The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 52

Brave Sioux for peace Kevin Costner goes West. Richard Wilson's at the Saatchi Collection: Seen at periscope level, a second-unit film director might want to sink or raise the Titanic in the tank.Photograph by SueAdler. a -r A run-of-the-mill van Goyen, Reflections on contrasting oils Saatchi installs Wilson, Buhrle at the RA. A SUNLESS pool of oil fills, or appears to fill, a room waist-deep. One can enter it, using the steel-lined cul-de-sac provided, and stand like an upped periscope surrounded by brimming smoothness.

This is the third time Richard Wilson's has been put into effect. Originally, at Matts Gallery in 1987, it was upstairs with the oil level at window-sill height. Charles Saatchi bought the idea and installation rights and arranged for it to happen at the Scottish Royal Academy. Now, in a side room at the Saatchi Collection (open Fridays and Saturdays, from noon to 6pm, until July), the flawless expanse is more oblong than hitherto; more the vista, more the precision flood. is neither fuel dump nor slick nor leak-proofing exercise but a liquid mirroring, with the used sump oil stillness itself, daguerrotype-toned, smart Eighties grey.

Peer into it and you see only skylights darkly reflected. The room has become a Thyssen: the collector, whether alive or dead, has the right to be forever humoured. Emil G. Buhrle (1890-1956), he of 'The Passionate Eye', collected, they say, with 'vision and courage'. He took over his father-in-law's Swiss machine-tool works at Oerlikon, making air defence and anti-tank weapons.

He did well in the Thirties, and later diversified into textiles and hotels. 'His brown eyes could truly Kokoschka said. He painted Buhrle in 1951-52, when he was at his busiest buying art. He stands there, tense but thrilled at the idea of actually being incorporated into a master painting. Buhrle, we are told, regarded i-w Philip French dubs Kevin Costner king of the wild frontier.

KEVIN COSTNER, whose impressive directorial debut Dances with Wolves (Warner, 12) is the first Western in more than 15 years to prove a major success at the box office, says that he fell in love with the genre at the age of seven when he saw James Stewart as the mountain man at the beginning of How The West Was Won in 1962. How The West Was Won was perhaps the last Western that could be regarded as an unqualified celebration of the making of America, the fulfilment of Manifest Destiny. By then, Westerns had become a highly critical forum for reviewing the national past and appraising the present, and by the 1970s the essentially pessimistic character of the best movies had alienated large popular audiences. Costner's film partakes of the negativity of the counter-cultural Westerns of 20 years ago that turned a jaundiced eye on corrupt white civilisation and embraced the superior life of the Indians that it was destroying. But through the force of his performance as the film hero, Lieutenant Dunbar, and his sympathetic treatment of the Sioux, Costner has turned his film into an entirely positive experience that reminds us of an earlier James Stewart movie, the optimistically liberal Broken Arrow which began the pro-Indian cycle of the 1950s.

In the opening scene, the severely wounded Dunbar performs a suicidal act of heroism that inspires a demoralised company of Union soldiers to take a Confederate position in 1863 Tennessee. His reward is to choose his next posting and he elects to go West 'to see the frontier before it goes'. His journey resembles those physically and psychically wounded Hemingway heroes seeking therapy in the wilderness after the Great War. As the fastidious, puritanical Dunbar leaves the last dismal remnant of civilisation, an isolated fort, the commandant commits suicide from self-disgust and he is accompanied into Indian country by a noisome, foul-mouthed trader. His new post is mysteriously deserted, -with Cisco;" his1 wonder horse, and a neighbourhood wolf for company, Dunbar settles into a disciplined Crusoe-like routine before contacting the native Americans.

They turn out to be. as sharply divided as the Brazilian Indians in Boorman's The Forest. On the one hand, there are the violent, predatory Pawnees, their heads half-shaven, their faces hideously painted, then-bodies nearly naked. On the other hand, there are the Sioux long-haired, dignified, eloquent, peaceful generous, democratic, in touch with their inner selves, the environment and the universe. The film traces the moral journey by which the hero sheds his hollow identity as Lieutenant Dunbar and becomes a Sioux Indian named 'Dances With Wolves'.

One of the agents of his change is the forceful widow Stands With a Fist, a white woman raised by the Sioux after the Pawnees massacred her pioneer family when she was seven. She's played by Mary McDonnell, whose strong jaw, deep voice and large liquid eyes bring to mind Jane Fonda. Dances With Wolves is long, simplistic and lacking in irony, though not in pawky humour. The action set-pieces (two ambushes, two pitched battles, a grand buffalo hunt) are dynamically handled. But the picture lacks the visual and dramatic authority of the best Westerns of, say, Ford, Mann and Peckinpah.

It is cer- Good News after Eden studio tank, as it were, in which a second unit director might arrange to sink or raise the Titanic. The passageway slopes just enough to give rise to fear of submerging. The Saatchi Collection boasts two other outlandish contrivances by Richard Wilson. One is a caravan humping or shunting itself; the other, 'High Rise', is a greenhouse painstakingly rammed into a wall, lodged there and baited with insect-killer light fittings. Saatchi has acquired a record number of Cindy Sherman's photographs of herself in sundry guises.

Imitation film stills introduce her as a perplexed Janet Leigh figure. Then she grooms herself for Marilyn Monroe off-screen roles and bouts of Joan Crawford indignation. Finally, to prove that identity crises can play strange one stone will be left upon another and where, in the name of God, nation shall rise up against nation. The dramatic synthesis is arranged for six actors in ordinary clothes. There are several chairs, which are thrown across the stage when Herod is angry or when Jesus expels the moneylenders from the temple.

For the Crucifixion, three actors stand on these chairs, casting large shadows against the wall. God's message, and Christ's teaching, is one of premonition, example, anger and foreboding. The bruited solace of institutionalised religion is nowhere to be found. The story unfolds, third person narrative passing from actor to actor with speed and urgency, as in the early Shared Experience productions and the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby. The beauty, awe and mystery of the St Mark Gospel was unforgettably conveyed in Alec i Michael Coveney hails 'The Gospels' as the play of the moment.

THE Glasgow Citizens announced their full 1991 programme long before the Gulf war began. But their spare, suit ewy and profoundly moving production of The Gospels, adapted by the director Giles Havergal from the glorious King James version (1611, the same year as The Tempest), is unavoidably the" play of the moment. On the naked brick back wall of the theatre is painted a simple scale model of the Middle East. Along the Mediterranean coastline, place names are picked out in black bold on grey neutral: Syria, Galilee, Nazareth, Cana, Jerusalem, Judea and Egypt: Here is the territory where not MikeAfford, WyllieLongmore and Stephanie Jacob in 'Doctor Faustus'Photograph byGedMurrqy. a dodgy de Hooch, rich man's Renoirs and Monet's worst poppy field ever, show Buhrle getting his ripples crossed.

His Van Goghs, though, include 'The Sower', with the swollen sun like an all-seeing eye, the stunted tree launching itself at the peasant as he strides along, punctuating the furrows. There are also several marvellous. Cezannes. The fleecy drifts of 'The Thaw in L'Esta-que' give way to the red plush and obduracy of 'The Artist's Wife in an Armchair', 'The Boy in the Red Waistcoat' and 'Self-Portrait' with the thumb cocked through the palette hole and the paint smears on the palette hinting at the shape of Mont Sainte-Victoires to come. Buhrle's 'Mont Sainte-Victoire' is superior to the one Heinz Berggruen has lent to the National Gallery.

He was also ahead of Berggruen in buying a sketch for 'La Grande Jatte'. cries the collector, but who else cares? agitatedly Semitic, more adven turous, readings ot Antony aner and Dustin Hoffman. The real trouble is that the worst fidgety excessiveness of Michael Bogdanov's ESC Young Vic-ery (c.1975) vitiates Tim Luscombe's. productions, which resort in Jorison to desperate uniocalised jollity and in Shakespeare to the over-used cliches of Italian fascism. There is a resourceful but heartless doubling of Mqsca and Young Gobbo by Stephen Jameson and a strikingly matched Voltore and Antonio by Gary Raymond.

Otherwise; the, best of an average, rather old-fashioned bunch of performances, are Gary Taylor's Tory-suited Sir Politic Would-Be (though lacking relish sufficient' to convince those poor benighted doubters of the subplot's hikrious merits) and Adam Magnani's rabidly vindictive Gratiano. I note.with pleasure the presence of Mary Roscoe, last year's incredible Olive Oyl in the David Glass Popeye, as a screeching Bonnie Langford-style jorisonian dwarf and a not-too-tedious Jessica. Charles Shaas- Murray ALBERT COLLINS Iceman Point Blank VPBCD 3 A set of thoroughly feral funk-blues from the 58-year-old Texan master guitarist with the obsession with sub-zero imagery and the most savage tone in the business. While the material lacks the epigrammatic wit of past Collins albums like Ice Pickin' or Cold Snap, the slicing intensity of the performances should provide a more than adequate souvenir for those who will see him co-starring on Eric Clapton's Blues Evenings at the Albert Hall later this month. tricks, she makes herself up to look like Caravaggio's 'Young Bacchus', a bearded Rembrandt, a flash Hals, a Renaissance Woman and others.

'L'art c'est she confides, I guess. While the Royal Academy private view card says 'Great Impressionist and other Master Paintings from the Emil G. Buhrle Collection, Zurich, including Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh', the catalogue calls it 'The Passionate Eye: Impressionist and Other Master Paintings' (until 14 April). What to call it is the least of the problems involved in exhibiting one-man collections. Buhrle, Burrell, Berggruen, Gelman, McCowen's solo performance; here, Matthew is knitted with Mark to shuddering effect and reinforced with parables from Luke and, from John, the movingly low-key appearance of the risen Christ at a beach breakfast after the fishing expedition.

For the latter interlude, the lights dim to a single candle. Elsewhere, Michael Lancaster creates simple, stunning effects for the Transfiguration and the Ascension. The production is more than a welcome antidote to the cheap fatuities of Children of Eden. It is a wondrbusly theatrical, but unsullied transmission of a great text and an astonishing, perturbing and prophetic story. Glasgow's previous brush with the Good Book, Bill Bry-den's Holy City on television, gave us Christ riding on a donkey down Sauchiehall Street.

Here, the entry into Jerusalem is decorated merely with the fluttering from the flies of GOVERNESS Eilons Hannon PETER QUINT Stuart Xale MRS GROSE Menai Daviss MISS JESSEL Christina Bunning fl6ra Rosomory Joshua MILES Samuel Burkey PROLOGUE Geoffrey Pagson his collection as a timeless pool of concentric ripples, from Impressionism outwards. Van Gogh to Goya to van Goyen: the names ripple off the tongue; and although fewer than half of the paintings could be described as great, clearly the Passionate Eye, backed by passionate Swiss francs, did well. This is an opportunity to compare the way Canaletto sequinned the Grand Canal and Van Gogh flecked the Seine, and to put Delacroix next to Gauguin. Not that anyone at the RA had the imagination to do that. Still, it is good to see a whole range of Manets.

There is Manet on the Rue Monnier with the red end of the tricolour blotting out most of the view. 'La Sultane' acts the part of an even more Modern Olympia. 'The Suicide' lies acutely foreshortened across a bed. war guilt which the German theatre is starting to unload 40-odd years on. Better such bitter confrontations than the bland confor-mism of the Liverpool Everyman revival of Marlowe's Dr Faustus.

John Doyle's production is neatly arranged around a large altar table, but monotonously played by Wyllie Longmore as the doomed doctor and with only the most perfunctory demonism by Andrew Schofield as Mephisto. The seven deadly sins, amazingly for Liverpool, are unrelated to the cultural ambience on the doorstep. For once, and here's a giveaway, the most effective scene is the visit to Rome, where Elaine Hallam's Pope whizzes around on roller-skates among the wimpled nuns. Such anachronistic high jinks have become the stock-in-trade of the i English Shakespeare Company, whose second brace of energetic touring hoe-downs Jonson's Volpone land Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice are on view throughout this month at the Lyric, Hammersmith. The first couple, Coriolanus and The Winter's Tale, follow on at the Aldwych in April.

The Venetian pairing of Volpone and Merchant have more in common than location. Both plays chart the intervention of cruelly indifferent justice in the mercantile dealings of two miserly money-horders. The difference between Volpone and Shylock, one scarcely indicated in the unfussed performances of John Woodvine, is that Shylock is at least impelled by. an idea of professional etiquette, inflated under pressure to cause tragic conflict. Woodvine is an actor of marvellous stillness and articulation, but you can do with more malevolence in Volpone and more passion in Shylock; in the latter, the Woodvine dignity is in sharp contrast to the recent tainly much inferior to Heaven's Gate.

But the sincerity of Costner's performance, Dean Sem-ler's handsome photography, John Barry's lush score' and the striking faces of the Indians give the film a rich romantic aura that sweeps us along. Thaddeus O'Sullivan's first feature film, December 'Bride (Curzon Phoenix, PG), is among the best-looking movies of the past couple of Set in turh-of-the-century County Down and lit by the French cin-ematographer Bruno de Keys er, it uses the hard northern light to produce images thatrecaui the paintings of Jack Munch and Caspar David Friedrich. V. Adapted by David Rudkin fmm $atn Hgnna Rf11a nntwil-' if is a sort ot aean ae r-iorette a tale of the daily struggle on the land and three intransigent people who defy a narrow, Presbyterian community. An Ulster patriarch gives up his life during a storm at sea' so that his two sons (Donal McCann and Ciaran Hinds) and the family's young servant; Sarah CSaskia Reeves) may live.

His act frees the taciturn trio to desert a hypocritical church and they drift into a minage a ran the familv's isolated wnen aaran gives oinn to a child, who could have been fathered by either brother, they are ostracised. This admirably acted movie is not without humour (mostly at the expense of. Patrick SbASll.At. tnougn tins is evidently; nor one of those areas of Ireland celebrated i for sparkling conversation. Dour is the that comes to mind and, apartf from an observant recreation of an nicnic.

there 'is lit tie community activity iA trict where narrow; muddy' often covered with water, tenuously link one smal- Ihrtlrlinrr tr annHlpr i If John Ford's The. Quiet Man Twlcl. iAnwin return home, December Bride explains way mey einigraieu the first place. Three Men and a Little Lady (Odeon, Leicester Square, PfiV more annronriatelv titled 'Three Immature Manhattan Bachelors and a Sickeningly Cute Five-Year-Old -Girl'; I is dire from a speeded-upjopening to a ludicrous British climax that suggests a knowledge of English life derived solely from distant memories of Mrs Miniver. Short Time (Odeon, Hay-market, 12) is a little better.

A cautious 50-year-old Seattle cop (Dabney Coleman) with eight days to go before retirement is informed that he has two weeks to live. i So he throws all caution to the wind in order that his 10-year-old son can go to Harvard with the $300,000 insurance which will be paid if he's killed' in the line of duty. Coleman is endearing, but an initially ruthless comedy-thriller is given a near-fatal injection of ruth at the halfway mark; FLEETWOOD MAC The Blues Years Essential ESBCD 138 This weighty but only partially digestible three-CD set revisits Fleetwood Mac's period as doyens of late-Sixties British Blues under the leadership of Peter Green, a Lost Boy Genius whose spirit haunts the present band just as Syd Barrett's does Pink Floyd. As savagely, introverted a blues guitarist as Eric Clapton and a rather more eloquent vocalist. Green's work is as melancholic as his team-mate Jeremy Spencer's is raucously vacuous.

Unfortunately, they both get equal time. The hit singles are on disc two. THE HIGH Somewhere Soon London 828224 The most profound and heartfelt nostalgia for the mid-Sixties currently comes from musicians who weren't even born then; to whom the sound of an old-style 'beat group' is a symbolic touchstone of honest emotion in av synthetic world. Misty, ominous and introverted. The High's Byrds-on-steroids jangle suggests that the end result of a decade's obsession with digital music-making has been the rediscovery of the 12-string guitar.

THE TURN OF THE SCREW Benfomin Britten 8 PERFORMANCES FIRST NIGHT: 7.30PM SAT 16 FEBRUARY 1991 Then Feb. 21, 23, 26, 28; Mar. 7, 9, 12 KJ a 'myriad cascade of green mini-fronds. The subversion and 'relevance' of the Gospels are; apparent without any underlining, and the Glasgow sextet perforin with passion, taste and dignity, with no trace of false sentiment or religiosity. They are talented stalwarts Anne Myatt, Patrick Hannaway and: Tristram Wyrnark; Sandy Welch, whose Sermon on the Mount embraces heart-stilling silence for the Lord's Prayer; Alastair Galbraith, moving in-eluctably from honest Joseph to mildly berating, skinhead Saviour; and the bright new Citizens star, Debra Gillett, whose handkerchief is rent as mightily as the veil of the temple.

Two more weeks. After premonition, the wages of vile sin are rivetingly counted in The Fallen Angel at the Bush Theatre, where a former member of the Nazi Youth recounts his de-Nazification in post-War Russia, his employment as a teacher in East Berlin and his lifelong fascination with the poems of Georg Trakl (1887-1914). Julia Bardsley directs an insufficiently biting performance by the owl-like Welsh actor Boyd Clack, last seen in Tectonic Plates. She surrounds him with a slide-show of Auschwitz victims and whirling poetic imagery that some have found repellent. But there is nothing remotely gratuitious in this autobiographical text by Franz Fuhmann, adapted by Manfred Weber for the 1988 Vienna premiere.

Anthony Vivis's translation makes but a good case not only for Fuhmann, but also for Trakl. It is significant that the first directorperformer was Manfred Karge, whose own virtuoso text for a surviving Nazi widow, Man To Man, was sensationally performed by Tilda Swinton three years ago. The Fallen Angel is further evidence of the pervasive legacy of post CONDUCTOR Michael Lloyd ORIGINAL PRODUCTION Janothon Miller PRODUCTION REVIVED BY David Rltch DESIGNERS Patrick Robertson Rosemary Vsrcoe LIGHTING David Hersey aHkzJiuiu mumj mm i ki i is THEATRE 1 gtTTli 1 1 JI WTfll 1 T3lA New hairstyle: Tanita Tikaram TANIT A TIKAR AM Everybody's Angel East West WX 401 'You can't say nothin' to the pourin' rain' intones the Basingstoke Bard on her second album's opening selection; I could have sworn she sang 'borin' rain'. Tikaram still sings as if all of her songs are pitched two keys too low for her, and she is currently using Van Morrison as a model for mingling her folksy style with a few sou-lish inflections. Her new haircut, though, is a considerable improvement..