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By James Hadley in London
 
On a recent trip to the Royal Court Theatre there was a film star on either side of me in the audience as well as three on stage. Some feel that the West End has become too reliant on celebrity names to draw audience, including the kind of TV celebrity who has found fame through being a contestant in a reality TV talent show.

But there is such an abundant wealth of established and famous actors resident or passing through this city that there's no need to resort to E-list celebrities unless it's a marketing tactic.

Only on a few occassions have I randomly seen a famous actor just walking down a London street. But where you do regularly see them (as well as on the stage) is going to the theatre to watch peers performing. And the Royal Court, London's flagship theatre for new writing, seems to be the most likely venue to run into famous actors on any given night. I've been there just three times and seen famous performers on two of those occassions.
 
Having been in London a year now, I'm starting to realise that despite the huge scale of its theatre industry, there is still a theatre community. And as a regular theatre-goer, I'm starting to recognise some actors re-appearing from one Fringe show to another in vastly different parts of the city, or to recognise an actor from a play when I pass them on the street. In New Zealand we take these random networking opportunities for granted. With the hundreds of venues and shows on any night here, it's extraordinary to me that you ever randomly bump into people you recognise from among the millions of people milling around the city.
 
Yet just the other day, on my way into the Royal Court, I bumped into playwright Mojisola Adebayo. Mojisola is widely felt to be an emerging playwright to watch. I'd been to a reading of the first draft of her new work, 'Matt Henson - North Star' earlier in the week, and just had to introduce myself to her so I could gush about how impressed I was by her imaginative writing and generally engaging theatrical vision. This new work is about the first man at the North Pole being a Black man. The play is at an early stage of development, but already full of intriguing propositions about gender and cultural differences.

As with some of her past work, she places a British Sign Language interpreter centrestage within the show, in this case as a sort of emcee of proceedings; the signing is positioned as an integral part of the work. Her regular collaborator, Jackie Beckford, signs with an eloquence that makes it like watching contemporary dance.
 
Inside the Royal Court I met up with a friend at the venue's stylish bar. He told me that every second time he comes to the bar he ends up sitting beside a Fiennes brother - either Joseph or Ralph. I'm thinking he was exaggerating, but I wouldn't complain to find he was right. Certainly the atmosphere in the bar is more stylishly urbane than the late-middle-aged culture vulture grandeur of most large London venue foyers. The venue has a wonderful little bookshop of play texts that's well worth a visit, and from its balcony vantage point over the bar area, you can scan over the hipster generation of theatre luvvies and appear to be literate simultaneously.
 
The Royal Court is currently showing a season of three plays by American writer Wallace Shawn. Don't recognise the name? Neither did I. But when I say that he's the actor who played the little, black garbed assassin character in 'The Princess Bride' film, you might know who I mean. He's not known as a playwright in England, so the Royal Court's Artistic Director, Dominic Cooke, saw fit to try and rectify that with this season.

I'd already seen one of the other shows, 'Aunt Dan and Lemon', starring Jane Horrocks. It's an intriguing and, at times, deeply ironic piece, which on the surface seems to be arguing that we would all be Nazis were it not for accidents of birth, when it's really about the dangerous influence that we allow others to have over us when we like them - for instance, the influence of a favourite aunt over a young person's political world view. This production was showing in the main downstairs auditorium, and concurrently, in the upstairs studio theatre space, Wallace Shawn's newest script also had a run within the season.
 
This play, 'Grasses of a Thousand Colours', is Shawn's first new script in a decade. And at three and a quarter hours in length, it feels like he's tried to compensate by writing a very chunky text of mostly monologues. It would all seem frustratingly self-indulgent were the cast performing the work not of such a high standard.

Wallace Shawn himself performs a scientist who has made his fortune tampering with nature for the benefit of food supplies, and to the detriment of animal welfare. His more ecologically-minded wife is played by Miranda Richardson, and his sassy girlfriend by Jennifer Tilly. I'm familiar with all three of these actors from a range of films, so it makes for an unusually starry cast considering the intimate studio venue. But it's not mainstage fare. There's an extended middle section of the play which explores the male protagonist's obsession with his penis, and this leads into a surprisingly explicit fantasy sequence where he carries out a fairy tale romance with a white cat. It's all a little bewildering. But Jennifer Tilly in particular is such a joy to watch that you forgive the excesses of the text. She's mastered the sexy gangster's moll archetype, and that's basically what she plays here, somewhat type cast, but she does it so well that no-one would complain.

This was definitely one of those theatre-viewing experiences where the play itself was background to the thrill of experiencing the actual presence of several famous actors. And in this instance, an awareness of star presence was heightened by those in the audience also. Sitting in our row on one side was Meg Tilly, star of several big films of the early 1980s, here to watch her sister onstage. And on our other side, just across the aisle, was Alan Rickman. So whenever things onstage were less than compelling, we could always watch the stars in the audience.