The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 48

48 OBSERVER SUNDAY 30 JUNE 1991 mm Flushed in the White House Family crises Italian style Die (Odeon West End, 15). Amiable as always, Robbie Col-trane plays the kindly rock 'n' roll-loving Father Albinizi, who is confronted by crooked cardinals and bent shoes and bed. Many of these actors have been on the EyreMcKellen RNT world tour; they are becoming an identifiable top-class ensemble. Italy is on the move this week. Parma has been relocated nearer to Naples than Bologna in the RSC's new version of John Ford's compelling documentary tragedy 'Tis Pity She's A Whore (Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon).

David Leveaux's production, designed by Kenny Miller, has a post-modern Sicilian feel to it: black baggy suits, scuffed shoes, rosary beads, snatches of dark music. The action, underlit by Ford's direct, functional poetry, is briskly presented on a bare stage, with a trucked-on platform to double as bed and banquet table. The central incestuous passion of Giovanni and his sister Annabella is more noisomely petulant than surgingly sexual: Jonathan Cullen is energetically tearful and wide-eyed, Saskia Reeves a good deep-kisser but fatally girlish and one-dimensional. The destructive properties of sexual jealousy are more vividly outlined by Celia Gregory as the rampageously wronged Hippolita, and by the object of her wrath, Soranzo. Tim Mclnnerny, as the latter, is a deviously saturnine presence, fully inhabiting the world, and tone, of the play and well 1 "mm Michael Coveney enjoys Naples at the National and Parma at the RSC.

EDUARDO DE FILIPPO (1900-1984) led his own company in Napoli Milionaria, a dark wartime comedy, at the World Theatre Season of 1972. The British theatre has sporadically attempted to repay the compliment by translating the dramas of Italy's leading popular dramatist (until Dario Fo) into our own damp and resistant climate. Richard Eyre's handsome production in the Lyttelton at the Royal National Theatre adopts the compromise approach of Neapolitan realism in design (by Anthony Ward) and an idiomatic Liverpudlian translation (by Peter Tinnis-wood). The two worlds almost coalesce over prayers, meals and family rows. Napoli.

Milionaria ('Affluent Naples') opened Filippo's own theatre in 1945. The play is set during the air raids of 1942; and after the Allied landing in 1944. Gennaro (Filippo's role, here taken by Ian McKellen) returns after the first act from rough captivity to find his house done up in pink and green, his wife in cahoots with the local taxi-driver on the black-market racket, his daughter about to elope with an American soldier, and his son shadily involved in the second-hand car business. It is a bit like Bread in the sunshine. When the local sergeant (Peter Jeffrey) calls by, McKellen, head bandaged and face blanched, plays 'dead' on the double bed to divert attention from a mattress heaving with black-market goodies.

This sit uation escalates hilariously with the onset of an ear-splitting air raid, plaster crashing to the floor while neighbours and nuns in drag flee in agitation and McKellen calmly continues his impersonation of a stiff white rabbit. McKellen, in his most delightful vaudevillian element, plays a ghost for real when he returns from 'humping stones' (echoes of Bent) and hiding out in ditches, failing at first to recognise his wife, Amalia. The play revolves around this hardhearted businesswoman, dispensing coffee to the community and reducing a creditor (Richard Bremmer) to utter penury; in the ironic melodrama of the third act, a sickly child needs medicine which only the creditor can supply. Clare Higgins's performance as Amalia is a remarkable achievement by an actress who is now fully established in the front rank: blisteringly executed, it combines elements of motherhen instinct, snobbery, profiteering and sexual appetite, and sheer temperamental excess. The community also includes Geraldine Fitzgerald as an incipient spinster (with one brilliant monologue of laughter, giggles and tears), Antonia Pemberton as a bustling, nosy neighbour, and Mark Strong as the sharp-suited taxi-driver Errico who steps into Gennaro's bankers when he becomes Pope Dave.

But the jokes are as thick dispensers in the Vatican! and the plot is jerry-built. The Pope Must Die tries to be tough and is frequently mited in sentimentality. Defending Your Life (Curzon West PG), written and directed by Albert Brooks, is sentimental in conception. A low-calorie yuppie version of Powell and Press-v burgers Dig, ooia ft matter Life and Death, this whimsical-affair stars Brooks himself 1 as Dan Miller, a divorced 40-year- old l-os nngeies Hies at the wheel of hisnew- BM convertible and wakes up in Judgment City. This halfway house is a sort of bland adult Disneyland where the transients wear feaf- tans, live in anonymous luxury hotels and can eat whatever they like without getting fat They are there to go on trial before a court that will decide" wneuxer uiey re lit io aescena to a further stage of being or whether they should bereincar- -nated for another lifetime.

Dan's drawbacks are fear arid turpitude, but in Judgement ciry ne meets a orave womany (Meryl Streep), also on arid their love offers him the chance of salvation. To a southern Californian the choice between proceeding to a higher, plane with Meryl Streep and returning to the world alone (probably to Kurdistan this Nielsen: Hilariously inept. time instead of Beverly Hilled is? no joke. By the time this Dante4 esque fork in the dark wood-has been reached, Brooks is after tears, not laughter. The title of Lewis Teague's Navy Seals (Warner, 15) suggests a Disney action movie, about a unit of dedicated, amphibian mammals trained carry but dangerous operations for patriotic porpoises.

-t i Actually this is a postrcold: war version ofyTopj Gun, the title being an acronyijii for an elite group of 'Sea, An or Land' commandos and vtheir task here is to kick Arab ass' in the Eastern Mediterrariean. The script is risible, the action sequences are well managed Raymond Depardon's rLa Captive du Desert (Renbir, PG) is an impressive evocation, of the dislocating experience of -a long period ins the desert, centring on a Frenchwoman (Sandrine Bonnaire) held! hostage by a nomadic Sahararoribe during a civil war. Depardon refuses to entertain f. through drama or to, enlighten by providing a political context, Unfortunately, despite encom- passing the infinite of desert light, his film canV-only convey mind-numbing tedium I by being mind-numbingly tedious. ff-fenai supported by Jonathan Hyde unreliable sommelier, the sepulchral Vasquez.

Another fine double act orbiting round Annabella is that of Richard Bonneville as the inane Bergetto and Guy Henry as his watchfully deadpan servant, Poggio. The final carnage, with Annabella's heart brandished on a dagger like a medium rare steak (no garnish, chips optional), is a superbly staged confection of black mirth and visceral horror. The RSC's record on Ford is quite good, but Leveaux's production is the first to relate the chamber qualities of unspeakable domestic turmoil to the contemporary tragedies which seem to multiply in every day's newspapers. London is blessed with two invaluable initiatives which go some way to plugging the gaps in public funding: the Barclays New Stages Festival, which is concentrated this year at the Royal Court; and the London International Festival of Theatre, LIFT (which does receive some Arts Council support), celebrating, throughout July, its tenth anniversary, and its fifth biennial programme. LIFT '91 was launched in a travelling tent on Highbury Fields by Footsbarn, the erstwhile Cornish collective now based and funded in France.

Their version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (today at 4pm, Tuesday and Wednesday) is appallingly spoken, dull and conventional, in spite of the Chinese gongs, the Irish fiddles and the tacked-on Kathakali processions and masks. Titania and donkey-headed Bottom disappear inside a vulva-like artichoke plant, and the depleted mechanicals perform their play as a posh mime that raises no laughter. Barclays and the Court had more luck with Graeme Miller's A Girl Skipping, a pulverising variation on childhood themes Delightful vaudevillian: Ian McKellen with Antonia Pemberton in 'Napoli Milionaria'Photograph by Richard Mildenhall. Too much slap and tickle Philip French finds the Capitol Hill mob hysterical. LAST Monday morning, still soaked from a walk through the rain, I smiled, chuckled or laughed uproariously throughout the 81 minutes of The Naked Gun 2 (Empire, 12) starting with the credit 'Un film de David Zucker' and ending with the voice of George Bush sitting in the lavatory trying to understand a speech.

God knows how I would have responded after a good dinner and a couple of drinks. The Naked Gun 2 is Zuck-er's second cinematic outing with Lieutenant Frank Drebin (the wonderfully straight-faced Leslie Nielsen, ex-skipper of the SS Poseidon), a cop as inept as Clouseau but altogether less, endearingly eccentric and sentimental. Drebin is the ultimate thick, dedicated policeman who takes pride in killing people in the line of duty. The plot here turns upon plutocrats in the power business attempting to frustrate the President's green energy policies, but their nemesis, Drebin, has himself cleared a sizeable tract of the Amazon rain forest of both trees and natives to build his retirement home. And the film's love interest Dre-bin's pursuit of Jane (Priscilla Presley) is the occasion for delicious parodies of conventional love scenes.

Keats said, 'We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon and exhorted fellow authors to 'load every rift with ore'. His advice has been diligently followed by director David Zucker and his associates ever since they made Airplane 10 years ago. Their work is without obvious moral purpose (other than to demonstrate the absurdity of everything, especially the cinema), bombarding us with a Desert Storm of verbal, visual and musical jokes. In the opening sequence, Drebin knocks down Barbara Bush (an extraordinary Iooka-like performance from Margery Ross); in the final scene he leaves the first Lady suspended from a floodlit balcony in her underwear. When he and side kick Captain Hoocken (George Kennedy) invade a sex shop, the buxom manageress asks: Ts: this some kind ot A crooked con man is introduced as 'former arts adviser to Jesse Helms', and cornering the chief villain, Drebin snarls: 'You're part of a dying breed, Hapsburg like people who can name all 50 The film's two best set pieces are a scene in the Blue Note, a plush bar for lonely losers decorated with pictures of the Titanic; the Hindenberg and Michael Dukakis, and a hilarious send-up of the romantic potter's wheel sequence in Ghost.

The latter leads to a montage of every cliche movie metaphor for, sex flowers opening, fireworks, missile launches. Ghost was directed by David Zucker's brother Jerry; so this is presumably a case of -one Zucker, never giving another Zucker an even break. There are few laughs to be had from the week's other comedies. The familiar plot of a good, simple man being elected pontiff is the point of departure for British offering, Peter Richardson's The Pope smm the Coliseum with its recently acquired: version of the Shrew, rented for a year from the Cincinnati Ballet. The production strives after such: mock-Tudor, adjectives as bawdy, full-blooded, rumbustious; all; too often this means slapstick and sexual stereotyping.

Cranko did, however, find a way round the misogynist message by making the taming of Katherina into a psycho-sexual game between consenting partners. Tuesday's central couple, Maurizio Bellezza and Renata Calderini, had the right Mediterranean gestures and flashing eyes. Calderini showed that Kate's rages frighten, her as much as everybody else, so that she welcomes a man strong enough to contain her The very nature of ballet partnering means that the woman has to co-operate with the man to make the lifts possible. So Kate colludes in being flung about, just as she does in being flown ecstatically in the happy-ever-after pas de deux. The charm of the dark, fiery Italians was well complemented by the blonde Estonian pair, Agnes Oaks and Thomas Edur, as Bianca and Lucentio, the subsidiary love interest.

Oaks was the epitome of big-eyed, open-mouthed innocence, while Edur gallantly surmounted his dull part and shiny pink boots. 0 'TJrilHahtly iTOnueomic fantasy. Albert Brooks is an inspired film maker and an incomparable aConsistently witty andengaging. Brooks proves a pleasing alternative to Woody Allen! Jann Parry sees ENB's fast and loose Shakespeare. JOHN CRANKO's The Taming of the Shrew owes about as much to Shakespeare as Kiss Me Kate does.

The plot becomes a pretext for comic revue sketches framing a love story full of misunderstandings which are eventually resolved by a happy ending. English National Ballet opened its two-week season at Observer Bi-Centenary 7.50 (inc. PLEASE Please send Observer at 7.50. Price includes I I enclose crossed chequePO value Observer Ltd. I I wish to pay by AccessVisa Card number CUT of the 1980s British fringe much influenced by the performance techniques of Pina Bausch.

Miller's quintet the Famous Five go performance-arting skip, run, spin and gargle for over an hour before producing the most tremendous 20-minute finale of co-ordinated stage action (babble, skipping, lights, supplication, rain and bells) I have seen this year. The serial music, by Miller and David Coulter, is monotonously Michael Nyman-ish, but the quirky text and hectic, well-drilled performance constitute an eloquent rebuff to traditional theatre cast in a vigorous search for new physical language. I would not have missed it for anything, but you probably have. It closed last night. ROLLING STONE TIME OUT Life PG 203 overstock HIM, NW3.

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