Michael Riedel

Michael Riedel

Theater

The fall floodlights offer a feast

The name is Pinter. Harold Pinter.

Though he’s been dead five years, the master of the unsettling remains a Broadway box office powerhouse, as you can see from the $6 million advance sale for the upcoming revival of “Betrayal” at the Ethel Barrymore.

OK, maybe Craig, Daniel Craig, has something to do with that haul. And perhaps Weisz, Rachel Weisz. And Nichols, Mike Nichols.

But let’s give Pinter his due. “Betrayal” is one of my favorite plays of all time, and if you give a toss (as they say in Britain) about the theater, you won’t want to miss it — that is, if you can still get a ticket or are willing to pay sky-high premiums.

If not, there’s another Pinter play this fall on Broadway you can get into: “No Man’s Land” at the Cort. Tickets are selling, just not as briskly as at “Betrayal.” Another masterpiece — though not as accessible as “Betrayal” — “No Man’s Land” stars Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart as two men in their 60s, both literary types, who are linked by murky events in their past.

I caught a production in London in 1993 starring the wonderful Paul Eddington, and still shiver when I remember him saying, “You know what it’s like when you’re in a room with the light on and then suddenly the light goes out? I’ll show you. It’s like this.”

And he turned out the light.

If you fancy yourself a “literary type,” you’ll feast all fall. McKellen and Stewart are performing “No Man’s Land” in repertory with yet another 20th-century masterpiece, “Waiting for Godot.” I’m told McKellen and Stewart play up the humor; this is not one of those slow-moving Beckett productions in which the actors speak as if every word is Very Important.

My good friend William Shakespeare is well represented on Broadway. “Romeo and Juliet,” starring Orlando Bloom and the beautiful Condola Rashad, is in previews at the Richard Rodgers, and I hear it’s going well.

Of course, I would say that, since it’s directed by David Leveaux, and if I say anything else, he might hit me.

The delightful Stephen Fry is making his Broadway debut as the yellow-stockinged Malvolio in an all-male version of “Twelfth Night” at the Belasco. Fry is the author of the charming memoir “The Fry Chronicles,” but the best book about him is Simon Gray’s “Fat Chance,” a hilarious and fabulously mean-spirited account of Fry’s nervous breakdown during Gray’s play “Cell Mates.” Fry disappeared right after the play opened to mixed reviews. He fled, in disguise, to Bruges, where he thought he’d teach English.

I encourage the producers of “Twelfth Night” to read it and make sure Fry’s got his medication right.

(Literary footnote: Gray’s best friend was Harold Pinter. They used to drink champagne together at an Italian restaurant in their neighborhood, until one night when Gray took a sip and collapsed. He gave up drinking the next day.)

Fry will star opposite one of England’s great actors, Mark Rylance, in “Twelfth Night.” The production’s in rep with “Richard III,” with Rylance giving a terrifying account of the title character.

Terence Rattigan was a first-rate though somewhat forgotten playwright. The Roundabout is producing one of his best plays, “The Winslow Boy,” starring the incomparable Roger Rees.

Another fine and forgotten playwright is William Inge, whose sexually fraught “Natural Affection,” starring Katherine Erbe and John Pankow, will go up at off-Broadway’s Beckett Theater. The play opened in 1963 during a newspaper strike and sank without a trace. It’s well worth exhuming, and should be on your list.

Cherry Jones will pick up raves, and very possibly a Tony, as Amanda Wingfield in the revival of “The Glass Menagerie” at the Booth.

This is, of course, one of the great American plays, but it was a measure of how touristy Times Square has become when a middle-aged couple walked by the theater the other night and the man said, “What’s a ‘Glass Menagerie’?”

Not a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, I guess.

But if that gentleman is still in town and would like to brush up on his Shakespeare, Pinter, Inge and Tennessee Williams, he couldn’t have picked a better season.