Diretor Sam Mendes has earned cachet for the plays he directed at Donmar Warehouse, the “flashy and successful London theatre” he co-founded a decade ago. He “knows, in his post-Peter Brook way, that the play is not the thing; the star is, no matter how ill-equipped he or she may be for the exigencies of the stage. He knows, too, that the theatre nowadays is to movies what jazz is to pop music: it has a certain cachet, but few prefer it to the populist-minded alternative.”