The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 17

SUNDAY 10 AUGUST 1986 OBSERVER REVIEW ir MCHMD MUMMHALL Theatre of LSD A whale of an evening O'Neill, Miller THEATRE in our time may be good or bad, but compared to the whole phantasmagoria of popular culture in all its pulsating bizarre-ness theatre is certainly predictable. The avant-garde is as cosy and self-contained as boulevard comedy. You know what you-'re getting, and it's some form of art, so you switch your responses to their alternative mode, settle back, and prepare to be shocked and The Wooster Group won't let you do that. This New York experimental company, who make their British debut at the Edinburgh Festival on Tuesday (at the Church Hill Theatre 12-18 August, moving on to Riverside Studios 21 August-6 September, Cardiff Chapter Arts Centre 9-14 Sept), offer something so original that you don't even know how to react. Their performances give you no plot or traditional narrative to hang on to; you never know what's coming next, but much more important you have no idea what attitude to take.

Is this funny, is it tragic, is it tasteless, is there a moral, should you take sides? all the usual signals are crossed. 'The Road to Immortality' (originally titled 'LSD Just the High Points ') is set on a high stage, dotted with video monitors, which looms quite threateningly over the audience. Across this stage runs one long table, furnished with microphones behind which the actors casual, deadpan now take their seats. This set, which remains in place throughout the evening, suggests both a panel game and some kind of official hearing. For Americans this set evokes a very specific image, almost an icon, which is the interrogation sessions of the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s.

The tone here is dry and rather ironic. We are presented with a kind of panel game based on readings from works by the gurus of Sixties counter-culture which shifts gradually to an account of scenes of paranoia at Timothy Leary's home in the early Sixties. There is a break, the actors change places and we are plunged into the wild theatricality of Part Two, as the actors change back and forth at the table in a seething re-enactment of the Salem witch trials, played partly in gibberish. This was, before legal threats made them change the text, a stripped down, electrically charged 20-minute version of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. The theme here is hysteria and hallucination, but it is characteristic of the Wooster MARY HARROW introduces the Wooster Group from New York Group that at their most extreme their acting is also at its most disciplined and precise.

Part Three is a drifting, timeless sequence that looks like every Sixties drug party distilled into one scene. What it is in fact is the re-enactment of a rehearsal of Part Two that the company undertook while under LSD and video-taped later, playing the tape back second by second to recreate each gesture Part Four is the dramatisation of a section of a debate between G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary in Miami, counterpointed by a sleazy Spanish cabaret act. Throughout all four sections films are playing on the video monitors, adding another level to the action. I offer this information rather gloomily, knowing that it will seem pretentious or incomprehensible, and at best give no real impression of the effect of the performance itself.

No one has been able to say what their shows are actually about, because they have nothing to do with logical connections or narrative line. One parallel is with the theatre of images offered by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass. However, as the enfant terrible of American theatre, director Peter Sellers (a passionate fan of the Wooster Group) points out, Wilson and Glass have an elitist, mandarin quality Their work is very oriental in flavour, but the crucial thing about the Wooster Group is that it's totally Western, totally The Wooster Group have virtually nothing in common with the British fringe theatre tradition whereby radicalism is seen in terms of content and message. What Elizabeth LeCompte, the company's director, is interested in is contradictions. At the end of The Road to Immortality you won't know if she thinks Timothy Leary was a good or bad thing, but you will have passed through an extraordinary re-creation of the psychic atmosphere of America in the Fifties and Sixties, unclouded by sentimentality or nostalgia.

The company was formed out of the ashes of one of the main Off Broadway experimental companies of the Sixties, The Performance Group, and took over their old base at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street in Lower Manhattan. James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey Into Night' EODIEKUUJKUNOIS AND RIGGS 0HARA PRESENT THENEW THEATRE COMPANY and Kurt Weill BLAKE MORRISON have been better done. But the drawback of the headlong opening is that it makes the play seem even more lopsided and disproportionate, even more of a sick whale, than usual. The second half, in which each of the characters must tell his or her own explains rather than develops what's been implied in the first, and weaknesses in the individual performances begin to show. Bethel Leslie, convincing as the tense, spindly, paranoid Mary we first see, nattering and nittering, nerves tightening through her body like bow-strings, is less persuasive (and too much the same) when she returns in a fog of morphine.

And Peter Gallagher looks too healthy and pragmatic as the consumptive, poetic Edmund. It's left to Kevin Spacey to provide the only real vigour in the final act, with his raunchy, blundering Jamie. The whale isn't mastered yet, though this is as close a shot as we're likely to see. A good week for London theatre, in a supposedly dead month, and a good week, too, for another Miller, Arthur, whose The American Clock (Gottesloe) is his first new play to be staged in Britain for 13 years. The Depression, not depression, is its subject, and Miller's sense of the difference is what makes the play undepressing.

One of the main characters is a man who makes more money in the Slump than ever before, and though in many ways the piece is an attack on revisionist, Reaganite notions that times may not have been so hard back then after all, it's also about survival in the face of economic hardship. Paper money and pawn shops, death-leaps and dole queues, hunger and 'anger: we've been here countless times, of course, not least in films. Like Dennis Potter's 'Pennies from the play juxtaposes the period's social agonies with its jauntily optimistic songs; the brief snatches from a dance marathon recall Sydney Pollack's film 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They hobo trains like the one we see here have whistled through countless documentaries. Miller also acknowledges a debt to Studs Terkel's book, 'Hard which helps give the play its sweep North and South, black and white, rich and poor, city and farmland. But the piece also has a strong vein of autobiography in what happens to the Baum family, particularly their son Lee and for all the documentary solemnity there's more than a whiff of soap in its concentration on the ebbing fortunes of two middle-class families in Brooklyn.

For the original 1980 production in New York, Miller intended 'the impression of surrounding vast-ness, as though the whole country The College of terrace on the south grand, pedimented house on the east which before were dishevelled and unkempt, and which looked as though they had nothing to do with the new building, now shine out (perfectly restored)with a comparable importance With the light-fingered deftness of a conjuror, Lasdun has retrieved a tinypieceofLondonandhasgivenit dignity. He has removed a high, dark brick barrier between the college and the early nineteenth-century buildings, has narrowed and changed the shape of the road in St Andrew's Place, has replaced INI Although LeCompte is the guiding spirit, the choreographer and final arbiter, the company (whose inner core have been together for 10 years) function to a remarkable extent as a collaboration. I had a chance to watch this in operation in May when helping to make a film about the Group for the South Bank Show, to be shown later this year. At crisis moments we -would approach Liz for a decision. She would approach another member of the company who would approach another until some time later sometimes a long time later a group decision had been made through some form of osmosis.

Rehearsals work equally slowly, and a production can be two or three years in the making to create what LeCompte calls collages in which each performer creates his or her own role. A final production will have many different layers: they throw in real life characters, the ripped up version of some classic play (' Long Day's Journey in one production, The Cocktail Party' in another), readings from books or newspapers sometimes the lights go down and you watch something on the video monitors, like watching television. Whether audiences at Edinburgh hate the Wooster Group and there are many who have doesn't in the end matter. This is the group that more than any other I have seen makes us re-think the crisis of naturalism in the theatre. The well-made play and kitchen sink drama now are period pieces, but so is the American method tradition as represented by Sam Sheppard it has no relation to the texture of modern life which is full of electronic voices, multiple sensations, fragmentation.

Through their collage technique and their refusal to adopt a single, judgmental controlling point of view, the Wooster Group have found a way for theatre to reflect not so much modern issues as the actual experience of being alive in the modern world. As Peter Sellers said: 'Film in the early days borrowed all its. vocabulary from theatre and then went off to make its own vocabulary while theatre gradually began to die off. The Wooster Group has taken this language of film and television and brought it back to theatre and through this cross-pollinisation created a totally new theatrical vocabulary. It's going to be the lingua franca of the new generation of theatre, and so no matter how odd it may seem now, it's going to be the language we're all speaking in 15 A REMARKABLE CQMPANVmch ROBERT EDDISON 'Maastenally eloquent RNANCULTMES SHEILA ALLEN 'Aady excellent' punch "Wittily underscored by STEPHEN BOXER THE GUARDIAN TIMEOUT II 14 2 IT'S Kkehavingasick whale in the back someone remarks of the foghorn in Long Day's Journey into Night (Theatre Royal, Hay-market) The same might be said of seeing O'Neill's greatest play, as this wallowing, flapping, blubbery beast engulfs actors and audiences alike in the drawn-out agonies of the Tyrone family.

Written 'in tears and blood in 1941, it was first staged 30 years ago, though if O'Neill had had his way, or his will, it wouldn't have been performed until the late 1970s, and for some critics it remains an unperformable masterpiece. Enter Jonah, or Jonathan Miller, to try to master O'Neill's hulking monster. A 'disrespectful and flamboyant energy (his phrase) is what Miller brings to productions, and the way he sets about his task here makes for a swift and exciting first act. As the four Tyrones tightwad James, morphine-addicted Mary, alcoholic James Jnr, con-r sumptive Edmund bicker and feud, their sentences drown out, stack up on, run into each other. They listen but they don't listen.

They answer but they don't respond. The cacophonous overlapping of speeches helps Miller to trim an hour or more off the play's usual running time, but this isn't its main purpose. What it emphasises is the gaoled helplessness of the characters, locked into a script they heard yesterday and will hear again tomorrow, unable to escape their predetermined roles, doomed to repeat the same family text: 'I could see that line I know you've heard me say this a thousand times. The theatricality is there in the story (James and Jamie have been actors, after all) and this production brings it out superbly, not least by having Jack Lemmon at its centre. He's not a great actor for one of his sons says cynically of jsmes, and with Lemmon in the part this prompts a knowing laugh, memories of his film roles as a kindly liberal flooding back.

That's part of the trick, though James Tyrone isn't the genial patriarch he takes himself to be, but rather (as his name implies, and as Lemmon soon makes us see) an Irish warrior-tyrant, fiercely obsessed with property and prepared to sacrifice his son's life rather than part with a dime. Doddery, irascible, maned with a shock (and quite a shock it is for us, too) of white hair, rising and falling in exasperation, Lem-mon's is an authoritative performance, unobtrusively establishing that the real illness in this play isn't the alcoholism, consumption or. morphine-addiction that afflicts the rest of the family, but James Tyrone's miserliness. The set, too, by Tony Straiges, subtly makes this point rather chic and Seventies in ite panelling, pull-blinds, wood-stain and bare floorboards, it's actually just mean, an expression of scrimping and scrooging The rapidity with which Miller's production gets all this across is breathtaking the espionage of the Tyrone family, their pacts and winks and whisperings, can rarely Secret garden frlTwilHyMtitlg Denys Lasdun's 'magical transformation' in Regent's Park STEPHEN GARDINER SOMETHING rather mysterious has happened in St Andrew's Place, just along from the entrance to the Diorama Arts Centre (the future of which hangs in the balance) in Park Square East in Regent's Park. It's here that you find the College of Physicians, building that was completed 22 years ago and designed by Sir Denys Lasdun It is a remarkable object and an undeniably forthright example of modern architecture (although Sir Nikolaus Pevsner called it 'postmodern in 1966, the first recorded use of the phrase) that always appeared somewhat adrift from its St Andrew's Place surroundings of the John Nash era indeed, too big for them.

"Now, quite suddenly, it seems to be neither of these instead, it makes a relaxed and comfortable contribution to them The reason for this surprising metamorphosis is simple Lasdun has madea garden that has turned a previously derelict area into a three-sided court of great repose where the fourth side is completed by the park. Two elements a stucco PERHAPS because it's summer and the Radio 4 planners were short of a documentary before going on holiday, they have just put out a programme about sheep, dog-turds and tapeworms as the Tuesday Feature. The Man, the Dog and the Worm Within wasn't one of those inquiries that gets in as a piece of medical detective-work, since the unspeakable life cycle of the parasite has been well known for years. Nor was it a blast at dog-fouling in general. These are farm dogs who eat the carcasses of infected sheep and pass the worm on via their bowels to farm-dwellers.

Most of it goes on in what used to be Breconshire. Victims develop cysts in lungs, FOR JOHN DEXTER AND THE NEW THEATRE COMPANY THIS IS A FEAST FOR THE SERIOUS THEATREGOER JOHN PETER THE SUNDAY TIMES 'AN EVENING OF RARE AND CIVILISING ENTERTAINMENT' JACK TINKER THEDAILYMA1L JOHN BARBER DAILYTELEGRAPH 'A FEAST 0FTHE BEST CHARACTER ACTING IN TOWN A PLAY OF RICH AND RARE FASCINATION' SHERIDAN MORLEY PUNCH A CRACKING CAST FWANOAtTWES ALECMcCOWEN 'A brilliantly mercurial performance' tme our SHEILA GISH Radiant' dahy mm. SIMONWARD 'A most distinguished performance' Sunday times RACHEL KEMPS0N ueiiciously batty1 THE GUARDIAN Jack Lemmon as were the But this isn't what one gets at the Cottesloe, where the backcloth is the twisted-metal sculpture of a scrapheap. The confinement is all to the good. The action shrinks to a series of cameos (welfare office, subway, back porch), the actors using the small space with the imaginative mobility one associates with' the Cottesloe at its best.

Above all, it's a gloomily funny play, the jokes bearing out Miller's almost wistful conclusion about the indomitable spirit of ordinary folk the patient lying on a shrink's couch, who declares the stock market to be nothing but a state of mind (' When did you first have this or the student who's staying endlessly on at college because this will entitle him to free dental treatment. In a large cast, directed by Peter Physicians a merger of modernism tarmac with granite setts, removed traffic with bollards and chains on to Regent's Park's Outer Circle, and introduced a line of trees leading up to the pedimented house. The rest of the landscape is all done with lawns ad hedges, and with decorative railings and lampposts from the period. Nothing dramatic yet the whole scene has undergone a magical transformation. Lasdun says that he had always wanted a garden to be made here, had seen from the first the possibilities of some kind of traditional college and that it was for this reason that the physicians' PAUL FERRIS served by characters in plays who wander around the place making speeches about Myth, Earth and Magic.

You could tell what was going to happen when writer John told his collaborator Clemence that he was off to recuperate between books in our mysterious Celtic adding, between the noise of zip fasteners (ha was getting his luggage together), returns psychologically maimed. Though bitterly ironic in its treat ment of militarism, Paul Green's script lacks the abrasiveness Weill enjoyed when collaborating with Brecht. (It also, in this truncated production, lacks a key part of the plotjohnny's courtship.) But John Owen Edwards's musical direction nearly mates up for this arid there's one explosive scene involving laughing gas (dive Mantle in commanding form) where pacifism gets the last laugh. Among the other Almeida shows, a laurel or two are due to Arnold Yarrow who in writing, directing and acting in Stitch about a day in the life of an illegal East End sweatshop exhibits the spirit of enterprise which the play, in its more honestly muddled moments before didacticism takes over, salutes as well as deplores. three months ago, a writ to achieve this evktkm was overturned in the courts.

Here, again, imagination proves what can be done with a neglected and largely derelict interior warren of spaces that includes Nash's fine octagonal, double-height auditorium for theatre production which, we're told, captivated society in those days. A few people's initiative and effort have brought scenes of remarkable vitality to the building with an art gallery, rehearsal rooms for young musicians, a theatre for the disabled, a film company and other similar groups. An arts club for the public, opened a year ago, was closed down in March by the Commissioners. CamdenCouncil will be considering two alternative schemes for planning approval on Thursday one from the Commissioners for luxury flats that would mean the demolitionofmuch of the building's interior, including the octagonal auditorium the other from the Arts Centre for the conversion of the uremises into a ororjer arts museum for the public (it is scheduled as a public building by Camden) that would save tne octagon ana onag the present scattered activities together. The council's olanners have, however, recommended that both should be refused since neither meets their reauirement namely, that the Diorama building be retained for community purposes a museum, thev feel, would be too static in character.

If the trustees of the Arts Centre revise their proposals to suit this condition, aonroval will be given. In this way, as with Lasdun's recently opened garden, the continuity of a tradition will be maintained. first of three programme about an Englishwoman in India, yet another dip into the inexhaustible bran tub of the Raj. The woman was Charlotte Canning, wife of the stiff-necked Lord Canning, who went out at Governor-General in 1855. Charles Allen found her papers, among them her letters home to Queen Victoria, and wrote the book on which Alan Haydock's adaptation is based.

Claire Bloom is Prunella Scales the Queen, neither of them sounding like the old cliches of eminent Victorians. Charlotte, cnua-less and not very happily married, wrote well (in the heat, people were boiled in rags, rather than roasted ') and had an E. M. Fonterish eye for behaviour. Highly recommended.

Wood, there are many strong performances, notable among them Michael Bryant, Sara Kestelman and Neil Daglish as the Baum family, Barry James as a would-be composer, David Schofield as dancei-cum-Company President Elect (a new part in the play since Miller revised it) and Marsha Hunt as a hooker If Miller's point about the American clock still ticking up to midnight remains fuzzy, this is nonetheless a brisk and entertaining evening with some excellent songs. Long days and late clocks at the Almeida, too, where the second Not the RSC Festival includes a number of British premieres, the most belated of them Kurt Weill's Johnny Johnson, a musical he composed in 1936 (shortly after his arrival in America) about a volunteer whogoes off to fight' the war to end all wars' in 1917 and who RQOEB HUTCH INflS and Regency. building had been planned as it was to establish an informal enclosure of sorts that could one day be developed if the chance arose. Ten years ago the idea of bringing the terrace and house into a dose relationship with the college for specialist medical and psychiatric rooms was taken up leases were bought from the Crown Estates. seen what sensitivity and imagination can make from very little The Crown Commissioners might make a note of this lesson as they consider their next move to get the Diorama Arts Centre evicted 'Legends coil like snakes around such places.

Like the low muttered stories of the Earth Dragon Soon, having nearly fallen down a mine, he was being seduced by Rose (' We should make our child here, by the open shaft'). Before the end, in which he and she vanished forever, Rose turned out to be a snake goddess. Clemence, who arrived too late to save him, declared that women may be the vehicle for an earth force they do not and was last seen taking over the rote herself. A Glimpse of the Burning Plain (Radio 4) was a relief all round, the V-' (S (SCmDL TSELIOTO 'A REFRESHING ANTIDOTE TO THE TRIVIAL PURSUITS OF MOST WEST END THEATRES WELCOME' MICHAEL BILUNGTON THE GUARDIAN 'INTRIGUING AND FUNNY' JOHN BARBER DAILYTELEGRAPH Dog-turds and tapeworms 'GLAMOROUS' 'GUTTERING' JANEEDYVARDES JOHN PETER SUNDAY TIMES ft HdrfdMtWMMV livers and brains, and Geoff Watts, whose programme it was, plodded from farm to farm, eagerly inquiring about their size when removed; the answers were three grapefruits, one melon and a tennis ball. There were worse horrors, lovingly dwelt on.

Could it, after all, have been a cunning swipe at canine threats to health in general, innocuously on this microcosm so as not to offend the dog lobby Something almost as amazing was abroad in The Valley of Trelamia, Peter Redgrave's Afternoon Play for Radio 4. This was another go at Mysterious Cornwall) a county ill IIII3MID I II I Hum HfJ FA 3 -T BOXOFFICE CREDIT CARDS CREDIT CARDS 01.8362294 01.2409661 01.7419999.