The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 56

1 yy i SUNDAY 13 OCTOBER 56 The roar of the crowd her pussycat as she sings; June Avril waving a leg and the cello neck poking back; Louise Weber "La whipping up her skirts at the Moulin Rouge, offset by her lanky partner, the grim Boneless' Valen-tin, and a ring ot appreciative silhouettes. Costumes and stances were established trademarks for such figures. Aristide Bruant's big red scarf proclaimed him king of the streetwise long before it appeared on the posters. The black gloves used by Yvette Guilbert to such erotic effect are trailed on the cover of the album devoted to her, waiting for her to insinuate herself into them. Lautrec was primarily an illustrator, adapting to the style of his subject.

The portrait of his mentor, the deaf and dumb painter Rene Princeteau, done when Lautrec was 17, is a tribute in kind to Princeteau's flamboyance. His 'Monsieur Boileau' is the soul of conviviality, sitting back in a cafe, a joke on his lips and his clothing so racily stippled it serves as a running commentary on his person. 'La Goulue' making her entrance at the Moulin Rouge, showing off her wishbone cleavage, staring down anyone who dares suggest she's past it, is illustrative of the maxim that pride comes close to pathos. Lautrec put giveaway signs of truculence or vanity in the set of the shoulders, the placing of the feet. Animals and vegetables fed him lines: he caricatures himself as Ratty but endearingly so and Felix Feneon as a doleful parsnip.

Working in illustration, full-page like Daumier for Le Rire, elsewhere more in vignette, Lautrec was a reporter from the nightlife front. He it was who witnessed the Moulin Rouge gala donkey race, the girls squealing at the invasion of the dance floor. He covered Decadence, not least because there was a demand for illustrations of it. His design for the sheet music of the notorious Yvette William Feaver gives Paris' star turn a standing ovation. TVi'l-NTV-Si-YKN years nld hut looking good 50, the devastating Mile Guilbert slithers on stage to take a curtain call.

Lvehrows arched, lips composed into a scarlet wriggle of rueful pride, she measures the applause. Mayhe an encore'' Another tew verses of 'Linger, Longer, Loo'? This reworking by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec of a photographic enlargement of his final 'lithograph lor the album, Yiatc Guilbert, is itself a sort ot umpteenth curtain call. The sketchv green curtain and dress complement the orange hair, pinked cheeks and long, black gloves. Waspish Yvette Guilbert is the star of prints, drawings, a painting and even a ceramic tile in Toulouse-Lautrec at the Havward (to 19 January). But she' fails to show up on a single published poster.

Those designed by Steinlen and Bac for Yvette Guilbert's appearances at Les Ambassa-deurs represented her as tall and bland; no hint of the sting in the act, the risque ditties. Lautrec, on the other hand, proposed doing her as seen by an avid fan. She rejected as a wicked exaggeration ('So his brilliant image of the snapdragon chanteuse harking to her echo, the gloved hands outspread like black-stockinged fiat feet. 'Really you are the genius of she said to him, then wished she hadn't. Peering over the footlights, Lautrec saw all acting, all self-advertisement, as live caricature.

His posters were consommes of seasoned performances. He went not for the person but the persona. The acts he conjured with were already tarted up and dramatically lit. Little May Belfort, professionally girlish, dandling Richard Pasco as a star QC in Hare's judicial system that is an 'inefficient punitive apparatus that will grind down a human spirit by Richard Mildenhall. The fine art of getting through Biros (iuilhert number.

'Knackered Cupid', features the lesbians referred to in the song. He contributed the same couple to illiniri. Readers would have been fascinated. Advanced views, no doubt, hut Lautrec is really more the voyeur sharing his experiences. His brothel scenes were part of the thriving and not necessarily prurient or moralistic Love For Sale genre of the period.

The kept women of the lilies par T-l. album of 18 laze hetween the sheets and prepare to exercise their charms. Their less fortunate colleagues wait for customers on plush red divans in the wonderfully prosaic 'Au Salon de la Rue des Moulins', each a type rather than a character, stolid or nervous. Off duty, they lie in bed together, relaxing. Are they sympathised with? Does it matter? Lautrec hasn't Degas's disdain.

He is more the raffish toff observing les girls, invariably noting how much older they look than they like to think. The impact of Lautrec depends on the raciness of wispy cross-hatching on cardboard grounds, on large heads and close-ups suitable for halftone reproduction. Heads fit to be read on posters at 50 paces. The jowls of the sugar daddy nuzzled by his kiss-curled companion shudder as he gets what she is being paid for. Constant sizzling comple-mentaries sustain Lautrec's performances: green, orange and lipstick.

In the splendid 'Au Moulin Rouge' (from the Art Institute of Chicago), the clientele are more sour, more edgy than any in the equivalent paintings by Degas (or Renoir); for here people swarm like fat bugs around 'each light source. A stupid face is spotlit white and green. Lautrec, with his tall cousin Tapie, flits by. Lautrec is revealed, in the thoroughly demythologising catalogue, as more the professional than legend would have it. And the exhibition shows him up rather as a sweeper-up after Degas and Manet, a go-between, better connected than Van Gogh or Gauguin, more accustomed to boulevardier pleasures.

The work fizzled as drink, syphilis and, it appears, the desire to be a less graphic painter, overcame him. He ventured into the operatic, with Beardsley hags and ever-more-, treacherous honeysuckle lips for Messalina. Finally, he painted his minder, Paul Viaud, as 'Amiral Viaud', a red-coated eighteenth-century sea dog snarling at a retreating man o' war, an inn-sign image straight out of Robert Louis Stevenson's Vile au Tresor and a reversion to his great shapes and former amplitude: the two posters of Aristide Bruant in red scarf and floppy black hat, commanding attention at Les Ambassadeurs. Lautrec's keen appreciation of women survives best. Yvette Guilbert sidling out to a blaze of appreciation; Mademoiselle Cocyte, the large prima donna in a Bordeaux production of Offenbach's La Belle Helene, raising her arms in preposterous ecstasy.

One small pencil sketch, catalogued by someone as 'Woman with Unkempt Hair', shows him gentle for once rather than striking, drawing not the brothel image but the actual person, sleepy-eyed, frowsty. bobbies read the Guardian and eat salads. The visit of the Shochiku Company of Tokyo to the RNT's other main auditorium, the Lyttelton, in Grand Kabuki (one more week) is a genuine highlight of the Japan Festival. Three items are enacted on the hollow wooden stage where a band of singers shamizen (three-string mandolin) strum-mers and flautists sits sculpturally still like a Buddhist musical Politburo. Offstage clappers and wooden blocks heighten a mood already teeth to indicate vulnerability, but improves in saintliness as the play disappears under him.

The crisis in the friendship is never properly dramatised, and Jeremy Sams's new translation is gratuitously scatalogical. Good set, though, of pastel-coloured medieval sliding panels by Michael Yeargan, resident designer at the Yale Repertory. The Glory of the Garden by Stephen Mallatratt at the Duke of York's is a pathetic squib of a satire on the Arts Council with Jill Gascoine as an underwritten masseuse and Russell Dixon as an overplayed entrepreneur who has been stashing away public funds while presenting bingo in a fictional (sounds like) West Yorkshire Alhambra, buttressed by the fake reviews of Janine Duvit-ski's stage-struck hanger-on. The plot incompetently expires in a second-act travesty of The Government Inspector. A Swell Party at the Vaudeville is a songbook compilation of Cole Porter very like the one at the Mermaid years ago with the additional ruse of 'outing the composerlyricist.

Porter lookalike Nickolas Grace plays Cole as a bug-eyed, fleet-footed fawn whose musical genius was only matched by his homosexual promiscuity. A Wednesday matinee audience of old dears, for whom the term 'theatre outing' means primarily a bus pass and a warm gin and tonic, went very quiet for a few minutes before deciding, collectively, to take all this on the chin. David Gilmore's production, though plagued with a tacky sound system, is full of great songs backed up by a vibrant piano duet of Martin Smith and Gary Hind. Grace is kept under good pressure by the unbeatable Angela Richards, the evergreen David Kernan and a feisty newcomer, Anne Wood. order to release the rain dragon at a time of drought.

The princess is Bando Tamasaburo the Fifth, whose complete mastery is displayed in the evening's third piece. A dying maiden inhabits the form of a heron in a snowstorm, an image Tamasaburo creates in stillness, the slightest inclination of the head, the merest lifting of an ankle. The climax is one of overpowering beauty and sadness. There is something markedly oriental, too, about Steven Ber-koffs vetch (as in 'kvetching', complaining, worrying) at the Garrick. But the elegiac is only a screen for the vicious.

This is an exhilarating blast of foul-mouthed Yiddisher cockney, which uses interior monologue, soliloquy and dialogue to weave a brutal tapestry of sexual fear and domestic aggression. Berkoff plays Frank, an East End cloth salesman who brings a divorced friend (Henry Goodman) home for a supper of stinking cabbage and burnt latkes. Frank's one-breasted wife (Anita Dobson) is sexually dissatisfied and decamps to Frank's manufacturing contact (Stanley Lebor). A kiss is just a kiss, but to Frank it's a threat: 'The mouth keeps coming at me, followed by the The second act is too long, but Ber-koffs production is the fiercest and, alongside the kabuki, the most technically enthralling in London. Three other West End offerings seem stilted and old-fashioned by comparison.

Becket at the Haymarket is a spirited attempt by Elijah Moshinsky to enliven Anouilh's boring chronicle about Henry II and his turbulent priest. Robert Lindsay, after his television triumph in GBH, reminds us what a first-rate stage actor he is. Derek Jacobi starts limply as Becket, overdoing the hissing intake of breath through his The texture is strong, the construction faultless. Hare skilfully controls the release of the information we need, and does so in speeches of some pith and moment. In addition to the two pivotal relationships, which are explored in scenes of great delicacy and finesse, there are critical and entertaining examinations of the judiciary, the police and the prisons.

Michael Bryant's canny old judge is finally too smooth for the Home Secretary, Kevin (Peter Wight), who explodes with 'We've nowhere to put the bloody prisoners you keep sending while Richard Pasco's serpentine star QC sidles off to the canapes. Paul Moriarty's front-desk sergeant, inundated with minor criminals and form-filling duties, defines policing as 'the fine art of getting through Biros'. And Joseph O'Conor's kindly old prison officer declares that the only countries with decent prisons are the ones where the government itself has just been let out. After an appeal court hearing, the play ends with new resolutions and fresh starts. Hare's point is that Gerard's crime is not of sufficient consequence to justify the complex, inefficient punitive apparatus that will grind down a human spirit and possibly warp it out of true.

Irina suggests that the rituals of law may anaesthetise its practitioners against seeing the world another way round. Gerard deduces that he may as well assume the role he has been assigned and takes up a book of Irish history. Irina addresses the John Wilkes Society as the first step in a campaign to reform the law. And Sandra, PC Bingham, who is poised above south London in a classic Hare scene at the end with Irina, reports to the chief superintendant. There is no alternative police force where Toulouse-Lautrec's Salon des Cents lithograph poster (1896).

for a tantrum mm Michael Coveney is witness to a critical miscarriage of justice. WATCHING David Hare's blazingly topical and craftily brilliant new play Murmuring Judges on the Olivier stage of the Royal National Theatre is like watching a modern city state conduct its own inquiry. Richard Eyre's rich production has panoramic scope and sharp detail: an Irish family man, Gerard McKinnon (Robert Patterson), makes one mistake and is sent to Wandsworth prison for five years; a black lawyer, Irina Piatt (Alphonsia Emmanuel), takes up his brief and becomes more sympathetic than she should; a south London detective (the stand-up comic Keith Allen, inspirational casting) is found by his girlfriend Sandra (Lesley Sharp), a bright new recruit from Hen-don, to have brought an unsafe prosecution in his pre-emptive strike against armed criminals. HareEyre attack their subject from above and behind, invoking the full panoply of the buzzing High Court, busy legal chambers on the Embankment, an overcrowded prison, the hubbub of a police station up to its neck in paperwork, and the Crush Bar at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. These packed locations are unravelled with amazing grace in Bob Crowley's design of photographic blow-ups magically enmeshed with practical scenery, and enhanced by the eloquent lighting of Mark Henderson.

The dissolve principle also prompts pleasingly sensual coalition, as in the ironically magnificent finale to the first act, where all points of view are orchestrated into the overture of The Magic Flute. Game Jann Parry explores Montreal's new wave celebration. MONTREAL'S International Festival of New Dance (which ended last Sunday) is the world's largest and most enthusiastic celebration of experimental choreography. This year, some 30 companies and soloists from Belgium, France, Japan, Spain, the United States and Canada showed their work over 12 days. Conspicuously absent was any work from Britain.

This was partly because the festival's focus was on the explosion of creativity from Belgian (especially Flemish) choreographers; but it is also because our young dance-makers are not yet established on the world circuit of dance festivals. This is surprising because new British dance has developed enormously during the 13 years of our own Dance Umbrella festivals (this year's started in London last week). The director, Val Bourne, like her Montreal counterpart Chantal Pontbriand, has stimulated the growth of emerging choreographers by giving them a platform alongside work from abroad. Whether foreign influences are absorbed or rejected, at least home-grown choreographers and their audiences have been made aware of international trends and standards of presentation. The problem in Britain, however, is that foreign producers are not similarly aware of what we have to offer in return.

We are not at the crossroads of Europe, like Belgium, and because Dance Umbrella is diffused over six weeks, it is hard for a visitor to get a clear picture of the range of work going on. TRINITY HOSPICE Mastery: Tamasaburo the Fifth. rarefied by the superlative control and elegance of the performers. These are led by two remarkable kabuki 'onnagatas', men playing women in white face, traditional wigs and kimonos with utter femininity and no trace of pantomime camp. Nak-amura Kankuro the Fifth (kabuki stars inherit their status) dances at a festival and is transformed by two butterflies impersonated by Kankuro's little sons into a raging lion in a long white mane of Tibetan yak hair.

Kankuro also plays a holy man seduced by a princess in reassert themselves as dancers in Achtertand, De Keersmaek-er's last work, which comes to London next April. Jean-Claude Galotta's Les Mysteres du Subal, which divided London audiences at last year's Dance Umbrella, entranced Montreal with its warmth and playfulness. Galotta's tribe of performers (based in Grenoble) span a variety of ages, sizes and skills but share an uninhibited relish in acting out their fantasies. Indulgent though he is, Galotta has a surer sense of theatre than Daniel Leveille, who tried to convey the humour, longing and despair of a 1960s Canadian generation in L'Exil on la Mort. Like other 'new wave' Canadian choreographers in the festival, Leveille has not yet acquired the maturity of European work.

Louise Bedard and Sylvain Emard also let promising ideas disperse in shapeless repetition. Far more intriguing were excerpts from pieces by two longer-established Montreal choreographers, Marie Chouinard and Ginette Laurier, given informally in dance studios. Even in these far from ideal settings, their work had an unmistakeable stamp of conviction. Three solos stick in the memory because of the integrity of their performers. Lina Malen-fant danced an arresting piece made for her by Lynda Gau-dreau; Paul-Andre Fortier bared his body and soul in a confined space; and Angels Margarit (from Barcelona) summed up a world of desolation in a hotel bedroom.

Only a handful of spectators could watch her at any one time, compared enthusiastic crowds for the large-scale performances. It is salutary to be reminded that New Dance can be mainstream entertainment as well as a fringe activity for aficionados only. "A SNAPPY, STYLISH, ENJOYABLE COMEDY BALL "ROflN BODY TO KILL FOR! ACTION, EXCITEMENT AftlH CTDinCMT POI Montreal's dance market, by contrast, is a frenzy of activity, with numerous performances every day in fringe venues as well as in the official programme. The exposure helps promote French-Canadian dance, which would otherwise be similarly isolated. Montreal's dance-makers are finding their own voice, as distinctive as the Que-becois accent.

They have followed a similar route to that taken by Belgian choreographers such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Michele Anne De Mey and Wim Vandekeybus, who have moved from an austere formalism to high velocity, emotionally charged dance theatre that attacks the senses as a way of disturbing the mind. A common theme that emerged from the festival was of uncontrollable emotions let loose through childlike behaviour: tantrums, giggling fits, games and rituals. In De Mey's Sinfonia Eroica, for example, the stage becomes a playground for strenuous bouts of exuberance and aggression, matched by music from Beethoven, Mozart and Jimi Hendrix. De Mey used to dance for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, whose theatrical universe is much darker. In Stella, five young women parade their insecurities and phobias about femininity, slamming doors, flinging shoes, trying on costumes and characters, spitting, sobbing and laughing their way through texts from Goethe's Stella, Tennessee Williams's Streetcar anil Kurosawa's Rashomon.

Stella polarises audiences between those deeply moved by it (mostly men) and those infuriated by its calculated hysteria (mbinly women). Performers with strong identities manipulate us into accepting them as victims, lacking any command over their sexuality or their destinies. I am told that they "A SLICK ADULT THRILLER. EMINENTLY SURPRISING RELENTLESSLY PACEY THRILLER i TIME OUT AUDI) THE FACB rrr "mi nrivinwiiir AND VERY FRIDAY 1st NOVEMBER 1991 Grosvenor House, Park Lane, London your support on the night will help others in the days to come. For tickets, information or donations please telephone: 071-622 9481 or write to Trinity Hospice, 30, Clapham Common North Side, London SW4 ORN.

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