The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 56

OBSERVER SUNDAY 17 MARCH 1991 I 56 Window on a golden slumber Shush! Lulu's that his English prep school and botany ballroom dancing, for instance, and rock 'n' roll. One is surprised that the screenwriter, Steven Zaillian, didn't go the whole way and make Sayer a woman. The film would then be even closer to the grisly 1968 Charly, for which Cliff Robertson won an Oscar as a moron turned into a genius by surgery and enjoying an idyllic affair with the teacher (Claire Bloom) who secured his transformation. The director, Penny Marshall, has done nothing to play down the sentimentality and contrivance of a script that is bent on accentuating the positive and denying the tragic. She dwells on the Chaplinesque pathos that Williams exudes, and she lays on soupy music to dictate our responses and eliminate ambiguity.

A blind person could chart the film's every turn merely by listening to the score. Hugh Hudson hasn't had a success since Chariots of Fire, unless you include in his oeuvre the unsigned When Neil Met Glenys, which was repeated on TV by popular demand though it did nearly as badly at the polls as Revolution did at the box office. His new movie The Road Home (Cannon, Panton St, 15), a banal, flashy reworking of Rebel Without a Cause in present-day Los Angeles, was first seen at the 1989 Cannes Festival under the whimsically punning title Lost Angels. Its glum middle-class deli-quent, unappealingly played by Adam Horowitz (one of the Beastie Boys), is committed to a cynically commercial private mental hospital where tweedy, twinkling shrink Dr Loftis (Donald Sutherland) has a similar function to that of Dr Sayer in Awakenings. Hudson has said disagreement over Robert de Niro's wonderfully detailed performance as Leonard Lowe, the patient who contracted sleeping sickness at the age of 1 1 and has been incarcerated for 20 years.

Equally good, in a less demanding part, is Ruth Nelson as his elderly mother whose nurturing function has been indefinitely extended by her son's illness. Their relationship and the way she comes to resent his independence are well handled. But almost everything else is wrong. Sacks has been semi-fictionalised into the American physician Dr Sayer (Robin Williams, almost a double of Sacks at age 36). He's a warm, bearded, unkempt, unworldly man, imaginative and caring in sharp contrast to his cleanshaven, hidebound, uptight, callous senior colleagues.

The nursing staff, of course, are a grand, multi-ethnic bunch, and in one of many embarrassing scenes they contemptuously parade past the senior surgeon (John Heard) in the hospital canteen, dropping personal cheques on his table after he has told Sayer that additional funds can't be found to continue the L-Dopa experiments. Sayer becomes the central figure. He not only opens windows for others (as in all films about mental illness, emblematic windows are constantly being opened and closed), but through his contact with the saintly Leonard, he is liberated into a fuller sense of life. Leonard falls in love with the beautiful daughter of a fellow patient; Sayer is drawn to a sensible, outgoing nurse Qulie Kavner) and shown that there are other things in life than opera and Eton prepared him lor lhe Road Home. It is not without interest that Coming Out (Metro, 15) is the original title of a locally controversial film charting the tortuous progress of an East Berlin teacher coming to terms with his homosexuality.

The milieu resembles Britain in the pre-Wolfenden 1950s and veteran East German director, Heiner Carow's dour, circumspect picture is a world away from Taxi Zum Klo Frank Ripploh's playful, sexually explicit picture of 1981 about an openly gay teacher in West Berlin. The documentary value exceeds the dramatic impact, and the most impressive moment is a speech by a dignified old queen who was converted to Communism while wearing a pink triangle in Sachsenhausen and emerged to discover that the East German brotherhood of man didn't extend to homosexuals. In direct descent from Camp on Blood Island, the contrived, cliche-ridden Blood Oath (Cannon, Oxford St, 15) turns on the trial of 90 Japanese for the murder of Australian PoWs in the Dutch East Indies. The film's feeling for history is poor, its grasp of legal procedure is shaky, and the chief prosecutor (Bryan Brown), supposedly a bonza bloke, will strike most viewers as neurotic. The crude polemical thrust is that the truly guilty either got off (saved' by the Yanks to further their global strategies) or committed hara-kiri, while a few honourable chaps, decent enough to own up, were executed.

Guest star Jason Donovan has one line as a neighbourly soldier serving on a firing squad. -fl Philip French on the waking of a saintly Rip Van Winkle. A WIDESPREAD belief that the general run of Hollywood movies is becoming increasingly naive, sentimental and (other than in a technical sense) unsophisticated, receives further confirmation in the disappointing film that has been made from British neurologist Oliver Sacks's Awakenings (Odeon, Leicester Square, 12), on which Dr Sacks himself worked as an adviser. The book Awakenings is a superb, richly suggestive account of Sacks's experience at a New York hospital in 1969 with 20 patients who had been in a catatonic state, virtually human statues, since the sleeping-sickness epidemic of the late 1920s. When given the experimental drug L-Dopa these Rip Van Winkles of different ages, sexes and backgrounds suddenly woke up to life, then gradually regressed to their former state.

The book has already inspired several radio and TV programmes and a number of plays (most notably Pinter's A Kind of Alaska). The success of this and several later books made Sacks the thinking nurse's Richard Gordon. Perhaps his experiences on the film will result in a salutary essay called 'The Man Who Mistook His Patient for a Cheque', though Sacks has (in his appendix to a new paperback of Awakenings) expressed himself pleased with the approach taken by the filmmakers and the performers. There is unlikely to be Rutk Nelson as Leonard Lowe's 1 back in town Michael Coveney finds quiet Joanne Whalley Kilmer is no Louise Brooks. VAMP till ready.

You can bring Rose with the turned-up nose but don't bring Lulu She's the kind of sma-aa-rtie who breaks up every pa-aa-rty; hul-labaloolooj don't bring Lulua she'll come by herself. Lulu hovers, threatens and destroys. She is also a self-perpetuating myth, one of the greatest amalgamated fictional characters of the twentieth century lover, daughter, whore and pin-up and she is currently embodied, doe-eyed and dewy-lipped, by Joanne Whalley Kilmer, at the Almeida Theatre in Islington. Whatever the shortcomings of fen McDiarmid's revival of The Lulu Plays Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box) by Frank Wedekind, melodramatic superfluity as some bone-heads have suggested is not among them. Lulu's a party-pooper but also a titanic challenge.

G. W. Pabst and Louise Brooks took the lid off Wedekind in a dark, mysterious world of Expressionist titillation (Kenneth Tynan used to attend parties en travestie as Louise Brooks, one of his best profile subjects); while Alban Berg took the heat out in his sumptuous 12-tone opeia, memorably projected in a P3sc-Modern metallic blue haze by Patrice Chereau. With Wedekind, we are not talking music-hall history. We are talking contemporary culture.

And we are talking rough seki incest, lingerie, lesbianism, prostitution, and neat little footwear. At the Almeida, we get the point but not the pith. Not enough pussy in boots. The plays were, and remain, beyond the pale. Confirmation has been recently supplied by the (publication of Wedekind's immodestly sensational and detailed Diaries, spikily verbal- ised George Grosz and Toulouse-Lautrec.

We start, or the Almeida does, by deleting the circus-ring prologue. Maria Bjornson's design is alive to the brickish, bouffes-ish architecture, but never recovers from the self-destructive irruption of Lulu's first, cuckolded husband. The floor-level action is confined by a red circle of banquettes. The floating portrait and the shifting locales never properly correspond with the predominant idea of Lulu's fickle, chameleon identity. Whalley Kilmer, infuriat-ingly inaudible at key moments, first appears as a Picasso-ish Pierrot, with trellis-like pantaloons interestingly suggestive of Vivienne Westwood's latest collection.

Not only is she Lulu, Nellie, Eve or Mignon, she is also our little sister, the one whom father might have seduced. 1 The theatrical metaphors developed by McDiarmid for these perennial actualities are cumbersome not intimate, crude not devastating. They even suspend the dressing-room scene in an unsettling onstage limbo that requires Lulu to quick-change behind her own portrait. The irony is not exploited. McDiarmid himself plays, with a dangerously unbridled fury, the corrupt editor Schon, who promotes Lulu the dancer as 'the second Taglioni'; after Lulu shoots him, she seduces his son Aiwa (Michael Gran-dage) 'Isn't this the spot the sofa, usually where your father bled to and escapes from prison thanks to a cell-swap with the lesbian Countess of Geswitsch (Belinda Lang), who co-operates 'by going to a brothel with an acrobat'.

The high-class ball is naffly costumed in cheap white gear. Not enough energy activates the by NeilLibbert. (Robert de Niro) elderly mother, whose nurturingjunction has been indefinitely extended by her son's illness. 3 ACADEMY JWAKV NOMINATIONS INCLUDING BEST PICTURE Kilmer with Michael Grandage in Hoboken Her father, a Russian cardiologist (Carl For-gione), modulates her anxieties with the interests of her suitor, a Sicilian cop played in a near-perfect de Niro imitation by Nigel Whitmey, and those of a rival nightclub singing detective (Robert Jerez): Bodies in the Hudson are confused with 'bodies on heat. And Bebe has a brother who hasn't come home.

The show is far too long, but we must not be unreasonable. Peter Granger-Taylor, and his regular musical collaborator, Adrian Johnston, are corning chaps. They have welded prohibition forensic science, and the alternative 1920s culture of low. Jazz dives and seances, into one of the most compulsively -hypnotic entertainments I have seen for many months. It plays for one more week in the pleasantly castellated seat of old John of Gaunt, 'time-honoured Lancaster'.

Alan Ayckbo'urn's attempt to pass off Invisible Friends at the RNT's Cottesloe as a serious new play, but for kids, is a bitter "MOVING, MAGICAL AND LIFE-AFFIRMING." Good moaning: Joanne Whalley tragedy of the London finale, where Lulu is bought by a succession of seedy clients before Jonathan Kent's silkily objective Jack the Ripper steps up to deliver the. murderous coup de grace. Whalley Kilmer's sex-in-death moan 7 was Her best moment, and we couldn't see a thing. More sex and murder, and much more compelling mystery, in the strikingly adventurous Hell's Kitchen (subtitled 'A hurtling thriller with live music') at the Dukes Theatre, Lancaster. Jon Pope has lately inherited a shocking deficit and the lingering reputations of the late Howard Lloyd-Lewis, of John Blackmore and of the current Young Vic supremo, David Thacker.

Thacker invented a Donmar Warehouse-style studio arena at the Pope has dedicated this unfriendly blackened space to the latest work of Peter Granger-Taylor, with whom he has previously collaborated in the cross-disciplinary company Shadow Syndicate, and at the Glasgow Citizens. Granger-Taylor has curiously, and fascinatingly, responded to the romantic obscenity of a New York Times report about American body-bags brought back from the First World War. Contemporary parallels could be drawn with newer ceremonies of mawkish repatriation. The heroine, Bebe (the Lulu-ish, elfinly attractive Saira Todd), is a doctor on the 006 Qliil "A wonderful, wonderful experience in the cinema. One of the best I've had' -Dr Miriam Stoppard, '01' HV one of the most entrancing and wondrous films of the year' Lizo Mzimba, SOUNDS performance from Robert De Niro that is almost beyond praise." Derek Malcolm, THE GUARDIAN ROBERT DENlRO ROBIN WILLIAMS disappointment.

It -is frankly inert and badly ma fmr riAf th arinarpnt'lv means underlining: everything you say and waving your arms a mnn HY an automatic: 'echoine exploitation of the; brilliant Woman In Mind five yeajrsjagoj Even sub-standard Ayck-bourn is divine manna to the offensively incompetent Map of the Heart by William (Shadow'lands) Nicholson at the Globe. The cast includes the indestructibly wonderful Sinead Cusack, the gritty Patrick Malahide, the strangely blundering Susan Wooldridge. They comprise a love triangle in the. shadow, of Third World chantable action and kidnapping, personal deceit and The play feels like a mistaken expansion of a feebly opportunist television script: and Peter Wood's uncharacteristically bitty direction does little to disabuse us of the notion. Its crass, implicitly criticalreferehcetb a far superior play by David Hare (Map of the World) does not help.

NATIONAL WilltWIUM AWAKENINGS lli ISADLER'S WELLS! liMWiiMilfHiinV EQ3SG ESS SmxE Her books generate great debate. And her latest 'The Way We Live Now' deals with our responses to Aids. Meet her at 6pm on 22 March at the Olivier Theatre. 'Phone 071 928 2252: 2.50 will make you stop and think. GC.