “Mary Stuart,” the canonical history play from Friedrich Schiller about the relationship between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots and a classic text that was stirringly revived by the Almeida Theater at the end of last year and that will move to the West End in January. But neither Ms. Edmundson nor her director, Natalie Abrahami, has unleashed much energy from proceedings that as often as not find characters stepping downstage to linger ponderously in the spotlight. (Sample line: “Go forth my friend, my friend go forth.”)

While the dramatic core lies in the shifting relationship between Emma Cunniffe’s swollen, ailing Anne and Romola Garai’s steely and glamorous Sarah, the production comes padded with superfluous (and unfunny) satirical interludes, most of them sung. Those, in turn, serve only to recall another tiresome period piece, Terry Johnson’s “The Libertine,” to play the Haymarket within the past year.

Heritage theater tends to be easy on the eye, but Hannah Clark’s curvilinear brown set soon palls, throwing attention even more squarely on Ms. Garai’s elegantly coifed Sarah — her curls are a thing of wonder — as the most arresting figure on stage. Ms. Cunniffe has the unenviable task of having to simper her way across nearly three hours. Off-putting in her neediness, this Anne emerges as less a study in pathos than in pathology.

Passing mention is made of problems with party tribalism, the Scots and Europe that are presumably intended to link the issues troubling Queen Anne’s newly united realm with the realpolitik at large in Britain just now. But if the RSC wants a state of the nation play, surely it has the resources to produce one. This play ultimately loses interest in its title character, choosing to give Sarah the last word — Queen Anne sidelined by her playwright as she has been by history.

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Dramatic skill turns out to be the very topic of German writer Daniel Kehlmann’s “The Mentor,” which has arrived at the Vaudeville Theater through Sept. 2 in an English-language translation by Christopher Hampton, of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” renown. (Mr. Hampton’s translating credits have included multiple French texts by Yasmina Reza and Florian Zeller.)

If only Benjamin Rubin (F. Murray Abraham), the outspoken senior playwright at the scolding center of “The Mentor,” could have been shown Mr. Kehlmann’s script somewhere along the way. It’s difficult to imagine the tough-talking authorial scourge that has brought the still-vigorous, 77-year-old Oscar winner to the West End for the first time in 21 years sanctioning the pileup of implausibility that courses through this 80-minute play (no intermission).

What’s the point, for instance, in presenting events as if they were being told in flashback by Martin Wegner (Daniel Weyman), the wunderkind playwright who has landed in Benjamin’s caustically spoken care for a (paid) weeklong mentorship, only to give up on that device altogether?

And though much is made of the aging Benjamin having had huge success as a playwright when he was 24 with a career-defining hit called “The Long Road,” why has that work been allowed to languish? I doubt the German theater believes any less in revivals than theater cultures elsewhere. After a while, one gets the impression that Benjamin resents Martin’s ascendancy for reasons to do not at all with stagecraft but with straightforward envy: cue the libidinous Benjamin putting the make on Martin’s wife, Gina (Naomi Frederick), and sending shock waves through the young couple’s faltering marriage.

The biggest head-scratcher of all comes when the ostensibly brilliant — or maybe not — Martin asks about the meaning of the word “bipolar.” At that point, I found myself wishing that Mr. Abraham, the welcome veteran who played the “patron saint [of] mediocrities everywhere” onscreen in “Amadeus,” would absolve everyone in “The Mentor” and call it a day.

Bodies. Directed by Jude Christian. Royal Court Jerwood Theater Upstairs, through Aug. 12.

Queen Anne. Directed by Natalie Abrahami. Theater Royal Haymarket, through Sept. 30.

The Mentor. Directed by Laurence Boswell. Vaudeville Theater, through Sept. 2.

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