The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 62

62 OBSERVER SUNDAY 11 NOVEMBER 1990 A rewardingly tricky Dicky power. Max Stafford-Clark's ultra-cool production makes a good case for a new talent, though the overall effect is one of attenuation, instead of concentration. We come almost bang up to date with the year's third homegrown Eastern European saga, David Edgar's The Shape of the Table in the National's Cot-tesloe auditorium. Jenny Killick's admirable debut production for the RNT is set by Dermot Hayes in an emblematic simulacrum of Prague's baroque castle palace: gilded decorations, chandeliers, tall windows, a long table. Here, various factions Public Platform led by a Vaclav Havel clone, the National Peasants' Party, and the new Communications Minister (Stephen Boxer) grapple for the future of their country, jolted by public demonstrations of disaffection.

The first act is witty, elegant, funny; Edgar's most stylish writing to date. The second act after the surprise resignation of the avuncular prime minister (Oliver Ford Davies) and a unifying rendition of the national anthem is dominated by two long, beautifully wrought debates, after the breaching of the Berlin Wall last year. Pavel Prus, the Havel figure (keenly played by Karl Johnson), engages first with a re-animated Dubcek-type Qohn Ringham) and then with an incorrigible old party lion (Stratford Johns in his best performance for years). World events have given new life and sophistication to Edgar's already considerable dramatic and dialectical post-Marxian writing; the elegiac waspishness of Maydays (1983) yields to the supple, humorous reflectiveness of a committed craftsman at the peak of his powers. Atalanta stooping to retrieve Hippomene's apples.

The sinister anachronisms of costume and weaponry are suggested within a classical false white proscenium, no less than in the Reni pictorial analogue of Bol-ingbroke's ascendancy, an image of victory through flight from a diverted opponent. Atalanta stoops just as Richard, the glistering phaeton, descends. When Richard is finally humiliated in Pomfret, his nearly-successful lank ginger crown-wig is usurped by a shaven head: Jennings sits on a steel bed frame in prison-camp clothes, the painting destroyed behind him in a concrete wilderness. The play is renewed as a study in different aspects of political will, and Jennings severe, taut, confidently spoken but unlyrical presents Richard as a slandered, and finally butchered, outcast of an insidious new regime. A very fine performance in a challenging new production.

'What we need are new artistic declares Konstantin in Chekhov's The Seagull at the Swan, also in Stratford, on the occasion of Terry Hahds's farewell production. As an RSC ensemble effort this may not rival Trevor Nunn's hallowed Three Sisters, but there are three blisteringly good performances: Susan Fleetwood as a tumultuously frivolous Arka-dina, arms permanently extended like a bendy scarecrow's in attitudes of uncom-promised frivolity; Simon Russell Beale as her tortured Michael Coveney salutes the RSC's new production of Richard II. WHATEVER the fate of the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, its Stratford-upon-Avon season has been one of exceptional interest and achievement. So it goes on, with Alex Jennings in Richard II. This main house production is undoubtedly controversial, but intelligently so.

The collaboration between director Ron Daniels and designer Antony McDonald forged on the remarkable Mark Rylance RSC Hamlet compels admiration, and is a significant improvement on the bland medieval prettiness of the last RSC revival with Jeremy Irons. Courtiers and clerics scuttle like black beetles on a dunghill, where grim-faced guards rake the stalls with crossbows. The pervasive mood of usurpation, threatened riot and dynastic chaos settles finally on the rasping, vicious Bolingbroke of Anton Lesser. Meanwhile, Jennings presents a monarch eclipsed by a rtbtion of office that does not really exist. No tear-stained poet he, but a tetchily impetuous absentee landlord whose decision to plunder taxes in Ireland is taken against a backdrop reproduction of Guido Reni's muscularly baroque version of Alex Jenningsand Yolanda Vazquez against a Guido Reni backdrop, in 'Rkhardll'atStrafford-upon-AvonfthotographbyNeilLibbert, various design conventions: the Prussian rigidity of the military, represented by Mark Lewis's deviously saturnine Hastings and Laurance Rudic's Gloucester, a wonderfully inventive approximation to Ian McKellen's South Bank finger-clicking fascist; Parisian romantic melodrama in the swishing, weighted dresses of the two mistresses, Alicia (Angela Chadfield) and Jane Shore (Julia Blalock), and in the emblematic flourish of Manet's 'Olympia' in a scene-change; and the a moving paradigm of contemporary political and sexual dispossession.

It seems much meatier, anyway, than Etta Jenks, by the Californian Marlane Meyer, at the Royal Court. In a series of elliptical, tightly controlled scenes set in a peeling red swimming pool (designed by William Dudley), Miranda Richardson, in the title role, graduates through various stages of street waif, porn-video accessory and junked-out whore celebrity to a position of callous executive Uncle Vincent's favourite boys Brain death lacks a sting Qisting couch: Linus Roache, son, the avant-garde playwright with a Hamlet neurosis; and Katy Behean as a snuff-sniffing, tragically raddled Masha. In taking his interval after the third act, Mr Hands invokes unflattering comparisons with Philip Prowse's 1984 Greenwich production, in which the two-year gap was more tellingly exploited in design and performance. And it is to Prowse, at the Glasgow Citizens, we must turn for the sort of enterprise first envisaged in the Swan: Nicholas Addled: Jeff Goldblum and Liza for a few big bad apples) and intend that Vinnie should fill the same role in his new community that the confidence trickster Harold Hill the Music Man played in River City. The robbing goodfella becomes a Robin Goodfellow, his buoyant optimism and high spirits transforming the dreary lives of the local citizenry.

For the kids he builds a Softball stadium bearing his own name (a bit of a risk for a gangland stool-pigeon) using stolen money, and he settles down with a lady cop. No doubt their little love nest will be called 'Cosy Nostra'. The Mad Monkey (Cannons Panton St and Tottenham Court Rd, 18) is an addled tale of perverse sex set in Paris, performed in English, and directed by the young Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba. It centres on the making of an erotic movie as unlikely as the one we are actually watching, directed by a callow English rock video ace (Dexter Fletcher) and starring his 16-year-old sister. A French producer (Daniel Ceccaldi, a gifted comic actor who has difficulty keeping a straight face) pays an exorbitant fee to a Paris-based American writer (Jeff Goldblum) to knock off a script derived from a line from Peter Pan about the horrors of being a grown-up.

The young Englishman, it transpires, has an incestuous relationship with his sister, and she uses her skills at fellatio to get money from the producer and to keep the writer committed to the picture. Evidently the writer's ruthless, wheelchair-borne agent (Miranda Richardson) has tipped off the young couple about the older men's weakness for nymphettes. Where comprehensible, The Mad Monkey is unconvincing, it moves slowly and fails to engage. The view of the movie 'Les Vingt' in Brussels, was the great influence then but, because he was an Anglo-Belgian, in Ostend (whereas Alma-Tadema was Dutch in St John's Wood) he doesn't qualify for more than a catalogue mention. In March 'The Age of Van Gogh' goes to the temporary exhibition space in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

There, on the upper, sunnier floors hang paintings that a different and possibly more generous selection would have brought to Glasgow. Among them are 'The Potato Eaters', that sweated rehash of Hague School pieties, and 'Harvest Landscape' where the wheel of the cart is the hub of a panorama that reminded Van Gogh of a Philips de Koninck landscape in the Rijksmuseum. There is nothing in Glasgow from the last months at Auvers. No 'Wheat Field Under Threatening Skies': arguably his final demonstration to Cousin Mauve that he could surmount Hague School themes and handle colour. The catalogue cover of his Amsterdam retrospective, in December 1892, (reproduced as the frontispiece to the catalogue for 'The Age of Van Gogh') shows Symbolism in mourning, sun sinking, sunflower haloed but drooping.

The parson's son, the art dealer's nephew, the bird's-nester and voluntary inmate becomes the prodigal sunflower beckoned home. frogging superior, incidentally, to that adorning the Dutch cavalry on manoeuvres in Breit-ner's 'Le Coup de Canon'. In confinement at St Remy Van Gogh resorted for a while to making copies of compositions he particularly admired. One of the finest of these is his transcription of an engraving of a Millet painting, 'Winter at Chailly'. Millet's 'Plain of Chailly' is turned into the remembered wastes of Drenthe and Nuenen with abandoned plough and harrow, a frostbitten landscape, a distant tower enlarged to become a reminder of the Old Church Tower with extra crows.

At about this time, Jan Toorop (who was to organise the Van Gogh retrospective in 1892 for the Hague Art Circle) painted a huge fishing boat being pushed down the beach at Katwijk by 13 men and launched into a scumbled and dotted evening haze, a mishmash of advanced paint handling. Van Gogh would have developed such manic symbolism more clearly. The last room shows Symbolism beyond Van Gogh, taking over among the younger set. Besides Toorop switching styles there is Thorn Prikker, his 'Cabbage Field' glorified with steamy glazes. Marius Bauer's 'The Cathedral' Rouen, more Ensor than Monet with its teeming black chalk scribble.

James Ensor, exhibiting with Rowe'sjane Shore (1714). This fascinating rarity by Shakespeare's first editor and biographer is a shadow play to Richard III, stemming the action at that point where Gloucester needs Hastings's support for his murderous, unconstitutional assault on the throne. Rowe pushes Hastings's midnight doxy, the late King Edward IV's mistress, to the fore, and composes a stately moral tragedy in the style of Dryden or Otway. This superb production (one more week only) integrates Walkerin 'The Mad Monkey'. industry reminds one of the story of the girl who said she'd do anything to get into movies only to be told that it wasn't that easy.

Maybe it is. The week was more than redeemed by the opening ofthe London Film Festival and the re-issue of Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (Renoir, PG), which won the Best Director award at Cannes in 1957, the year of the first London Festival, under its French title, Un Condamne a mart s'est echappi, ou Le vent souffle oil il veut. It is perhaps the only truly major movie about the French experience of the Occupation to be made before the appearance in 1971 of The Sorrow and the Pity. Marcel Ophuls's controversial documentary inspired a succession of important films, the first being Lacombe, Lucien, directed by Louis Malle, who assisted Bresson on A Man Escaped. Rigorously, unflinchingly and through a non-professional cast, the movie tells the true story of Lieutenant Fontaine, a resistance leader held in a Gestapo jail in Lyon in 1943.

Knowing that at any moment he might be led away to a firing squad, he sustains himself on death row planning his escape. Bresson concentrates on Fontaine his fears, his courage, his intellectual single-minded-ness, and his spiritual growth. The other prisoners are seen largely from his point of view; his captors are kept at a distance, their faces rarely glimpsed. The film is claustrophobic, painfully intense, opening with a close-up of Fontaine in the back seat of a Gestapo car, his hand reaching for the door-lever. It is far more exciting than The Wooden Horse but the violence is off-screen, and there is none of the British escape movie's sense of adventure and camaraderie.

Seeing this film is a moral experience. Philip French finds an ingenious plot peters out into facile gothic horror. HAMLET spoke of that 'something after death, the undis-cover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns'. The ingenious plot of Joel Schumacher's Flatliners (Odeon West End, 15) hinges on five Chicago medical students taking a return ticket there through a series of operations in which they become brain dead for a few minutes and are then revived. The assorted quintet are led into the foolhardy experiment by the truculent Nelson (Kiefer Sutherland) who plays on their professional ambitions and scientific curiosity.

He makes the first trip himself and initially hides his disturbing discovery. As if the operations are not scary enough for the squeamish necrophobe, they are performed at night around Hallowe'en in a deserted baroque palace abutting Lake Michigan (actually the Chicago Institute of Science and Technology with its portentous murals of Prometheus and other appropriate ancients), giving the film the atmosphere of a gothic horror story. Drawing on his own experience on the operating table in 1962, C. P. Snow has his fictional alter ego Lew Eliot's heart stop for three-and-half minutes in Last Things, the concluding novel of the Strangers and inimitable Prowse-ian atmosphere of doom and foreboding in an antechamber marked off by great hanging gold and black carpets whose red stippled tassels match the Citizens' latest interior decoration.

The control of mood and pace is masterly, and a great crashing scenic coup heralds the public humiliation of Blalock's Shore, left out with the garbage like a dying jackal. You can see why Susannah Cibber and Mrs Sid-dons relished the role. Blalock, both noble and soignee, makes it painters of drab lives at or just below sea-level. They include Van Gogh's cousin-by-marriage Anton Mauve (who tutored him briefly), Jacob Maris and Jozef Israels in whose 'Pancake Day' the wife watches the frying pan while the rest of the family settle into humble Rembrandt poses. Such paintings were popular with self-made collectors.

They imply that work, endless work, is besides being heartwarming subject matter its own reward. The exhibition attempts to fit Van Gogh in, as a Dutchman among Dutchmen, with lesser paintings if need be (a head of a peasant woman, a stuffed bat), to stand comparisons. After the Alma-Tadema pottery and the seas so capably handled by Jacob Maris, his blurted images look defenceless. He paints the derelict church tower at Nuenen with crosses staked out all around and guardian crows. 'I wanted to express what a simple thing death and burial He was commemorating his father's death earlier in 1885.

Then there are the bird's nests he collected and painted, still clinging to broken branches. One has eggs in, adding to the incipient Symbolism. Off he goes to Paris, to the hasty embraces of Impressionism, painting a windmill on Montmartre, part ofthe Moulin de la Galette entertainment complex, with flags hoisted above the viewing stand from which the newly-arrived could take their first good look at the city. Back in the early Eighties, Van Gogh had prowled around the Hague looking for raunchy urban life with George Breitner, another young defaulter from the Hague School. Breitner persisted and, with bold brown spreads like 'Dam Square in the Evening', 1890, rivalled Sickert ofthe Old Bedford and Dieppe.

In the South, Van Gogh found little further use for raw umber and burnt sienna. He dedicated a blossom painting to Cousin Mauve (who, he learnt, had just died). Then he developed his own boldness. 'The Zouave' sits rough and ready against a brick wall and violent green glaze, unaware of the Symbolist potential of the sinuosity on his uniform jacket: in time your for details of our JifS? 8 V7 William Feaver spots early Van Goghs in Glasgow. AFTER the plodding cows of 'Landscape in Drenthe (Dusk)', by plodding Julius Van de Sande Bakhuyzen, the Whistleresque portrait by Menso Kamerlingh Onnes of his sister Jenny, and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's 'Emperor Hadrian's Visit to a Romano-British Pottery' (Liberty's more like), what a pleasure it is to recognise the first painting by you know who.

A weaver sits at his loom, clacking away like a young Silas Marner. (George Eliot was, for a while, Van Gogh's favourite writer.) In the Nuenen weaver series the window is normally open, framing the old church tower out in the fields. Not here though; but then this isn't a Van Gogh, one's told. It's a Van Rappard. Anthon Van Rappard stayed with Van Gogh in Nuenen in May 1884 and it was he who first thought of painting weavers and, as Van Gogh said, their 'tremendously imposing' looms.

Later, they fell out. because, to Van Gogh's disgust, Van Rappard decided to go off and acquire academic skills. There are few other risks of misattribution in The Age of Van Gogh: Dutch Painting 1880-1895 at the Burrell Collection, Glasgow (to 10 Feb). The Van Goghs are in the minority: only 17 paintings, amounting to 16 per cent ofthe whole (the sponsors, Whyte Mackay Distillers may reckon it 16 per cent proof). The exhibition covers the period between Van Gogh's brief experience of the Brussels Art Academy and the onset of the Van Gogh cult following his memorial retrospectives in the Hague and Amsterdam.

It begins with a round-up of the sort of artists Van Gogh originally intended to devote a professional life to, on his art-dealer Uncle Vincent's recommendation, at Goupil Co (branches in the Hague, Brussels, London and Paris). These are mainly the Hague School, the grey Sincerity School, Brothers sequence. 'I bring you back no news 'from the other Lewis comments with characteristic prosaicness. Not so with these young medicos. They all encounter suppressed guilty memories of school-ground bullying, a father's suicide, women exploited and bring back material ghosts to haunt them.

Atonement is called for and the movie peters out as a disturbing horror story and lurches into sentimental religiosity of a comforting kind, rather like the movie, Ghost. Herbert Ross's My Blue Heaven (Warner, PG) is another comic attempt at domesticating the Mafia, scripted by Nora Ephron, screenwriter last year on the not dissimilar Cookie as well as the superior When Harry met Sally. An almost unrecognisable Steve Martin sports a fashionable scrubbing-brush haircut as Vin-nie Antonelli, a New York mobster-turned-informer being hidden away under the Federal Witness Protection Programme in southern California. Vinnie, however, is an incorrigible crook and an irresistible charmer, causing trouble for his wimpish FBI minder (Rick Moranis) and becoming a thorn in the humourless flanks of his new community's dedicated district attorney Qoan Cusack). There are passable moments in the beginning when an ungrateful Vinnie pours scorn on the tedium of suburbia.

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