LOCAL STORIES.('His Girl Friday')(Theater Review)

In his excellent first season as artistic director of London's Royal National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner has continued the recent company policy of offering safe haven to the best of America's theatrical talent. In this instance--in an adaptation of "His Girl Friday," Howard Hawks's 1940 screwball-comedy version of the 1928 Hecht-MacArthur satire on American journalism, "The Front Page"--the playwright John Guare and the director Jack O'Brien make their Royal National debuts. They return the honor by delivering a rambunctious summer hit. Playfulness is the stock-in-trade of both gents. They show their hand even before the story begins, as the fun machine is cranked up in front of the audience. The flats of the pressroom and the Chicago skyline behind its windows are lowered into place; the smoke machine belches test clouds; the array of bulbous lights above the sprawling Olivier proscenium blink on and off; period jazz music plays over the bustle of actors as they chat with each other and warm up. The stage hubbub makes the play feel like a frisky racehorse being pushed into its gate.

When "His Girl Friday" is finally off and running--a red light signals the start--it stumbles at the first narrative hurdle, bedevilled by the humdrum exposition and the undefined newspaper hacks who sit around waiting for another disaster to report. But with the entrance of the ace Examiner reporter Hildy Johnson (Zoe Wanamaker), who is hellbent on leaving journalism for normal life, and her ruthless managing editor, Walter Burns (Alex Jennings), who is equally adamant about keeping his star at the typewriter to cover a sensational local story, the play finds its feet. As the momentum of both the big newsbreak and the big plot complications grows (Guare has added two characters to the play), "His Girl Friday" gathers speed and more or less romps home.

The creators of the original play, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and its director, George S. Kaufman, were former newspapermen who loved the louche world they were laughing at. Hildy Johnson was, as Hecht and MacArthur said, a "vanishing type--the lusty, hoodlumesque, half-drunk caballero that was the newspaperman of our youth." But in transforming Hildebrand (Hildy) Johnson of the play into Hildegarde (Hildy) Johnson of the Hawks movie, the metaphor does more than change sexes; it changes intention and tone. As a woman, Hildy Johnson is not a vanishing type but a futuristic one: an early version of the independent American female whose fast-talking assertiveness substitutes sass for cynicism.

When Hildy traipses into the pressroom at the Criminal Court Building to say goodbye to the guys and to show off her engagement bagatelle--"You're all my wicked past and I came back to make sure this room smells as bad as I remember"--the gallows are being prepared for the execution of the cop-killing anarchist Earl Holub (Kerry Shale). This is big Chicago news; but Hildy's off to Albany, her wedding, and a new, more secure existence. "For once in my life I'm going to be taken care of," she says of Bruce Baldwin (Richard Lintern), prospective Husband No. 2, taking an incidental swipe at Burns, who was until recently Husband No. 1. Although she is marrying a man who enters wearing rubbers on his shoes in case of rain, Hildy herself is a risk-taker. She is constitutionally unable to be passive or proper. She can handle her cards, her stories, her liquor, and, as her motormouth demonstrates, her men. "Rome is burning and I have to run into Nero," she says to Burns--a great Guare line--as she finally sits down to write the story of Holub's jailbreak while the building resounds to volleys of gunfire and shattering glass.

Wanamaker gallivants around the pressroom with terrific swagger. She's a petite dynamo with a glint in her eye, and her gumption plays well against the gleeful cockiness of Alex Jennings. "You're wonderful in a loathsome sort of way," Hildy tells Burns. And he is--during the course of the evening he bribes, cajoles, lies, browbeats, even frames people to get his story and his way. ...