British theaters take a fresh look at touring opportunities in Washington

It was a tour group with a highly dramatic itinerary. Leaders from some of Britain's best-known and most prestigious theaters zigged and zagged their way through Washington this week, stepping in and out of taxis and Metro stations to get an intimate feel for the local real estate.

The representatives of the elite companies -- the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Court Theatre among them -- were not here to ooh and ahh at the monuments. They had come with another agenda: bringing more of their plays to town. Stocked with brochures and business cards, they had as their destinations the city's big playhouses and subscription theaters, to assess the aptness of the spaces and, potentially, bring Washington more fully into the circuit of stops for world-class performance.

The city, of course, does receive a sizable dose of global culture, through the ministrations of foreign embassies or, more frequently, under the auspices of an art museum or a festival at the Kennedy Center. Even so, Washington has remained frustratingly and curiously off the short list of major world cities considered natural, routine stopping points in a key area: international theater. And more to the point, work from perhaps the most influential English-speaking theater country on Earth, Great Britain.

Now, however, on the heels of an extraordinary expansion and redevelopment of theaters around the city, particularly at institutions such as Arena Stage and the Shakespeare Theatre Company, the alternatives for housing visiting productions are growing -- and so, at the same time, is Washington's reputation as a promising place to do stage business.

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The changing perception of available spaces here was given a huge boost after the September engagement of the National Theatre's "Phèdre," starring Helen Mirren. The entire run at the Shakespeare Theatre's Sidney Harman Hall, the only stop in this country, sold out in an eye-blink, in a venture that proved financially successful for both the American and British companies. The experience gave Shakespeare company officials an even more vigorous appetite for booking outside productions into the two-year-old, 775-seat Harman.

Granted, an actress of Mirren's stature helps immeasurably. A similar frenzied scrum for tickets surrounded the sold-out Kennedy Center stay last month of Cate Blanchett in Sydney Theatre Company's "A Streetcar Named Desire." Still, it was concrete evidence of the intensity of the Washington audience's preparedness to respond to such events in new venues, and a positive indicator for companies eager to bring their work here.

"It's the capital of the United States. It means something, still," said Neil Murray, executive director of the National Theatre of Scotland. He had to come to scout possible sites -- and partners -- for the Washington premiere of his troupe's widely admired "Black Watch," a remarkable 2006 piece that chronicles the brutality and boredom of a tour of duty in Iraq by a storied Scottish regiment. The play, which has already been performed to great acclaim in New York and Los Angeles and had an unusual, brief stint at a festival in Norfolk, is staged in the round, making it an ideal fit for Arena's main stage, the Fichandler.

Murray is, in fact, in talks with Arena to bring "Black Watch" as soon as next year, after Arena completes a $125 million overhaul of its campus in Southwest Washington.

For Murray, whose theater is based in Glasgow, the trip was eye-opening, an exposure to a city he found far more alive than he'd imagined. "This is my first time in Washington, but I get a sense it's not Canberra," he said the other evening, in a reference to Australia's sleepy capital city. "There's a vibrancy about Washington."

Washington has long been at some disadvantage with international theater because of the limitations of geography and space. The relative proximity to prime-stop New York made a visit here seem less than essential to some theater producers from outside the country. And the difficulties of finding a slot in the schedule of the Kennedy Center, far and away the region's most desired venue for international work, can be a barrier to productions making their way here.

The center does much of its booking 18 months to two years in advance, an eternity in theater terms. Occasionally, a company like Ireland's Druid Theatre ("The Playboy of the Western World" in 2008) or the National Theatre (Fiona Shaw in "Happy Days" in 2007) gets a brief booking. (Kennedy Center officials noted that it was they who were first approached about Mirren and "Phèdre," but by that time there was no room for it in the schedule.) The center has had no agreement in place with a British theater since the Royal Shakespeare Company concluded its five-year deal in 2007 with a production of "Coriolanus."