A place to play: London's West End

ILONDON ’m cradling a pint of hard cider, standing at the bar of the Finborough Arms, a cozy and casual pub in the London neighborhood of Kensington, talking to my new friend Craig Glenday about theater in his city.

We’re not drunk — yet — but we’re exhilarated. A half-hour earlier, we had applauded the “Adding Machine” cast as they took their bows in the 50-seat Finborough Theatre, just up a winding staircase from where we were standing.

It was the last night of the show, a wrap of its brief fall run in London. It is a funny and bitter musical version of the 1923 satire by American playwright Elmer Rice, about an accountant who loses his job to automation. The tiny theater had rippled with the fury and despair of the main character’s dawning realization that playing by the rules is for suckers.

And now, the actors who had sang, emoted and danced were milling around with us, saying goodbye to their castmates and talking about their next assignments.

The next day, I would fly back to Maryland after a five-day, five-show trip to London with a group organized by the Olney Theatre Center in Montgomery County, Maryland. The excuse for the transatlantic excursion was “Adding Machine’s” London debut: The book and lyrics were written by Olney artistic director Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt, who composed the music.

Not that we needed an excuse. The trip provided a quick introduction to the incredible diversity of theater in a city with about 150 stages. HIT THE WEST END

My advice: Venture beyond the shows you can see in the District or New York — “Wicked” and “Mamma Mia!” and the like. Instead, head to the West End, a district of about 40 theaters that is similar to Broadway, for stardriven revivals of British classics. And check out the off-West End theaters (there are more than 80) for the experiments, the raw emotion, the magic connection between artist and audience. You might luck into a play or an actor who has not yet been discovered by the masses.

Glenday, the freelance critic for a blog called Musical Theatre Review, is all about those offWest End plays. In fact, he liked “Adding Machine” so much, he saw it twice.

Loewith, who traveled with us, has attended “Adding Machine”

performances around the world since the musical’s 2007 debut outside Chicago. The London version was probably his favorite, he said.

Maybe it’s because London, where the first Juliet sadly murmured to the first Romeo that “parting is such sweet sorrow,” is justly proud of its rich theater history. Live performance is baked into the DNA of this city: In 2015, a pie shop hosted a run of “Sweeney Todd.”

“We’re spoiled here,” said Londoner Charlotte Thomas, who goes to a couple of shows a month and loves musicals. I spoke to her in the crowded lobby of the West End’s Garrick Theatre during the intermission of “The Entertainer,” a revival of the 1957 classic by John Osborne, this time with Kenneth Branagh filling the role originated by Laurence Olivier.

“I try to see a show whenever I’m in London,” said Colin Blaydon, a Dartmouth College professor in town with his wife, Linda, to give a speech. “I look for spectacular actors,” he said, which explains why they were at Wyndham’s Theatre to see “No Man’s Land,” another West End big-star remake of a British classic, with real-life besties Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart.

EMBRACING DIVERSITY

This is a particularly exciting time for London theater, said Michael Billington, theater critic for the Guardian newspaper since 1971 and probably the most qualified to issue that opinion. For one thing, he told our group, the audience is getting younger and more diverse. Young people these days think “it is quite cool to go to theater,” he said.

The changing audience demographics are starting to be reflected on the stage, with “much more emphasis on gender equality and ethnic diversity,” he said. So you can see Glenda Jackson as King Lear at the Old Vic or Lucian Msamati, who is black, as the composer Antonio Salieri in “Amadeus” at the National Theatre.

The diversity push isn’t limited to actors. “Eight years ago, there had never been the work of a living female playwright on the Olivier stage,” Nina Steiger, senior dramaturge at the National Theatre, told us, referring to the largest of the theater’s three stages. She’s changing that.

The nonprofit theater, which opened in 1963, devotes considerable resources to workshops and collaborations to nurture new works. It recently launched “A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer,” a musical meditation on illness and free will, which writer Bryony Kimmings developed in a National Theatre workshop in a co-production with Complicite Associates.

Another female playwright who’s kind of a big deal right now? Ella Hickson, creator of “Oil,” a sprawling yet intimate look at the unlikely mix of family relationships, power and England’s energy dependence. “Oil” premiered in October at the Almeida Theatre, one of the larger off-West End venues. During a Saturday matinee, the buzz was palpable before the first line was spoken. We knew we were seeing something ambitious and special.

In fact, all five plays, West End and off-West End, could be described as such. I loved seeing Branagh as a shabby showman in “The Entertainer” and adored the thought-provoking “Oil.” I guffawed at the meticulously timed slapstick of “The Play That Goes Wrong,” marveled at the acting in “No Man’s Land,” and reeled at the bitterly funny cynicism of “Adding Machine.”

When “Adding Machine” ended, I turned in my seat and asked Olivia Maffett, in the row behind me, what kind of theater she prefers. Maffett, who lives in London and goes to theater about once a month, said she likes it all: “Here in London, you can find almost anything.”