The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 54

OBSERVER SUNDAY 29 APRIL 1990 54 Park Avenue comes to visit Piccadilly Dali's 1929 'The Accomodations of Desires', in which lions act like Cheshire cats on a set of oddball fungi, lost in a brown desert. With later Braques (among them 'The Billiard Table' from the late Forties, sand-textured and pinched at the waist) the Cubism of 30 years before is mollified. With Picasso there remains a voracious quality in the paintings, including the fuddled dalliance of the 1967 'Cavalier and Seated Nude' and the sea urchin face of 'Man with a Lollipop', 1938. The Gelmans' earliest Picasso, 'Girl in Profile', 1901, is another duff collector's item. But a 1906 'Self-Portrait', formerly owned by Gertrude Stein, who probably fancied a resem- describe, it excites and fuses at every turn.

Matisse too, occupying the Council Room, gives a new look to life. There are drawings in which forms are frisked and reinvented. 'Laurette in a Green Robe', 1916, sits sculpturally on a fat pink chair, her hair as black as the enfolding background, her robe in itself a brilliant dissertation on abstract values. 'View of Collioure', 1907-8, is a hillside enrobed, black stems of trees railing the slope to be negotiated, down to the red-roofed town and the blue bar of sea. And 'The Young Sailor II', of 1906 (the more daring version), is a swagger of green trousers and green-rimmed eyes, a study in assumed nonchalance resting on mild dawn pink.

The Matisses harmonise wonderfully. With them the Gelman Collection becomes more than a major shopping achievement. Putting on the Style, at the Geffrye Museum, Bethnal Back home: John Neville returns to the British stage after 20 years, as Sir Peter Teazle in The Schoolor Scandal', Photograph by NeilLibbert. Vacuity stops ideas getting in the way Both Antipholuses are played by Desmond Barrit, a supreme Welsh comic actor now emerging in full spate and plume; and both Dromios by a delightful new star from Yorkshire, Graham Turner. This brilliantly original idea an equivalent of the Magritte painting of a man looking into a mirror who sees only the back of his own head deserves a resolution more inspired than the last scene provides.

Even more astonishing in an RSC Stratford season that is already assuming vintage status is Sam Mendes's debut production of Troilus and Cressida in the Swan. Performed with shattering intensity and stylishly designed by another RSC debutant, Anthony Ward (a great leaning mask of Apollo, ladders, dire, though I warmed to a motel number for the King entourage, wittily written by Alis-tair Beaton, which puts the satirical skids under the Democratic Party approval of Martin Luther. You'd never know from the show that a) King lost that support through his pacifist denunciation of American involvement in the Vietnam War; or b) that when he was shot, he was rousing a strike-force of garbage workers in Memphis, having unsuccessfully switched his emphasis from race to class in the Poor People's Campaign. The choreography of the oppressed on what I presume are the Selma marches is like a dreadful St Vitus Dance of Jerome Robbins offcuts. 'You're done, cries an hysterical FBI agent.

He sure is. I prefer my empty-headed-ness neat and stylish. As at Stratford-upon-Avon, where Ian Judge's wonderful, surreal-into-pop main stage production of The Comedy of Errors, fantastically designed by Mark Thompson, evokes a De Chirico dream city. The sorcerer is Salvador Dali. The wonderful soundtrack of Nigel Hess merges that of films like Buii-uel's L'Age d'Or with Mediterranean circus.

Toni Palmer, one of the glories of our vulgarian stage, has joined the company to upstage it as a courtesan in a tight skirt and a beehive hair-do. cast jovially slaps its collective thigh and stamps its communal foot in all manner of superficially concocted business. John Neville, returning to the British stage after 20 years in Canada his embrace of the fictional outcast of Quilley is a moment fraught with symbolic resonance is a sourly affable, squinting, dignified Sir Peter Teazle; his great encounter with Diana Hardcastle's unusually mature and raddled Lady Teazle is a model display of rhythmed snap and intonation. King, alas, finds little redemption in its actors, led by the gigantic Simon Estes and the wasted Cynthia Haymon, magnificent singers both. However, Ray Shell's embryonic Black Panther and Godfrey James's rabid Alabama redneck indicate areas in the story that might have been more fully investigated, and not just by J.

Edgar Hoover. Instead, we are sold an Old Testament icon, descending on a gantry with the Nobel Peace Prize and raised on a rock like Moses for the great 'How long' oration at the Washington Capitol. We have an LBJ lookalike (Leon Greene), but no sign of Governor George Wallace. Estes tells Haymon, 'Coretta, I am just tired', which prompted a non-Baptist antiphonal response in my row. The music of Richard Blackford is awful, and predictably orchestrated, most of the lyrics collaboration with John Gunter, The Rivals, put the whole of Georgian Bath on the stage.

This time, the buzz and movement of the gossip college is carried through to a sea of newsprint on furniture, stage floor and tapestries, and a floating confection of cartoon bubble tongues, licking around Lady SneerwelPs bed and flying out to a mistily expectant London skyline where flags, sails and rigging absorb the bitching ripples as if possessed by Shakespeare's Rumour. So, in spite of Wood's protestations, there is an idea of sorts in Prunella Scales's Mrs Candour bumping along these ill winds like an overladen dinghy in a slipstream; and another one in the college slipping its needles into a collective giant sampler; and, who knows, another, in the gusting hither of Denis Quilley's bumptious Sir Oliver to inspect an invisible picture gallery through a suspended gilded frame. Yet more: Joseph Surface (Jeremy Northam, a sneeringly plausible contrast to Richard Bonneville's cheerily rakish brother Charles) has done up his rooms with the fruits of his uncle's generosity in the Indies: the closet is a red pagoda library, the screen a geographic marvel. No doubt reeling from such high intellectual conceptualising, and mindful of pleasing the more venerable critics, Wood's Michael Coveney on two productions with little to say. APPEARANCES are rarely deceptive.

Sanitised vacuity reigns in King at the Piccadilly Theatre this week and in The School For Scandal in the Olivier at the Royal National Theatre, where director Peter Wood has been as good as his reported word and interposed no ideas whatsoever between Sheridan's play and the audience, on the risible grounds that it's a masterpiece. King suggests, inaccurately, that its subject was beyond moral reproach, extremely tall, and as mesmerisingly witty and quick on his feet as a lobotom-ised traffic warden. Apart from the sheer badness and fatuous hagiography of the musical, you can tell that the bittiness of the staging, its lack of pace and momentum, is directly related to the production team having nothing to say. This is less of a handicap at the Olivier, where having nothing to say is wholly subsumed in saying it as smoothly and expensively as possible. The actors talk and disport themselves like popinjays in any modest English rep production.

But hold: the design is something else. Peter Wood's previous National Sheridan William Feaver has a glimpse of a Manhattan collection. MATISSE'S 'Young Sailor II' normally sits above an Empire-style fattteuil in Natasha Gel- man Park Avenue apartment. A Giacometti cat stalks along the mantelpiece and Miros busy themselves vying with the chateau carpet. In the dining room, where interior decorators' pink-striped watered silk is teamed with a fumed glass table-top, Bonnards quicken the taste buds.

The apartment must look empty without them, without Derain Regent Street without the Modigliani, the Braques and Picassos. For since last December the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection has been out on show, first at the Metropoli tan Museum and now (until 15 July) at the Royal Academy. They call the show Iwentieth- Lentury Modern Masters. When does a collection be come a wnen there's enough of it and when it hangs together, tempting museums to considerations of mutual advantage. At the Met, where even the flower arrangements are gifted (a whim of the founder-publisher of the Reader's Digest), private collections cannot but be regarded as potential bequests.

At the RA the situation is different. Here, in the Fine Rooms, the Gelman Collection looks a treat. Jacques Gelman made a fortune producing Cantinflas movies in Mexico City from the Forties until his death in 1986. Cantinflas, the Hispanic Chaplin, always good box-office in that part of the world, generated what was needed to buy dozens of fine examples of the School of Paris, from Vuillard to Brutalism, that is to say right through to Dubuffet and, by affinity, Francis Bacon. There are anomalies: a faded Kandinsky watercolour, two Rouaults, one of them a 'Christ and the Apostles' dripping puppet piety, and a Mondrian mounted like a security grille on one of the blocked-in doorways of the Reynolds Room.

Mr Gelman bought several Yves Tanguys for the bedroom, presumably as soporifics. Collecting, for the Gelmans, appears to have been a matter of seizing on the absolute musts. A special liking for Miros (such bounce, such cheeky twinkles) was compatible with the acquisition of two classic Summer 1911 Cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque. And these, with their interchangeable buttered concavities, could be reconciled, via Miro, with Salvador Ruzimatov, has fought back. His Albrecht was a man who loved Giselle and who could hardly believe that so beautiful a being could forgive him.

And Asylmuratova must be as beautiful as Theophile Gautier dreamed when he devised the ballet in 1841. She has the Romantic ballerina's neat head, dark eyes and long neck and an arabesque of infinite variety, from the demureness of a lithograph to the stretch of a modern penchee. Sylvie Guillem, who danced two performances with Jonathan Cope, has yet to find the right arabesque for Giselle. She is technically stronger than Asylmuratova, but her hyper-flexibility disrupts the flowing line of the Act Two pas de deuxt Guillem's difficulty (which can also be a virtue) is that she fits no convention. She rethinks each role to suit her exceptional physique and personality.

Her Giselle is frank in her innocence, with no blushes or peasant gaucheness. It's a disarming confidence that could work if only she had a responsive partner. Cope gives his standard account of a prince with a marital problem. His Albrecht is more than adequate as a dancer, but provides no foil for Guillem's interpretation. She goes convincingly mad on her own, but cannot bring out the nuances of Height of elegance: A Giacometti from the Gelman show.

blance to herself in it, and three splendid drawings from 1908 are what the Met would describe as 'museum quality'. Jacques Gelman's favourite colour, we are told, was red. He warmed to the Fauves therefore, especially Vlaminck in blazing mood and Derain, in whose 'Regent Street a horse-bus dashes to catch the end of the Belle Epoque. The intensity of Bonnard, transcending the old Belle Epoque mannerisms, and the marvellous perspicuity of Matisse, similarly derived, dominate the collection. Bonnard burnishes the bananas, melds tablecloth and plates, makes the shadows under the sideboard pulsate orange, heliotrope and scarlet.

The paint does not just a pool for Cressida's feet and warriors' blades), it will stand comparison with any version I can recall. It is visceral, crystal clear and as absorbing as a great sporting event. Ralph Fiennes and Amanda Root are the lovers, and an al most unbelievably strong cast includes Norman Rodway's definitive Pandarus, Ciaran Hinds's sensuously leonine Achilles, Sally Dexter's lushly melancholic Helen, David Troughton's vigorously ebul lient Hector, Paul Jesson's gravely subtle Ulysses and Simon Russell Beale's blister-incly repulsive Thersites. You should go. Learning curves "A WINNER-.

"Superb A great and inspiring evening" Green (to 7 October), an exhibition about 'Setting Up Home in the Fifties', posits a time when the average housewife and her man about the house cried out for sound advice. Gordon Russell spoke for the entire Council of Industrial Design when he said, in his 'How To Buy Furniture' pamphlet, 'go to a reputable dealer, the "flash Alf" variety'. The Alfs of this world had plenty to offer. Under-the-counter lino, rickshaw cacti holders, chairs with daringly splayed brass-tipped legs and increasing numbers of TV accessories. For your walls, ducks over the marshes by Peter Scott or swans on ponds by Vernon Ward or, if it was the exotic you were after, the Mona Lisa of the age of expresso: Tretchikof green-faced lady.

The Geffrye Museum is about to add a Fifties room to its sequence of period interiors. But which should it be? We are asked to help choose from those in the exhibition. Should it be the council flat living room? The suburban lounge with ivied wallpaper? Or the architect's Canonbury terrace drawing room with converted carboy lamp and an obvious readiness for the coming of Habitat? Keen not to impose the notion that, the Fifties was a period of Design Council ascendency, New Towns and G-Plan only, the Geffrye has accommodated Rachmanite bedsitland, hand-me-downs in the spare bedroom where newly-weds lived, and repro-Regency from H. Epstein Ltd. Space too in which to dream of work-tops clad in 'primrose softglow' Formica, fitted into the 'California' kitchen.

convention, enrich our understanding of the ballet. Giselle in the theatre is, after all, more rewarding than Giselle by radio. Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet opened its last season at the Wells with a tribute to Peggy van Praagh. She commissioned Valses Nobles et Sentimentales from Ash-ton in 1947; and the company danced this revival with the good manners and vitality that are its trademark. Of their performances, more next week.

Street, London W1B 3FB all usual agents. "A TRIUMPH GUARDIAN FINANCIAL TIMES THE TIMES sense of r99 DAILY TELEGRAPH IAN JUDGE'S SKILFUL AND WITTY PRODUCTION 66 and acting with a spirit and a CZSEZZI Jann Parry prefers a Russian line in Giselles to a French. RADIO 4's Kaleidoscope recently took listeners through both acts of Giselle, with performers describing what happens at key points in the ballet. The dancing (like the scenery) is so much better on radio that there seemed little inducement to watch the Royal Ballet's performances at Covent Garden. Then Altynai Asylmuratova and Konstantin Zaklinsky arrived from the Kirov on Thursday to demonstrate the ballet's extraordinary visceral power to move.

It needs two great dancers, for Giselle is essentially a long pas de deux in which the emphasis shifts between the partners as the story evolves. Asylmuratova showed in Act Two the conflict between Giselle's Wili-nature and her human love for her betrayer. As the baleful Queen summoned her forward, her arms reached back to shield Albrecht; as her body impelled her away from him, her torso curved longingly towards him. Zaklinsky, who seemed in danger of being completely eclipsed at the Kirov by Farukh which made the evening pure joy STOll MOSS THEATRES In oiwc1io will POLA JONES mi till ARTS COUNCIL prcltnl llw OPERA NORTH AND THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY Romantic: Altynai Asylmuratova by Angela Taylor. JEROME KERN Singing style iRoyaUnsurance premtiM of OSCAR HUMMERSTEIN II MOSS THEATRE FRANK WARREN by arrangement with HAROLD DAVISON and LIZ present IF IK A KJ IK Act Two without emotional as well as physical support.

Although she has been a member of the Royal Ballet for over a year, Guillem persists in behaving like a guest, wearing her own costumes and refusing to accommodate the ensemble style. This self-imposed isolation undermines her performances in the traditional ballets (although she is riveting in more recent works). The Kirov pair, despite coming from a different PRETTY Personal Callers T.B.T., 73 Brewer Tickets also available Irom LONDON PALLADIUM 01 437 7373 A STOLL IN CONCERT IIN IMt KUUINU A JULY 1990 8.00 pm each night Tickets 75 (All other prices sold out) LONDON ARENA BOX OFFICE 01-538 1212 FIRST PERFORMANCE WED. 25 JULY PRESS NIGHT WED. 1 AUG.

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