The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 31

SUNDAY MAY UTt 31 Rocking at Mere mortal Mans! the Riverside Brilliant: and hypnotic or kinky claptrap? This week the controversial Pip Simmons Theatre Group is 10 years old. MICHAEL COVENEY reports. up for air, and more punishment, ing out to the unyieldiiit screen that one does not'ilay rugby. We were all onSW-This was women's liberation talking. Seldom has it talked with so much wit.

sympathy and good humour--alK Jot which made the arguWeri even harder to Diane Fletcher, a brainy actress whose work is- always worth seeking out, the central -jtMS" tie. As a school-teacher, and ead of a one-parent family, Maggie was wearing herself out coping, but would have been able to hold her head up if her boyfriend had been less of a bastard1. Not 'that he was a real bastard. just a thoughtless He and the rest of theiajto reserved their understanding and sensitivity for each other, with nothing left aifef'fjjr their women. Ya randy they would shout at each other in the pub.

He's a helluva jQa when he's wound It was obvious that the bastard was far from; randy and the fellow was not helluva. There was nothing to. any of them. 'It's a' man's game, is rugby' ws-tBe general cry, but in tlfe playwright's view they weVe just shouting to keep their courage up they weren't, in any real sense, men at; aljj. Staggering home prised long after the evening meal had gone cold, the lads became rapists without evan realising it.

The special vjritfi of the script was that the women were not all much more comprehending than the men. They wereisto'w to analyse their plight. tUW; sibly, anger led to iijarticfl: lacy rather than eloquence But the light was dawning all the time. Friendsbip'Tie-tween the women deejjejied at the same rate as stentorian camerademo revealed itself to be pulsing with barely repressedfagfceS-sion. AH that the be with each other was helluva.

At least the women could talk about Moira Armstrong's was fully up to standard she established Girls of Slender which is the highest standard-, in television. Her technique is too subtle ever to be hailed as an innovation, but in, tile long run hers is the only kind of originality that counts. Certainly her unassertive but all-seeing cameras madeg. important contributioJfrWCSt play which was, on JeJfeSBJC level, genuinely radicaMMwSE of our committed young male playwrights are wrirjngabjBUt things they only thinESQtSS' care about. This was a play about something tha- $ie people who created itj-fiajje lived through.

tentious integrity of a Glyndebourne production at its best, and on television you can see it without struggling into a dinner jacket, being chased around an ornamental lake by swans, or sitting among ladies who count their pearls like rosaries throughout the performance. Glyndebourne productions have the additional merit of underlining the utter crazi-ness of what is currently being palmed off as an artistic policy at Covent Garden. I happened to see the Covent Garden as produced by Gotz Friedrich, and it only confirmed my theory that producing operas is nowadays what Germans do instead of invading Poland. But enough about the weekend, except to say that the Sunday night screening of the English National Opera's Carmen (BBC2), though it was a stage production rather than something re-created in television terms, was nevertheless, alas, not so hot. Singing operas in English almost invariably screws them up.

Especially does this rule of thumb apply in the case of since when you let in the English language you let in the English character and the English weather. By an inexorable process of rising damp, the fiery inhabitants of Seville come to resemble the Bootle 'Knock-Out' squad during a February training session there is plenty of energetic posturing, but you can practically hear the fibrositis. And so, at last, to the week proper. The reason I am being so conscientious about getting to the week proper, instead of wittering on about the weekend, is that last week I got my whole column upside down, devoting thousands of words to the Eurovision Song Contest and only one short paragraph to Cold the best play I have seen on television in ages. Cold Harbour' was the first play in a new series called ITV Playhouse (Thames), which has since given forth with yet another commendable effort, One of the written by Anita Bronson and directed by Moira Armstrong.

Not that One of the Boys was easy for the male ego to take. Here were drunken, hearty rugby players seen through the eyes of the women who have to live with them. One could scarcely exempt oneself from the general indictment by point British they were right after all to continue in 1974. But surely it is about time that they were given the chance to occupy and animate the string of studio theatres throughout the country that, week in, week out, play host to tepid- revivals and new plays that, after an initial airing on large stages elsewhere, are deemed too risky for the main stage. Simmons would dearly love to have a crack at making the most of the splendidly equipped smaller theatres that are the in the and lovers legacy of the sixties expan sionist philosophy.

The time may have gone when the National would have invited mm to direct a revival of, say, The Bacchae But we should at least be grateful that he is still comma up for air, and more punishment, in the British theatre, wnen it would nave Been so much easier for him to have packed his bags for the Con tinental bouses and lived who knows, the luxurious life of an esteemed and well-paid Peter Zadek, Stein or Brook. entertainment. Bilbow met him through television He told his best stories in the hospitality room Another nice man, by everyone's account, warmly remem bered. Steve Race, in Serendipity (Radio Four) is each week remembering old films and him music with unremit ting nostalgia. What killed the musical asks Race, and suggests" it was new nasties who' fill the screen How could an angry sex- obsessed street fighter con ceivably woo Jane Powell or send flowers Ginger Rogers Perhaps nice men are due for a revival.

Per haps not. WITH-. the opening this week at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, of a 90-minutej rock version of 'The the Pip Simmons Theatre Group celebrates it's tenth, Ten glorious years? Not exactly, hut if survival in the theatre, is the virtue it's trumpeted to be, then Pip Simmons deserves a few congratulatory blasts. Britain has produced few enough experimental theatre artists over the past decade to be worth mentioning, and what little energy was initiated by the sub-cultural explosions of the late sixties has largely disappeared in the bland and subsidised seventies. Simmons, 34, is a Jewish East Ender reared id Eastbourne.

His father is a chemist and there is no theatrical background in the family. After grammar school, he worked as a deck-chair attendant, a lifeguard and a central heating salesman before dropping in to a Hampstead theatre school. From that base, he formed a group of actors who had either left the school frematurely or been rejected the conventional theatre. Like Nancy Meckler's Freehold, a group that responded to the physical, gestural theatre influence of Grotowski and the American Open Theatre, Simmons's early work originated at the Drury Lane Arts Lab. A transatlantic obsession with the events surrounding 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the ironic treatment of Nietzchean Superman ideology in terms of rock music and cartoon caricature led to shows like Superman (1969), Do It I (1971 re-member Jerry Rubin and the Yippies?) and 'The George Jackson Black and White Minstrel Show' (1973).

It amounted to a body of work unequalled by any comparable fringe set-up, even if its reputation rapidly outstripped the acknowledgement paid to it at the time oy critics and the comparatively small numbers of people who crammed excitedly into the Oval House or Theatre Upstairs. The theatre of assault as typified by the Living Theatre of New York, was, for a time, a bone of lively American critical contention between, on the one hand, literate apologists such as Paul Goodman and John Lahr, and, on the other; academic liberals like Robert Brustein. The battle was never joined as fiercely over here, partly because it was always easy to dismiss Simmons's work as derivative, second-hand or just plain noisy. But Simmons's interest in America, like Kafka's or Brecht's was, as Peter Ansorge pointed out in his history of the fringe Disrupting the Pitman), fuelled by a concern 'with the myths created around a city which is only partially a geographical reality the nightmarish jungle of a city which is marginally Ne-. York but, more importantly, a summary of American excess, confusion, barbarism and popular Those early shows presented a raucous challenge to stock liberal on Civil Rights, negro Slavery and the Pentagon demonstrators by daring the audience to take sides.

In George a slave-auction was staged in which actors as minstrels were manacled to their buyers and taken off to the bar. Having established a physical metaphor in this unsettling manner, Simmons's troupe proceeded, in the second half, to document the savage story of Jackson in a series of circus acts. At the end, as Jackson struggled to free himself from a large sack, a fist emerged in a Black Panther salute. A volley of gunfire rang through the theatre. Black Out.

At that point, in 1973, the impetus on the fringe was fast waning. Simmons wound up his operation, the group dispersed. it was just at this time that the institutionalisation of the fringe was proceeding apace, with little dollops of Arts Council money fortifying the not very exciting circuit of pub and luncfatime venues that totter along to this day. Simmons's future seemed to be in the balance. Along with such talented contemporary directors as Max Stafford Clark, Nancy Meckler and Pam Brighton, he was spurned by the mainstream and ignored by the subsidised houses.

A rescue act was mounted, not here, but in Holland. Simmons was highly prized in Holland the Mickery Theatre in Amsterdam, spiritual home of the best of British fringe for many years now, under the direction of Ritsaert ten Cate. ia the one European venue to have presented every single Pip Simmons show. Over there, they do not understand how lucky we don't think we are to have Pip Simmons, the People Show, Welfare State and the rest of our visually-oriented theatre troupes. As a result of.

the Mickery connection, the Rottedam Tonelraad, ah organisation devoted to promoting new theatre in that city, invited Simmons in 1974 to re-form a group and work for a period of nine months behind closed doors. (That sort of invitation was, and still is, anathema to the way theatre is organised in this country and the lack of similar creative opportunity goes a long way towards explaining the bile of Charles Marowitz, the exile of Peter Brook.) The result was two horror shows, one based on fact, the other on fiction. An Die Musik was about a group'of Nazi camp internees gruesomely compelled to provide their own musical It revealed, above all, that Simmons had not altered his theatrical oredo one iota, as the critical responses ranged from the incensed to the wildly laudatory. Through hypnotically nightmarish sequences of distorted music, Yiddish lament, callous brutalisation terror, an unpalatable reality was described in an unforgettable display of imaginative shock tactics. In these pages, Robert Cushman was enthralled but worried Who needs reminding he asked.

The Jewish Chronicle's David Nathan was unreservedly enthusiastic, were many concentration camp survivors the group en- Simmons Still coming countered in Holland. Later, in Paris, Maoists disrupted a performance, claiming the show took no account of (their) historical perspective. Once again, Simmons had opened sores by questioning the moral credentials of his audiences. The second fruit of Rotterdam, was a far less successful venture, although, when the show visited Glasgow, the Lord Provost of the day described it as 'kinky claptrap appealing only to mentally-ill an opinion he clung to despite not having actually seen a performance ('If I'm told there is a sewer, I don't need to go down it to see that it is there '). Rejuvenated by their Dutch experience, the group sought further inspiration from a Dostoevsky short story, Dream of a Ridiculous an extremely slick musical account of a man saved on the brink of suicide by a vision of Paradise.

The beauty and charm of that visionary island may have encouraged Simmons to attempt 'The which he interprets as a play about murder and rape, insurrection and plotting. 'The Tempest' is the latest in a recent line of project work undertaken in an effort to redefine the group's identity. Meanwhile, on the grounds that they failed to conform to touring requirements in Great Britain last year, the subsidy allocated by the Arts Council has been reduced by 12,000. Last year's projects, in fact, were both conducted outside the Arts Council's touring grid The Mask of the Red Death was an extravaganza at the Mickery in Amsterdam based on Edgar Allen Poe, in which the audience were dressed in white hooded cloaks as inmates of Prince Prospero's Gothic castle, witnesses to scenes of lust and debauchery as Poe moved through a moonlit graveyard to an ignoble death. It was an ambitious project, involving numerous locations and huge moving screens, the kind of commission rare in the British START the week riant with Giuseppe Verdi.

But hrst, a fond farewell to World Snooker (BBC1 and sometimes 2). Eddie Charlton didn't make it to the final, but otherwise the tournament had everything. Charlton surfer, foot baller, snooker champion, philosopher, poet is the complete -Australian hero. Untortunatelv he was Dresent in the final only in the role of assistant commentator, but typically he made a good fist even ot that. By telling us something about Ray Rear-don's positional sense, he did a lot to explain whv Perrie Mars the superior potter, was nevertheless headed for defeat.

John Spencer took up, indeed harped on, the same theme. You began feeling sorry for Mans, a mere mortal tangling with a demigod. Reardon embodies in its highest form snooker's headv combination of requirements he has uncanny physical skill and a subtle mind to go with it. Watching him and the other champions battling it out over hundreds of frames was an experience to souse the eyes. One became visually blotto.

And now back to Verdi, whose FalstaS (Southern) came to us in the form of the full Glyndebourne production, to the greater glory of the television company and everyone concerned. Verdi, of course, no longer needs the break, but he would have been pleased anyway. Bad staging, even of his minor works, used to make him hopping mad, and this opera, though small in scale, was the last great flower of his art, the culmination of a lifetime. Southern takes big risks with its no-compromise policy on opera. The approach pays off, but it must need nerve.

By the time he got to Verdi had pretty well abandoned arias altogether, so there are no stand-out numbers to catch the casual ear. Uninstructed viewers, no matter how well disposed, must have been wondering when the songs would start. But the sheer look of the thing probably allayed any initial puzzlement. This was the way to do opera on- television i.e., find a good stage production and point cameras at The repent-BBC assault on -Verdi's Macbeth was an -how not to do it i.e., re-create the work in television which invariably turns out to mean wide open spaces and funny hats. Nothing re-created in television terms is likely to match the fertile but unpre The vale, London W3 7QS Tel: 01-749 1 In theatre.

Similarly, Woy-zeck' was mounted at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff last December in seven separate but inter-related settings. One national theatre critic made the trip to review it. Like them or loathe them, at least the Pip Simmons group see their role as one of sustained experimentalism in a native theatrical climate hostile to their work. The Tempest' may or may not herald a new era in their activity, an assurance that On love THAT obsessed man Stendhal once said that if he could please 30 or 40 readers in Paris with a book, he was content. What would he have made of the attempt to please an eletronic audience with a sort of essential Stendhal on love and lovers in 75 minutes flat, or 73i allowing for opening and closing announcements Perhaps he would have argued for a series, but done it anyway; after all, he always needed just a little money.

Michael Bakewell did it in A Disease of the Heart (Radio Three) to make an attractive anthology of Stendhal's essays, novels, letters and autobiography and give the flavour, anyway, of the man who loved women. 'Stendhal was the best known of about 120 pseudo nyms that Henri Beyle employed. By giving Stendhal the novelist one part. Young Beyle another and Old Beyle (Nigel Stock) a third, Bakewell was able to switch moods and cover ground quickly. We meet the old boy near the end of his life, scratching the names of lovers in the sand.

Out comes the past. At times he seemed to be covering too much ground too quickly. Half the point of Stendhal is the way he dwells on every twist of the sexual relationship, exploring warm thoughts in cool prose. Here he was always on the go, writing the moment of Angela's seduction on his VICTOR GORDON on the pleasures of the cold table. The Causerie at Claridge's (Brook Street, Wl; 01-629 8860) long ago established a reputation for reasonably uus ing it after an interval of at least 15 years, I was surprised to find how little had changed.

The cost is still dictated by the first (and complementary) drink you choose 4.25 (for beer, 4.50 (wine, 4.75 (spirits) and includes VAT but not service. With at least 16 fish dishes and more than 20 meat, fowl, and salad dishes there is a great deal here to suit all tastes, and all the dishes tried were up to a very high institutional standard one senses a professional team, however, rather than an individual artist in the kitchen. The Causerie may not be very First drink your aquavit You also like the reverse drum action. The ample automatic control. r.

And special economy button, savingup to 30 In a word, you want a Miele because ffsthe r'ak You've always wanted a Miele washerdryer. Youlikethethoughtofhavingasuperbly efficient, fully airtomaticmaehineabletofitirrtoa space Iessthanl8" wide! You're impressed by its capacity to both wash suspenders (' half-past eleven in the morning '), pursuing Melanie across France, languishing for Mile Dembow-ski in Italy more episodic than the real thing. But always a pleasure to listen 'John Theocharis was the producer. Heroes For a Time (Radio Four) is back, digging up old entertainers and their reputations. Anthony Bilbow does it without malice, but not so gently as to sound like a puff for the departed.

I dimly remember Peter Brough and ArrHi Anrfrpwt whnse radio show always sounded to me a imsicurc, lu put. 11 mildly, but wasn't. Eleven years at the said Bilbow, amazement creeping into his voice, 'for a lump of wood and a ventriloquist who didn't even have to keep his mouth The programme was called Educating The extracts sounded excruciating. Peter Brough, who has a parallel career in business, sounded a nice man. The week aften Bilbow did a comic called Jimmy Wheeler ('I'm the King of to rhyme with Son of a Gun '), whose hoarse cockney voice, trained in the dying music-hall, evoked a whole history of cheap but all over the West End there are unpretentious restaurants where you pay appreciably more for less good food with worse service in nastier surroundings.

Maudie's in the Drury Lane Hotel (Drury Lane, High Holborn, WC2; 01-836 6666) is not one of them. Epony-mously hung with Osbert Lancaster Littletoniana there is nothing little about this new restaurant's huge selection of hors d'oeuvres. These may be taken as a first or mam course and, if taken as the latter and preceded by, say, -melon, cost 3 including VAT and service. Cheese or sweet is an extra but second helpings are encouraged. The standard of presentation, enthusiasm and originality is high and the accent is French and Austrian more than Nordic pisaladiere, stuffed tomatoes, tunny fish, tongue and pimento, and Viennese herring salad being less than a quarter of the items offered.

Maudie's is currently good value for money, though the wine for a white VDQS is expensive. clear, was a great deal of en thusiasm among its followers in happy contrast to wnat several students felt was the acrimoni-nn. atmnsnhere of the competi tive Durham Student Festival. Ai Oxford, lectures often con tinued from hall to bar; and Phantom Captain's aggressive show consisting of questions was met with equal aggression by its audience, who spent the rest of the day plotting tne questions they would ask the group at the npvf nerformance. For George Economou, the Oeek undereraduate who must take the credit for hatching the idea of the resnvai, a peric or it all was to discover mat committee at Oxford can actuallv exist for a purpose.

And" even Barry Sheppard, who as Director of the Oxford Playhouse acted as the senior member of the festival committee, said he would be delighted to have another go next vear. We had too many events, and too many participants next time we should have a tighter focus. Victoria Radin best. Because its made by Miefe. These are important and drya4lbloadina single switch operation.

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And there are r. heftysavingstobemade1 on the whole Miele SeeyourMieledealer. JT'CjT Tferiufacturers recommend price including VAT). SCANDIWEGIAN meat and fish balls are major exhibits, in the culinary chamber of horrors, but the cold tables, and in particular the herring dishes, ot Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are iustlv famed. The smorgasbord (however misspelt) lends itself well to the fixed price meal and May to September is surely the best time of year to enjoy its pleasures.

cold table in London is at the Danish Club Knights-bridge. It is a genuine club. so any friend who happens to oe a memDer is well worth cultivating. Next door the Hyde Park Hotel has a set price. help-yourself cold table which has-already been mentioned favourably here.

A few hundred yards further west, Norway shows its' paces. The Norwegian Food Centre (166 Brompton Road, SW3; 01-584 6479) consists of a shop and a restaurant. Sub-zero aquavit and cold beer provide a good way to start the meal and, indeed, to finish it. Most people take the fish dishes first and move on to meats, salads and cheese. The half dozen herring concoctions are outstanding, and the two unusual ways with cod one of them a sort of fish sausage disprove the assertion once made to me in the Lofoten Island cod fisheries that 'We only eat it boiled; we prefer it that Also recommended is the poached trout, but the smoked eel was disappointingly dry on our visit and the potato salad tasted as if made with tinned potatoes.

The meat dishes including the roast beef, tongue, and ham variations, but not the chunkily cut roast pork tend to look better than they taste, possibly because a certain amount of refrigerator life is unavoidable with a smorgasbord. Norwegian cheeses, on the other hand, are a sub-culture in their own right, and one worthy of much attention. The cost is E3.5C at lunch and 4.75 in the evening, excluding service and VAT. Oxford postscript Our real target is sheltered homes I lor the elderly with security, warmth, friendship, and a helping hand. 90,000 is promised IF we raise a similar sum, so every gift, whether 9p or 90, is worth twice the amount Give generously in fact, give double, and GIVE NOW.

Send your gift marked Target '90' to Mr Brian I. Callin M.A., B.Sc, Dept. Methodist Homes for the Aged, Freepost London SW1 3BR. Methodist Homes for the Aged MY LAST contact with The Observer Oxford Festival of Theatre (which ended yesterday.) occurred as a member of a panel of speakers in the festival's lecture programme. Richard Eyre, formerly director of the Nottingham Playhouse and now a producer of the BBC's Play for and Yvonne Mitchell- actress and theatre person, were my co-panellists the event seemed to me to sum up the festival itself.

Typically for this affair organised by undergraduates, we had been invited to speak, but no subject had been chosen for us to speak upon. Initially we ambled about, but it soon became clear that the topic almost every one of the 70-odd souls in the audience really burned to discuss, was the festival, whose best events included a theatre group from Iran, one from Poland and Richard Crane's What this non competitive festival had created, it became Anything less is acompromiNtrr 90 11 Tufton Westminster, London swip 3QD Secretary: Brian I. Callin, MA, B.Sc, Pastoral Director: Rev. Reginald W. Hopper, B.D.

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