OLD ENGLISH

“Player Kings,”"The Cherry Orchard,” and "London Tide.”

- HELEN SHAW

Ian McKellen stars as the coward-knight Falstaff.

When I was in London recently, walking down near Cheapside, north of the Thames, I went into the small museum built above the Mithraeum, an ancient site hidden twenty feet under Bloomberg’s glassy European headquarters. You’re often conscious in London of the place’s great age, but there’s nothing like visiting the remnants of a third-century temple devoted to Mithras—a bull-killing god popular with Roman centurions—to make you appreciate just how many cities lie beneath the streets. (A river, the Walbrook, once ran by the temple, though it has since been built over and lost.) Spring in London feels like a time for the new: goslings waddle in the parks, tiny daisies dot the grass. This May, however, many theatre productions were digging old, sometimes familiar things out of the sediment and reconsidering them in the city’s changing light.