The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 23

SUNDAY 9 MARCH 1986 OBSERVER El REVIEW Some People's Dreams Poems from the Gulag VM1 for Irina The White-hot Blizzard- The whtte-hot blizzard Brands us with Russia. Black rhetoric of craters, Dark holfows under the arrow Go away, eyeless woman, go away I Only how are we to leave each other, Pencil Letter I know won't bm received And won't be sent. The page is In tiny shred No sooner than I've finished scribbling it. Later. Some day.

After all, you're used to It. Reading between the lines that haven't reached you, Understanding everything. And on the tiny sheet I find room for the night, taking my time. What's the point of hurrying, when the hour that's past Is merely part of the same term, I don't know how long. And a word stirs under my hand Like a starling.

A rustle. The movement of eyelashes. Everything's OK. But don't sleep yet. A little later on I'll tie up my sadness in a bundle, Throw back my head, and on my lips there'll be a seal, A smile, my prince I Even from afar I You'll feel my hand warm Across your hair.

Across the hollows In your cheeks. How December has blown on your temples How thin you've grown Let me dream of you more, In our infinite whirling, In our kinship and conflict with her And when at last you break loose From the oppressive tenderness BLAKE MORRISON on the plight of a remarkable young poet imprisoned in a Soviet labour camp. Some people's dreams pay all their bill. While others' gild an empty shelf But mine go whimpering about a velvet drM Cherry-red and sumptuous as sin. 0, inaccessible I Not of our world I Nowhere to get you, or to put you on But how I want you I Against all reason's reproaches-There, in the very narrows of the heart's Recesses flourishes the poison Of heavy folds, and obscure embroidery The childish, flouted right To beauty I Not bread, not domicile-But unbleached, royal lace, Enspiralled rings, sly ribbons but no I My day is like a donkey, bridled, laden, My night deserted, like the prison light.

But in my soul it's no good 1 1 am guilty I keep on sewing it, and in my mind I make The thousandth stitch, as I do up my anorak And try on my tarpaulin boots. (April 1983; Of her despotic embraces, In which to fall asleep is to do so forever Your head swims. As from the first childish drag at a cigarette. And your lungs are torn to shreds Like a cheap envelope. And then, as you wait for everything thtt Haa emerged alive from her unpeopled cold To recover from the narcosis To know that the angels of Russia freeze to death towards morning Like sparrowa in the frost Falling from their wires into the snow.

(4 August 1984) Open the window. My pillow is hot. Footsteps behind the door, and a bell tolling In the tower Two, three Remember, you and I never Said goodbye I This is nothing. Four. Everything.

Such a heavy tolling, (3 November 1982) TODAY, in Birmingham, a 38-year-old Anglican clergyman and orthopaedic surgeon will complete hn 26th day inside a cage, and on prison rations, in a Bull Ring church. It is no ordinary Lenten bbt. The Reverend Richard Rod-gers means to draw attention to the plight of the Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya, who since April 1983 has been similarly if more brutally confined beaten and iorce-fed in sub-zero temperatures in a Soviet labour camp. Dick Rodgers's vigil ends at Easter; Irina will not be free again until 1995. He isn't the first to campaign on Her behalf.

The PEN American Centre, Amnesty International and the magazine Index on Censorship have fought for her release, and it's said that Nancy Reagan wanted to raise the case with Mrs Gorbachov attheir recent meeting. But-the pressure has a new urgency1 now that there are reports of Irina's failing health Last autumn she was moved to an isolation cell, where during her six months sentence (the maximum possible without a retrial) she can expect to be given warm food once every two days In these conditions she has just celebrated her thirty-second birthday. But the 'Irina Vigil' is more than (if anything can be) a campaign for human rights. There are some who consider her a poet in the class of that great quartet of Russian poets, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetayeva and Akhmatova, whose work she belatedly discovered at 24 with a kind of Irina was born in Odessa, in the Ukraine, in 1954. She received an orthodox Soviet schooling and upbringing but soon became sub-versively fascinated with her highborn Polish ancestors, whose estates were confiscated during the Soviet takeover, and in particular with the Catholicism of her grandmother, who was frequently hauled in by the KGB because of her faith.

'But here too my parents protected Irina writes in the bitterly titled memoir My Motherland not only did they forbid grandfather and grandmother to teach me Polish; they also forbade them to talk to me about any religious or un-Soviet" At university in Odessa the studied physics and wrote revue sketches. A friend of that time remembers her as energetic, popular and attractive (' She looked a bit like Mary, from Peter, Paul and Mary'), not at all a poet-recluse was always outdoors. Her schedule was packed with hiking In 1977 a play she'd co-written was taken off because of its anti-Soviet Two years later she married the human rights activist Igor Gerashchenko and after their application to emigrate had been refused they began to campaign on behalf of other dissidents. Irina was first arrested during a demonstration in support of Sak-harov, and imprisoned for 10 days. In 1982 she was arrested again while working on an apple harvest At her trial family and friends were not allowed into court and she was denied a lawyer of her choice.

The trial lasted three days. She was thought that If they hadn't sent me, it'd have been another perhaps somebody you didn't Other poems have a comic stoicism It's a family trait of Russian poetsTo be shot at she says in one, and in another describes her latest the cutting of a new tooth (' the guard will get a ticking-offfor not being watchful But the stoicism only goes so deep. No, I'm not afraid is the title of a poem addressed to her husband but later she qualifies this It isn't true, I am afraid, my darling make it look as though you haven't And however she puts on a defiant face, her sufferings do show through I will survive and be asked How they slammed my bead against trestle, fed by six men. In the course of this procedure they banged Rarujninskaya's head against the trestle-bed and poured liquid down her throat while she was unconscious. Velikanova revived her in the cell in the psychiatric section where they were locked up after the force-feeding.

The win-dowless cell is never aired, and they were not taken out for exercise They spent five days and nights under these conditions. The diary ends with an appeal for Irina from her fellow women prisoners Her fate deserves the special attention of the people of the world; her fate depends directly on this attention Her poems have flown to every corner of the country like swallows of 'What can one say about a government that is forced to kill How I had to freeze at nights, How my hair started to turn grey. The ordeal of the second line is described again in an apparently authentic document, 'The Diary of the Small a 23-page prison journal smuggled out by the inmates of Zone 4, Barashevo, 10 political women prisoners within a larger corrective labour of whom Irina is the youngest. If the diary shows how mutually supportive these women are, and how determined to achieve their rights, it also shows how inadequate are the legal safeguards against ill-treatment On the seventh day of the hunger strike Vclikanova, Rudenko and Ratushinskaya were isolated in the infirmary. On the eighth day they were fed by force.

Velikanova and Ratushinskaya resisted and were handcuffed and were force- MARY HARRON assesses Liza Minnelli's comeback Kurosawa crowns a brilliant career Needing to be poets in order to maintain liw order asks one of Irina's friends, and the question has a cruel, pertinence after the death of another young Soviet political prisoner from the same kidney condition which affects Irina. David McDuff believes that th poetry itself may be Irina's best hope, if it is powerful enough to move people on her behalf. Brodsky offers a similar frail 4 optimism A crown of thorns od the head of a bard has a way ofi turning into Above are three of Irina's poems: heft collection 'No, I'm Not Afraid will be published by Bloodaxe Books on 17 April, and there is to be a reading of her work in St Martin's Church in the Bull Birmingham on Palm Sunday (23 March) at 2.30 p.m. loved happy she left the pathos atone. Technically there should be nav problems with the relaunch ofN Minnelli's career.

Her voice sounds marvellous, and, having lost soma of the stridency of her youth, is probably better than ever. Her dilemma is that she is a musical' comedy star without a Instead this is an evening of show tunes based around the theme of her -favourite women performers, songwriters, dramatic characters, friends. This idea probably sounded great over coffee one morning, but quickly fizzles on stage It is when Minneili takes on Mama Rose from Gypsy that her greatest talents are revealed. It's not that she can't handle quieter. material her version of Irving" Berlin's I Love A Piano' tig delightful but, above all, she is the Ethel Merman of her genera-1" tion, mistress of the grand emotional display.

Minelli has kept her skills la particular that gtft of seeming to talk a song lyric while virtually shouting it. what she needs is at role, or failing that simply an -evening of the Musical's greatest hits, what we get is an uncertain -evening, transcended by a perfor- mer who is so true to herself that she transcends vulgarity and becomes the last embodiment of Broadway's innocence. given seven years imprisonment to be followed by five years internal exile, the maximum sentence for her crime. This crime was agitation against the principally through her poetry. The severity of the sentence a Neanderthal shriek Brodsky calls it seems all the more barbaric when one reads those poems, which are nervous explorations of the spirit rather than denunciatory political tracts.

But as Irina's husband says To a regime that is founded on a lie, any work of art is Many of Irina's poems are prison poems, written after her first arrest or smuggled out on tape or in memorised versions after her second In one she dreams of an old schoolfriend being brought in to execute her he cheers her with the Jinpachi Nezu in 'Ran': sy y) THERE IS, of course, no equiv alent to Broadway in this country there is only the seedy gentility of the world of light entertainment Therefore, although Liza Minnelli's opening night at the Palladium on Friday, began in traditional style with crowds in the street, flashbulbs popping and queues of limousines, it was endearingly dingy the furs were moth-eaten, the stars looked like hairdressers. But inside, Liza Minnelli's show took us to another world, a world of precision and glittering excess, where the lights are always blazing. The show also took us back in time, because whatever its faults in conception (and they are serious) it proves that she is the last of the old Broadway stars. Minneili is, quite literally, a child of showbusiness mythology, and it is almost impossible to describe her performance without using show-business cliches, because those cliches are what she is all about. Liza is There's No Business Like Showbusiness'; she is the little trouper, the dynamo whose high voltage is powered by a voracious, insatiable desire to please.

This need to be loved can easily become wearing and is only made tolerable by her surprising lack of sentimentality. This was, after all, i Irina Ratushinskaya A voice of her own, piercing but devoid of hysteria' electric Joseph Brodsky describes her as 'a poet with faultless pitch, who hears historical and absolute time with equal precision. She's a full-fledged poet, natural, with a voice of her own, piercing but devoid of And David McDuff, translator of a selection of her poems which will be published here next month, thinks her the finest new talent since Brodsky himself. Kurosawa's Ran, Streep and Redford in Pollack's Out of Africa and Godard's Detective PHILIP FRENCH the Fool, who now survives Lear to rail against the gods. Why must you crush us like he demands, to be rebuked by Tango the humanist, who speaks passionately of the gods and Buddha weeping to see the folly of men, who, given their free will, constantly choose evil over good.

As the' sub-title I've just quoted suggests, there is little verbal poetry in the translations we're offered. But there is abundant visual poetry delicately composed interiors and swirling battle scenes with five armies bearing banners and plumes in red, yellow, blue, black and white; stylised costumes and make-up from the Noh Theatre. Streep: 'Fancy accent' Most of Kurosawa's artistic collaborators have worked with him for years, and here excel themselves. Every department design, editing, photography, sound contributes to such unforgettable sequences as the bloody battle at a castle planted in the black ash on the side of a volcano where the Lord goes mad. It concludes with the deranged Hidetora dressed in white, his face a ghostly mask, descending a flight -of steps and passing through the ranks ojLbjions' red and yellow armies depart into tne wuaer- Pliny said imetmnutttotyiva8ed.

by screenwriter Kurt Luedtke on five books (three of them by Karen Blixen the others an excellent biography of her by Judith Thurman and a little-known biography of her lover Deny Finch Hatton. by Errol Trzebinski), the film purports to be an account of the great Danish authoress's 17 years on a coffee plantation in Kenya, where she went in 1914 with her husband, the Swedish Count Bror von Blixen. However, by the canny, if ill- judged manipulation of the facts the film ends tip as a mushy, unduly protracted cross between a glossy Fitzpatrick Traveltalk on 'Kenya, Land of Contrasts' and one of those pre-war Hollywood colonial melodramas in the Maugham manner (some of them actually by Maugham). You know the kind of thing, a decent dry old stick (usually Herbert Marshall) takes his arrogant city bride (Garbo, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford) to some outpost of Empire where she becomes increasingly The sound of hamnieruigl I IN 1955 John Gielgud toured Europe as a Japanese Lear in an austere Stratford production designed by Isamu Noguchi, and two. years later 'Akira Kurosawa stunned the world with 'Throne of his magnificent transposition of Macbeth to mediaeval Japan.

We have thus been long prepared to receive Kurosawa's version of King Lear and rarely can the highest of hopes have been so completely fulfilled as by the 75-year-old aiaestro's Ran (Curzon West End Screen-on-the-Hill, IS), a towering achievement that sets the cap-stone oh one of the greatest bodies of work in the history of world cinema. 'Ran' means chaos, and it begins and ends with variations on the same image man at the edge abyss. In the opening groups of horsemen at high noon on a precipitous Verdant mountainside, poised, confident, completely still, as the camera moves closer towards them- At the end a blind man taps his way to the edge of a bleak only to stop just in bile the camera draws back; to' leave him a distant, lonely figure against a darkening sky. In pjfetween we have seen the breakdown of order and reason, the destruction of a family'and a world shattered, yet the dignity Of man is ultimately affirmed a movie of great visual power, moral authority and psychological perception. Lear is Lord Hidetora (played by Tatsuya a sixteenth-century Wrrior-chief who at 70 decides to divide his kingdom between his three sons, with the eldest primus inier pares.

When the youngest aqn, Saburo, questions the wisdom df attempting to impose so rational a system on a kingdom created by 'Violence, he is banished, Cordelia-ke, along with the film's Kent-figure, the outspoken courtier Tahgo. For most of the way, indeed, the movie adheres to Shakespeare's dramatic line, and includes a Fool, played with graceful vivacity by a transvestite aMst called Peteri Ihe chief difference is the dropping of the Gloucester-Edgar-Bdmund sub-plot. But this loss of symmetry is made up for by the introduction of a blind Prince eyes have been gouged out by Hidetora himself after slaughtering his father. This blind youth's sister has been forcibly married to the Lord's1 "second son but has nil i -w mm (Mtiiii npr boys' has been incorporated into a speech delivered by FELICITY KENDU. nnrrn ii-fucdv-1-- rcitnmvEnmi BENJAMIN WHITR0W oPAIh.

SHELLEY A NEW PLAY BY MfTH0NY MIN6HEUA mih STOfHER fWHHtD AhO- DAVID YIP Mtatutr MICHAEL BLAKEMOKE ALOWYCHtHUV 86C4M379G233 TNISfUfOaiSWITHUlASPKISCIFlOUftlSM IN WN6K0K AND MAY NOT BE SUTOgLE HW 10UNC tOPU restless, offends local mores, has an affair with a handsome bachelor, goes through agonies of remorse, and redeems herself by good work during a plague, earthquake or civil war. In this liberated version of the traditional scenario, she actually gets the plague herself (in the form of syphilis caught from her promiscuous husband) and finds fulfilment with the other man. On top of this the main characters have been tailored to entice and accommodate Meryl Streep and Robert In clear line of descent from the heroines of 'The French Lieutenant's 'Sophie's Choice' and Karen Blixen has been turned into another instance of the Streep Woman an intransigent outsider winning moral victories while suffering social defeats in a male-dominated world, the tragic face of feminism whose cheerfully triumphant visage belongs to the Jane Fonda heroine. Once again Ms Streep has a fancy accent, in this case a studied Danish lilt that sends the first a in Africa echoing around her mouth like a whisper in the Marabar Caves, though I'm assured by someone who knew Baroness Blixen that it's uncannily accurate. Robert Redford, on the other hand, transforms the balding, aristocratic English big-game hunter Finch Hatton into a critical American observer of the ridiculous British colonial scene.

He talks and acts like a laid-back Sierra Club conservation officer seconded from California to advise ignorant East Africans on matters ecological. To justify the beady romance between this pair endless camp-fire chats on safari and dancing in the bush to a wind-up gramophone (' their tune is Let the Rest of the World Go By') the lecherous Bror Blixen, though warmly embodied by Klaus Maria Bran-dauer, is turned into a weak, fleshy charmer. You'd never guess that Bror was the model for the charismatic Wilson in Hemingway's 'Short, Happy Life of Francis The heroine of Jean-Luc Godard's Detective (Camden Plaza, IS) declares that she'd like to quit what she's doing (whatever that is) and open a bookshop. Her initial stock might be the books displayed and read by her fellow guests mysteriously gathered in a Parisian grand hotel. Ever since his debut with 'Breathless when Seberg and JBeimonclo lay bed discussing Faulkner's 'The Wild Palms Gpdard's central conviction has been that books do furnish a rriovie.

In 'Detective' a house detective' called Prospero (sharing a room with a teenage Arielle) surrounds himself with stacks of serie noire thrillers; a Mafia chief (Alain Cuny) reads from a collection of fables by the Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia; an airline pilot (Claude Brasseur) totes a copy of Samt-Exupery's Vol de Nuit, his wife (Nathalie Baye) shuffles paperbacks of 'Madame Bo vary' and Gide's 'L'Ecole des and so on. These people along with a boxer's manager with thejokey cinematic name df Fox Warner (Johnny Hallyday) who's given to quoting from Rimbaud and Conrad are obscurely united through unpaid debts and an unsolved murder. None of it makes much sense and the music (snatches of Schubert, Wagner, Chopin, et al) seems applied at random by someone twirling the station knob on a wireless set. Yet one keeps watching because of the races (all twisted gallic angoisse) and Bruno Nuyt-ten's elegant images. Minneili I'm her come-back show after a long period of career delcine and a much publicised spell in the Betty Ford clinic.

I dreaded what seemed to be the inevitable soul-baring about her sufferings, her recovery and gratitude to her fans, but I was wrong. As Garland's daughter she has obviously had enough public exposure in her time and apart from a single cry of I'm healthy, I'm Rowan Atkinson MICHAEL RATCLIFFE 'The New Revue, which opened on Friday, is essentially a one-man show for big theatres, with feed and support for the star from Angus Deayton. It is directed by Robin Lefevre, designed by Will Bowen, lit by Mark Henderson, with music by Howard Goodall. I mention them all because they make up a talented team and this looks like a very smart Broadway show, staged within dark blue steel girders, staircase and lighting grid, with high tech metal props and furniture to match. Classic Bedrooms DORKING Tel: 0306 880330 Tony Walker Interiors EDINBURGH Tel: 031 3323455 Tony Walker Interiors GLASGOW Tel: 041 3322662 The Baileys LEAMINGTON SPA Tel: 092622235 The trouble lies not merely with the writing but with Atkinson's clear, confining style.

Audiences adore the imperious pout, theP lolling tongue and the agelessum liberating sexlessness of the actJ but, unlike his old mates Smith and Jones, he is a comedian but not yet an actor who can create characters' and sustain interest in their lunatic r-: behaviour over an extended sketch. He is a lightning mimic, mar-'i vellous in silent frenzy, best at fast-forward speeds, but although ths'-i Prime Minister is portrayed as aa ingratiating knee-jerker aad ths- possibility that she might never teJL a fib is considered as remote as thatw Sellafield has never sprung a leak or Arthur Scargill has nice hair (yes, him again, and Duran Duran)? this is a very middle-of-the-road, show. ROWAN ATKINSON begins 1 The New Revue at the Shaftesbury Theatre by slurping a pool of light off the floor of the stage in one corner, crossing in darkness like something not entirely human from an Egyptian trieze, to burp the light up again in the spot where he had been standing in the first place. The mime is funny but the vicar runeral oration whicn follows, for, three variously deaf, dumb and blind friends called Tom, Dick and Harry proves typical of much that is to come. It starts well, hammers the life out of a joke until every combination is exhausted and has no energy left for a strong end before blackout.

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