Once upon a time, a glamorous screen siren breezing into town for a rare stage appearance could reliably expect to be brutally savaged by London drama critics, even the straight ones. Years of grueling fringe theater in the upstairs rooms of pubs in obscure outlying boroughs, years of exposure to nudity on the stage—where on the whole the people who take their clothes off are the people you’d rather didn’t—all this had left them with no use for such banal Hollywood values as flawless skin, defoliated armpits, firm breasts, etc. But last year, when The Blue Room opened at the Donmar Warehouse with Nicole Kidman, she brought out the kid in every man. “Stunning,” said The Daily Mail’s Christopher Tookey. “Pure theatrical Viagra,” said The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer. Was that a rolled-up copy of the Telegraph in his pocket or was he just pleased to see her? Hard to tell. Fo ...

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