The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 50

OBSERVER SUNDAY 12 AUGUST 1990 50 Masses of marvels Macho pain in the viscera values. But Boorman is a visionary, essentially amoral director and he displays no sympathy in the contrasts between rich and poor revealed by the family's predicament. As in Boorman's other films, his leading characters undertake a geographical and spiritual quest, and in this film it happens to be through the slums, soup kitchens and rubbish heaps of New York. Yet his interest in the subject remains formal. He uses his superb visual flair to turn New York into another planet inhabited by the strange tribe of the poor and the abandoned.

His spoilt young people discover their creativity by remaking the house they live in. Then they destroy it and manipulate the stock market to become rich once more. Boorman is so captivated by his visual extravagances that he seems to have lost sight of the smug ghastliness of his leading characters and a social message amounting to the complacent assertion that everything is all right if you are creative, successful and very rich. The irresponsible heartless-ness of Where the Heart Is is devastatingly exposed by the comparison with Coline Ser-reau's excellent comedy, Romuald and Juliette (12, Camden Plaza, Cannon Premiere). Rich white Romuald's company and private life are falling apart and the only person who will help him is a black office cleaner, Juliette, whose large family of five children by five separate husbands has its own problems.

He moves in with her and plots revenge. The film is both a cleverly plotted comedy, a wildly offbeat love story, and a beady-eyed exposure of racism and social inequality. It's also beautifully performed, especially by Daniel Auteil as the smooth, this staging was not dowdy old operatic spectacle, but tradition Drought strikingly up to date. Commendably, the company refused all requests to bring popular old-style warhorses to Glasgow, creating some severe problems for the marketing men, and instead brought two of its newest productions (the other was Tchaikovsky's The Maid of Orleans). Produced by Boris Pokrov-sky, the Rimsky staging did not attempt to clarify Mlada's admittedly slender plot, but, rather, reinforces its symbolism with a marvellous sequence of dolls, models, and mannequins who served in all the folk dances, witches' sabbaths, and huge processions.

Over a solid wooden bridge at the back the choruses trod, gauzes flew, backdrops dazzled, while below the spirits of the deep were conjured up from beneath the floor. What this show does, vividly, is to alert us to a form of music-drama which is far more than just singing: as often in the past, before the age of 'classic' opera, dance and spectacle are both integral to the whole. Rimsky makes this point by casting Mlada herself (the only operatic heroine who is dead by the time the curtain rises?) as a dancer, here the wispily affecting teenage Bolshoi star Nadezhda Gracheva. She is forever coming between the hero Yaromir (Oleg Kulko, in ringing, stirring voice) and his new love Voislava (Makvala Kasrashvili, less subtle) so that their intoxicated love can never be fulfilled. There were many fine, idiomatic voices in the smaller parts, and the orchestra plays with magnificent sweep and command; this was above all a team show, which demonstrates how a great Russian tradition can reanimate itself.

The big question now seems to be whether, in the new climate of artistic and political freedom combined with acute economic uncertainty, the company will be able to find the resources to continue its work of renewal. Glasgow's extravagantly promoted year as European City of Culture continues apace; coincident with the Bolshoi visit was the first Glasgow International Early Music Festival, offering some startling and rewarding events. Last Saturday the French conductor Jean-Claude Malgoire, a veteran of English Bach Festivals in London, returned with a concert performance of Rameau's Les Paladins a work which, heard so close to Mlada, proved an equally subtle interweaving of dance with drama. What recordings of the dance music alone have not revealed is how pointfully Rameau dovetails singing and dancing, making a dramatic point out of a half-heard musette, for example. Malgoire's cast, including the excellent Isabelle Poulenard and Gilles Ragon, as well as the reliable Bruce Brewer, are now able to unlock the secrets of this complex style with ease.

The evening was an ever-increasing delight, even given the regrettable absence of the chorus, for whom Rameau wrote some stirring music. On Thursday came the festival's most ambitious undertaking, in the now trendy Tramway: the first staging for over three hundred years of La Vita Humana, the dramma musicale of 1576, with music by Marazzoli, and the libretto by a Pope-to-be, Giulio Rospigliosi. If it seemed quixotic to revive a piece entirely concerned with the rivalries between Innocence and Guilt, Pleasure and Understanding, for the soul of Life as she journeys through the world, the excuse was quickly given by some deliciously crisp and inventive music. Marazzoli's arias and ensembles (including one gorgeous passacaglia duet for Pleasure and Life) are extended, often tortuously awkward in their lines, but oddly satisfying. Within the bare brick walls of the Tramway, on a white platform surrounded by musicians, the director Kate Brown had devised a staging that set up the conflicts clearly, cleverly intertwining naturalism and period style, stylised gesture and real emotion.

At the centre of a large cast (including a strong Swedish contingent), Jill Feldman as Life sang with clarity and acute penetration of the recitative style. She was well matched by Lorna Anderson the first time I have seen this accomplished singer on stage as Innocence, and Stuart Patterson as Understanding. Oddly, the devils had fewer of the good tunes, and their singing was more conventional. The Scottish Early Music Consort accompanied with just the right lively deference to the singers: Jakob Lindberg was the outstandingly responsive theorbo player. 1 Nicholas Kenyon admires the Bolshoi Opera's dazzling spirit of renewal.

THE Bolshoi Opera's appearance at the Scottish Exhibition Centre in Glasgow was not only an artistic marvel but also a technological miracle. For the first time in my experience, a convincing stage and auditorium for large-scale opera had been created out of nothing in four days flat. Just the vast hangar-like structure of Exhibition Hall 4 existed to house the Russian company, with a space far wider than its normal auditorium but rather lower in height. Four thousand people were crammed in, on not over-comfortable seats; a painted proscenium and a glimpse of some stage boxes were all that gave atmosphere to the proceedings. Inevitably, the sound was almost entirely artificial.

But this was the technological aspect of the whole complex undertaking that impressed most forcibly (I saw the show on its third night; earlier reports had been more patchy). In strong contrast to the ghastly Earls Court Carmen, where the orchestra was reduced to a single tinny sound and soloists were obtrusively miked, this amplification was subtle and hardly distracting not so different, in fact, from the 'electronic enhancement' we accept in some famous concert halls and theatres. The orchestral texture, issuing from the wide pit, was spacious and clear (except when the sound of a solo violin suddenly jumped above the stage to the speakers), and the miking of the singers, sensitively attuned to their own vocal qualities, was convincing (except when they turned upstage and one expected to hear less of them). The huge, milling choruses of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada must have posed a problem or two, but even these masses were projected well into the auditorium. And what a sight! The single semi-staging of Rimsky's long-neglected opera-ballet at the Barbican under Michael Tilson Thomas had alerted one to the musical splendours of the piece, but could not prepare one for the visual panoply that the Bolshoi lavished on it.

The artistic marvel was that Sean French is dismayed by male codes that would be an embarrassment for rutting stags. BY ANY civilised standards, Days of Thunder (12, Empire I) is a monstrosity. It's manufactured by the team producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, director Tony Scott, star Tom Cruise responsible for Top Gun, a staggeringly successful film about male bonding, fighter aircraft and what fun it would be to start World War III. Now they have taken the same visceral style and applied it somewhat incongruously to the world of stock car racing. The film's story is credited jointly to Robert Towne, probably the most respected screenwriter in modern Hollywood, and Tom Cruise, currently the most bankable film star in the world.

But actually the film is a bit of a stock car itself, constructed from the scrapyard of old movie cliches. Cruise plays Cole Trickle, a fiery young driver whose ambition is to win the Daytona 500, the summit of the sport. Robert Duvall plays the canny old engineer, Harry Hogge, who is lured out of self-imposed retirement to build Cole a special car, an object filmed as if it were a cross between Pegasus and Excalibur. The plot the setbacks and ultimate triumph writes itself but the real subject is the same as Top Gun: the excitement of powerful machines and the special bond between men who use them. The only values that matter are male, and women only appear to comment on them, not to assert any of their own.

Days of Thunder is dismaying in many respects, not least in its endorsement of a code of behaviour that might be rejected as irresponsible by rutting stags. But, like its predecessor, it is also extremely gripping. David Puttnam has said that his new Memphis Belle, about the crew of an American World War II bomber, was written in reaction to the rabid individualism of Top Gun. Would that Puttnam's decent liberalism could grab an audience like the red-in-tooth-and-claw frontiersman theology of Simpson and Bruckheimer. Tony Scott portrays the macho buffoons of the racetrack as if they were gladiators and Towne has a matchless ear for the rhythms of male talk.

Robert Duvall gives his role a tragic dignity that the character doesn't begin to deserve. The car races are brilliantly filmed, accompanied by the sort of pounding rock music that pummels you into submission. But it works. I came out of the film partly feeling sick, partly wanting to become a stock car driver, and partly wanting to go out and invade some foreign country. I fear the results of this film being screened on American warships heading for the Gulf John Boorman apparently believes himself to be a normal, sensible film director.

He makes genre films a pop star vehicle, a thriller, a horror movie but they all come out strange once they have passed through his singular imagination. With films like Point Blank and Deliverance the results can be magnificent, but with Where the Heart Is (IS, Odeon Mezzanine, etc) it is a near-complete disaster. Dabney Coleman plays a rich New York building contractor who plans to teach his spoiled children a lesson by making them live, in a ruined house in Brooklyn. Then a financial crash wipes his fortune out and he and his wife move in with the children. By the end, all is sorted out and they are all rich and happier than they were before.

Even the character whom we thought was gay turns out to be heterosexual. The ostensible purpose of the story scripted by Boorman with his daughter Telsche is the familiar, if timely, one of the rich being made aware of the way the poor live and, in the process, discovering new From the depths: Arkady Mishenkin and Svetlana Slavnqya in 'Mlada'. Photograph: Alan Donaldson. Sharp, hard turn of the screw on Chekhov reworked in August Wilson's latest play in New York, The Piano Lesson. Griffiths tightens the screw on the characters, so that Penelope Wilton's voracious hostess is more crudely skittish than in Chekhov, and the idealistic newlyweds (Duncan Bell and Suzanne Burden) more risible.

Other Platonov stalwarts the doctor (Oliver Cotton) and the old colonel (Basil Henson) have been entertainingly revamped. An exchange in the story 'At a Country House', about the social consequences of absorbing the peasantry into positions of influence, becomes a pivotal dramatic confrontation: Philip has already reconstructed Platonov as a spectacular farce in Michael Frayn's Wild Honey. Here, Griffiths starts with a 1980 Soviet film, Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano, and presents the hero's bungled suicide attempt as a sour footnote to a survey of social arthritis. This process is beautifully controlled in Howard Davies's production, laid out across the entire floor of the Cottesloe and haunted by the jangling interventions of the pianola delivered to Anna Petrovna's estate by a couple of glowering, prophetic workmen. That event, and its metaphorical reverberations, have been similarly Frank Hauser, the inimitable Alan Badel was glintingly and neurotically hilarious, neither Kemble nor Kean.) At the Old Vic, Jacobi tries vainly to barter his Kemble-ness for Kean-ness, resorting to fits of boyish petulance and precious inflections that betray a surfeit of good breeding in a parvenu rapscallion.

What Hazlitt called the hoarse burst of thunder in Kean's voice becomes the glottal spluttering and whinnying in Jacobi's. Missing the persona of Kean matters less than missing the demonism of his reputation. This Kean is not a tempestuous clown but a tarnished matinee idol. Jacobi compensates a little in brilliantly invoking Olivier's Othello (to whom he played Cassio) with its early preview of the Viv Richards leonine amble, palms splayed like those of a priest at the Offertory, the reddened inner mouth, the glistening, dark coffee body make-up and the tight black wig. It is a clever and technically adept performance, but it does not justify the play, any more than does Sam Mendes's disappointingly rhubarby production.

The initial effervescence of Jeremy Sams's musical interludes, beautifully played by an Arlecchino quartet on violin, accordion and clarinets, tends finally to pall, as do the expensively-not-quite-effective sets of Simon Higlett. A lot of the support playing is crude, and Eleanor David's Danish pasty-face, the object of Kean's wild passion, far too introverted. But Nicholas Far-rell is a splendidly supercilious Prince, Sarah Woodward fiercely pert and precise as the determined Anne Danby (the role that made Felicity Kendal's name opposite Badel), and Ian McNeice admirably slothful as Solomon, the devoted dresser. meetings where the caring philosophy of the Beveridge era is unceremoniously lamented. McEnery cracks up and sends all his furniture to Ethiopia, while his wife Qudy Parfitt) suffers a parallel breakdown in recalling a wartime lesbian fling.

The play is persistently interesting, though it fails to congeal in any convincing way. Janet Suzman is the director, and the clever designs are by Johan Engels. McEnery finally fades out with a dream of suicides in Frinton-on-Sea ('We didn't want to be a burden'), a haunting sequence that suggests a play much better than this merely promising ragbag by another of our dangerously disappearing talented contemporary playwrights. Meanwhile, the Old Vic, in reviving Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean (1953), meekly turns back the clock for no very good reason. In a mish-mash of backstage farce and theatrical low camp, we see Kean embroiled with high society, subsiding in debt and a codpiece in his dressing room, carousing in a smoke-filled dockside pub with old mates, and performing the last act of Othello with a besotted neophyte as Desdemona.

This Drury Lane charity show, 'a benefit for old Bob', is overrun by prompts, interruptions, an ungovernable onset of real jealousy, a stand-up row with the Prince of Wales, and an act of actorish self-abasement ('To act you have to think you're somebody else; I thought I was Kean'). Kenneth Tynan suggested that John Gielgud was Kemble to Laurence Ouvier's Kean, the aesthete opposed to the animal. Today, you might draw similar comparisons between Derek Jacobi and Michael Gambon. (Twenty years ago, in this same prickly-sharp translation by Voss's smug, liberal-baiting reactionary is quietly reminded by Stephen Moore's otherwise virtually silent paterfamilias that his own father was a worker and his grandfather a serf. Platonov himself, in the scowling, tousle-haired figure of Stephen Rea, patrols the garden like a restless, vitriolic gamekeeper.

This is indeed a far cry from Rex Harrison's ill-tempered womaniser, or Ian McKellen's merciless poseur. Rea turns the failed schoolmaster inside out, so that his Byronic romanticism becomes a weapon of attrition. Distant rumbles of thunder, and the ungoverned music of the piano, are premonitions of Platonov's explosive hopelessness; this erupts in the unexpected sound of Caruso singing 'Una furtiva lagrima' as Rea rushes around like an unleashed maniac. Chekhov has long ceased to be the sleepy theatrical palliative imagined by Griffiths, both in mainland Europe and, especially, in the Irish theatre. But his exercise in reclamation has its own rhythm and validity, and the National is surely doing its job in matching the master with an important contemporary playwright of whom we had nearly lost sight.

Griffiths's text is a gem diamond-bright, hard, unsentimental and funny. Michael Hastings's A Dream of People for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Pit is also shot through with an anger at the way things are. A civil servant (Peter McEnery) fails to interest the Prune Minister in his report on pensions in the twenty-first century. He throws a punch, suffers demotion, and responds by mixing with the tramps and wrinklies whom rational Tory politics will very soon dispossess. His 'dream' takes the form of illicit policy rzzs 3 Michael Coveney sees gems in Trevor Griffiths's reworking of classic tales.

WHEN Trevor Griffiths talks of the 'recovery job' still to be done on Chekhov, he sounds foolish and out of touch. But in Piano at the Cottesloe, he has concocted a flinty, nagging meditation on Chekhov that recasts conversational flashpoints from the short stories in the setting of Chekhov's first play, Platonov. The Royal National Theatre LEICESTER SO A iX I llLl NOW Of men and motors: Tom Cruiie. selfish Romuald and the wonv derful first-time actress Firmine Richard as the plump, comply cated Juliette. To create a comedy that is both so funny and so unflinching is a remarkable John Woo's Hong Kong thriller, The Killer (18 ICA Cinema), has acquired a cult reputation in the United States and in this tale of a hitman doing one last job (involving the.

killing of hundreds of people, largely with pistols that hardly ever seem to need reloading) he does show a certain visual panache. Even I grew tired of the relentless stylised violence, which is saying something. I can scarcely recommend it to a normal human being. However, I would like to recommend Paul Brickman's Men Don't Leave on the Hill, etc), particularly 'since some have held the reputedly off-putting title responsible for the film's financial failure in America. Jessica Lange plays a woman in that not entirely unfamiliar cinematic situation of having to bring up her two children alone in a strange city (Baltimore) after the sudden death of her husband.

It could all have been like a sentimental TV sitcom but Brickman directs with a sure sense of the comic and sombre possibilities, and the cast are outstanding, especially Cusack as the nurse who seduces the son, and Lange, startling as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. IMMIWgHlWHMilHW 081-741 9999071-140 7200 B00K1NG GROUPS 071-9306123 fEES MUST END 8TH SEPT PRIOR TO BROADWAY TRANSFER immiaa SHOWING QUEENS THEATRE I CANNON CHELSEA 071-352 5096 9 3 0 6 111 A STOLL MOSS THEATRE hoarse burst of thunder: Derekjacobi as Edmund Kean.Photograph by SueAdler. r..