The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 56

Booed-off Bodger gets a bouquet Michael Coveney applauds Michael Bogdanov, who runs theatre companies in two countries and still finds time to party. Michael Bogdanov: 'I don 't think "sod England" any more than I've always thought "sod England" 'Photograph by Richard Mildenhall. So much ado about whether to do it 13 pressure. He's a born leader, and loves a scrap. Now, with the ESC struggling to replace the generous three-year sponsorship of Allied Irish Bank (225,000) and of Ed and David Mirvish who run the Old Vic the recognition for the Wars of the Roses sequence comes as a well-timed boost.

The ESC is currently on the road with The Comedy of Errors, directed by Glen Walford and sponsored (to the tune of 60,000) by a Leicestershire businessman, Mike Edwards. Plans are congealing for the major autumn season of Corio-lanus and The Winter's Tale. However, at last Sunday's awards ceremony, Bogdanov sounded a grim note of warning that 'the miracle of Thatcher funding' is over. The ESC is supported by the Arts Council (100,000 for 1989-90), but Bogdanov and Pennington have been trying for 18 months to find replacement sponsorship. 'There is no miracle of Thatcher funding.

It is an illusion, a mirage, it just doesn't exist. You strike it once if you're lucky, as we were. Then you're grovelling in the dirt again. 'With the award, we may be able to struggle on and, if we get another 100,000 from the Arts Council, the main autumn season will go ahead. But all our other plans look unlikely at the Does this make him feel even happier to have his four-year contract in Hamburg? 'Not at all.

I don't think "sod England" any more than I've always thought "sod That feeling is my impetus. And Hamburg, too, is an enormous Next week, Bogdanov starts rehearsing Guys and Dolls in Hamburg. But if he continues to displease the audience, he will soon find his head on a pole; Hamburg is a great theatre city, but no respecter of reputation. The irony, is that Bogdanov was approached for the job by the Mayor of Hamburg when the ESC was on tour there. He then came top of a poll in a local newspaper, and was supported in a fierce campaign by the actors themselves.

Had he not felt a twinge of regret at seeing the RSC pass into the hands of Adrian Noble? 'No. I don't want the banging headache of the RSC, even if someone there had thought of offering it to me. Quite honestly, the only worthwhile challenge for me is to run a theatre on the big European circuit. I didn't apply for the RSC job, but I might be tempted by the Schaubiihne in Berlin, or the Burgtheater in Vienna. 'It's different over there.

I am in constant telephone communication with my European peers and colleagues. I go to parties in Berlin where I meet Peter Stein, Heiner Muller, Roger Planchon and Ingmar Bergman. At the National, I was lucky if I bumped into Peter Gill in the For Bodger, as for Coriolanus, there is a world elsewhere. WHEN Michael Bogdanov collected the Olivier Award for Director of the year, the applause sounded doubly sweet; on the previous night, in Hamburg, he had been booed off the stage after the opening of his new production of Schiller's Mary Stuart. Bogdanov now lives in Hamburg, where he is artistic director of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus.

But he continues to run, with the actor Michael Pennington, the English Shakespeare Company they founded three years ago to take large-scale Shakespearean productions on the road and around the world. How does he manage the two jobs? 'By fax, mostly. My wife Patsy works part-time for me in Hamburg and thanks to the fax revolution I'm as passionately committed to the ESC as on the day we Affectionately known as 'Bodger', he is an energetic director who deals in a patchwork of style and jumbled visual imagery, as befits the nickname. Now a ridiculously youthful, fit-looking 51, he has worked extensively with the big national companies indeed, he won the Director of the year award in 1979 for his RSC Taming of the Shrew but has always claimed to have done his best work elsewhere. So his appointment last summer to one of the top European theatre posts came as no surprise, especially to those aware of his polyglot temperament and linguistic distinctions almost alone among British directors he speaks French, German, Italian and Spanish.

His mother was Welsh, his father a Lithuanian librarian and scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He spent his childhood in Ruislip and took a degree at Trinity College, Dublin. No one who saw Jonathan Pryce ripping down the scenery in his RSC Shrew will ever forget it, however much he may want to. But the quintessential Bogdanov moment surely came in Henry in the award-winning Wars of the Roses, when the English troops set sail from Southampton in an interpolated post-Falklands madcap euphoria, football scarves waving and banners unfurled to read 'Fuck the Frogs'; the action cut to the French court, gathered in dignified stillness and dressed in brilliant Chek-hovian white, their appalled silence pierced only by the line 'Thus come the English with full power upon His work at the National was overshadowed by the private prosecution brought against him in 1981 by Mary Whitehouse under the Sexual Offences Act. She deemed his direction of Howard Bren-ton's The Romans in Britain, with its naked Druids victimised in acts of simulated colonial buggery, an incitement to acts of gross indecency.

Mrs Whitehouse, who never saw the play, withdrew the prosecution soon after the case opened. The episode demonstrated Bogdanov's dignity under pointlessly declaims in a ruff, huff and yellow costume), and Sylvester Morand as a sedately chill and silver moving statue. It's one of the finest things the RSC has done in the past 10 years, at least the equal of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The modish Byronic tone is most fantastically well-sounded, too, at the Glasgow Citizens, where Dumas's Antony (nothing to do with Cleopatra) has been faithfully, almost uncharacteristically, translated by Robert David MacDonald. Terry Bartlett's set of grey drapes, pillars and obelisks suggests grim tragedy.

MacDonald, also directing, and moving stealthily along the nineteenth century, invokes three of his previous Citizens -triumphs Dumas fils's Cam-ille, Lermontov's Maskerade and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in the diagrammatic and severely romantic playing of Mark Lewis and Julia Blalock as the doomed lovers. He makes of their plight, underpinned with surging Puccinian cadences, a comprehensible disaster, and nobody, the night I went, sniggered. The RSC's artistic director, Terry Hands, recently claimed his company was the sole source of training in the nation's classics. This statement is contradicted this week at the Citizens; and in Mr Hands's back yard at the Swan, where actors like Hinds and Vazquez, Citizens both, owe a lot to Glasgow and a lot less to the RSC. Tirso De Molina; it's at least as good as his great Hogarthian splash, The Art of Success, and brilliantly directed by Danny Boyle.

Moreover, the company is, by turn, young, Irish and black, Kandis Cook's design an appropriate infernal oven-face that fits well in the neo-Elizabethan wooden architecture, the central role superbly occupied by Linus Roache as the pathological willy-waver. One gets as much sense of Moliere as of Mozart, but the new play also defines a fascinating modern political and cultural ambience hovering over Spain and Italy: the Don flits between arranged marriages, shipwrecks, reputations, shepherds' weddings, political convenience and danger. His flight, which leaves hearts and houses ablaze a red silk comet shoots across the Swan-sky also implicates the servile Seville pimp and sidekick (Sganarelle-cum-Leporello), sensationally redefined by Sally Dexter as a put-upon, horribly fascinated cook, Catalina. There's an appetite and atmosphere of contemporary fun in this production that is entirely missing in Much Ado. It rips and roars, and stomps and snorts, magnificently alive with the contributions of Ciaran Hinds as a manipulative duke, Yolanda Vazquez as an extraordinarily camp and witch-like Donna Anna, Paterson Joseph as a dumb Marquis ('Whatever I've done, I didn't do he Now Messina becomes a mid-seventeenth-century post-Civil War hedge-strewn garden, costumes Caroline.

The wheeze is superficial, not clinchingly or poetically strategic, as were the aforementioned RSC productions of Howard Davies and John Barton. The best scenic upshot is the gulling of Benedick, concealed in a suspended cypress tree. Roger Allam, a wigged and mustachioed popinjay with the clipped and smilingly acidic delivery of Alec McCowen, puffs smoke signals when hiding, pokes his face through a floating cleft in the hedge, and holds his nose at Balthazar's song. Allam is a deserving stalwart, has a great voice (McCowen plus glottal tonality) and superb timing. He wins a round on his banal embrace of us when bidden, surlily, to dinner: 'There's a double meaning in And he plays Monsignor Love by deleting the face hair, rolling down his stockings and tottering away precariously on pink heels.

Fleetwood is stricken and aghast by the topiary, but her predicament is a generally expressed piece of acting, not specific. The imbroglio is not enraptured. This is the RSC vamping till ready, while the RSC champing and heady may be seen next door in Stratford in the glorious Swan Theatre production of The Last Days of Don Juan. Nick Dear has prepared a raun-chily idiomatic new version of the first ever Don Juan play by aw' ii Michael Coveney at a turkey and a triumph from the RSC. TALES of romance this week, my dears: Beatrice and Benedick pretending they don't want to have sex with each other, Don Juan succumbing to every passing opportunity, and Dumas's Antony saving his adulterous lover's honour by killing her dead when hubby turns up in Strasbourg: 'Elle me resistaitje I'ai That famous curtain line translated with cruel accuracy in Glasgow as 'She resisted me, I killed her' drove the folks wild in the Paris of 1831.

Audiences don't change much, nor does their appetite for romance. Critics, on the other hand, loathe the idea of another Much Ado About Nothing, with which the Royal Shakespeare Company opens its main house season at Stratford-upon-Avon; who needs it, we ask, unless directed by Franco Zeffirelli or played by Judi Dench and Donald Sinden? At Stratford, we have a mediocre production by Bill Alexander, badly designed by Kit Surrey and haphazardly lit by Brian Harris, which features the worst Claudio (John McAndrew) I have seen, a rantingly tedious Leonato (Paul Webster), a screechingly irritating Hero (Alex Kingston), a meddlesome but finally disinterested Don Pedro (John Carlisle), an unfunny Dogberry (George Rais-trick), hopeless under-casting in the tail, and an unconvincing partnership between Roger Allam's technically accomplished Benedick and Susan Fleetwood's long overdue but stranded Beatrice. The applause was deafening. What do I know? All comedy depends for its success on the actors' personalities; but Much Ado presumes an audience's conspiracy in the double-act of a professed bachelor and his Lady Disdain before they even come to wisecracking blows. We then watch the combatants suffer, squirm and survive the melodramatic nastiness of a church scene where Claudio disowns the true but allegedly fickle Hero.

The RSC has previously defined Messina as a brutal outpost in the Brechtian aftermath of war, and a playground of the British colonial sunset over India; that wane of Empire, last chance for love, remains the play's best modern reading. Ackland delivers his speeches with passionate commitment and Robert Crowe, the prosecuting lawyer (Julian Glover), efficiently contrasts this with his inferior brand of justice. There is no strain in the performances but plenty in the quality of the writing. Geoff Bullen directs adroitly and as a courtroom drama, it holds the attention. But as an enquiry into the psychology of evil, John Logan's play is lightweight.

It suffers partly from the style of the narration: the story is told in short labels, like the headlines of sub-editors on an off day. It is also limited by its content, which is chiefly testimony and flimsy flashback. One longs for less trial and deeper evidence, an examination of the killers' lives beyond the courtroom and before the crime. "A DELIGHTFUL PICTURE" Barry Norman FILM '90 I I I IB IB IB Linus Roache as Don Juan.Photograph by Roger Hutchings. A FILM BY GIUSEPPE TORNATORE Gods who kill for kicks IF WE CULD TELL YU EVERYTHING ABUT MAYFEST HERE YU WOULDN'T NEED THE Yet again the stage is set for an even bigger and busier Mayfest.

Amongst 1990's line-up, stars such as Nina Simone and Billy Bragg will share the limelight with Julian Clary and African arts from the front line. As if all that isn't enough to get you packing, as Cultural Capital of Europe 1990, Glasgow offers a wealth of special things to see and do. So act now, send off the coupon for details of Mayfest events and lplaces to stay. Vs. I Ms, IfV.

rn QfifVi Mov 1QQO I almost sexual as he anticipates murder. He moves across the stage as if it were a ballroom and he were dancing to restless inner music. The two youths brilliantly convey poisoned eroticism and amorality. Their motive in so far as they have one is to elevate themselves. By presiding over life and death, they will become gods in charge of the exit signs.

It's the summer of 1924. Sean Cavanagh's set, panelled in ebony, neatly suggests both a courtroom and a coffin. The drama focuses on the trial and in particular on Clarence Darrow (Joss Ackland), the attorney for the defence. His shambling gait (he looks like an easy-going koala) conceals his power. He is limbering up for a modern version of Shakespeare's 'The quality of mercy is not Kate Kellaway sees a Chicago courtroom psychodrama based on a real case.

LEOPOLD (Denis O'Hare) is telling us about the prairie falcon. It is evident from his quivering demeanour that this is no ordinary lecture. As he recounts the precise ornithological details, the fingers of his clasped hands twitch like trapped wings. The bird symbolises what he and his friend Loeb are about to do. Never the Sinner (Playhouse) is founded on the true story of the murder of a young boy, Bobbie Franks, in Chicago in the 1920s.

He was killed arbitrarily. He could have been anyone. 'Pick the first flower that smells says Loeb (Ben Daniels) whose agitation is PHILIPPE N0IRET JACQUES MUSIC BY ENNIO MORRICONE PERRIN IH PjlI -S i 1 A VERY SPECIAL FILM" lb: Mayfest, PO Box 88, Glasgow, Gl 2ET. "THIS IS 13 4 THERE'S A 0154 GLASG0WING IN 1990. cuuuBAi capital i vavn.

Sue Heal TODAY rid fld1 Id: Al Name: Address: Postcode:.