The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 80

The Observer Review 8 March 1998 TTh Block ml Cel. Jrosoi mainly due to Viswanathan Anand's adoption of it in three games. The first of these against Alexei Shirov in round one went swimmingly, after Shirov played somewhat anaemi-cally in Nigel Short's favourite line of the advance starting 1 e4 c6 2 d4 d5 3 eo Bfo 4 Nf3e6 5 Be2. But the next two rather concerned me. In rounds three and six Anand faced Kasparov and then Topalov.

Both games started 1 e4 c6 2 d4 d5 3 Nd2 dxe4 4 Nxe4 Nd7 5 Ng5 Ngf6 6 Bd3 e6 7 Nlf3 Bd6 8 Qe2 h6 9 Ne4 Nxe4 10 Qxe4 Qc7 11 Qg4. Against Kasparov he tried a novelty inviting complications after 12 Bxh6 Nf6 13 Qg5. But Kasparov found the very clever 12 Nf5 13 Qf3 e5 14 dxe5 Bxe5 15 Nc4 Be6 16 Bd2 0-0-0 17 0-0-0 when, despite the apparent sterility of the position. White stands better due to the rather unfortunate Black bishop on eo. Kasparov converted Ms advantage in 18 more moves.

Against Topalov he retreated to which is something of my baby in one reasonable database about a quarter of the two dozen games are mine. After 12 6-0 c5 13 Rel b6 14 c3 Bb7 Topalov introduced an interesting new idea with 15 Re8 16 h5 and Anand ended up having to undertake some serious grovelling before he split the point in 40 moves. Yes, it's extremely gratifying when one's ideas find a showcase like Linares: and I'm more than happy to add Viswanathan Anand to the troops on my side of the barricade. But I do fear somewhat for- the longevity of the line when Messrs Kasparov and Topalov get stuck into it However my main game this week is the fourth Caro: Alexei Shirov Yassily Ivanchuk, Linares 1998 Round 9 1 e4 c6 2 d4 d5 3 Nd2 dxe4 4 Nxe4Nd7 5Ng5NdfK? Avoiding the main lines. This is usual against 5 Bd3 but here White can move the bishop to a different square.

6 Bc4 e6 7 Qe2 Bd6 8 Bd2 Qc7 9 0-0-0 b6 10 Nlf3 h6 11 Quite ambitious. 11 Ne4 Nxe4 12 Qxe4 Nf6 1 3 Qe2 would transpose into a known 'theoretical position except that the bishop is on c4 rather than d3. 12 Neo c5! 13 Bb5 Kf8A slight concession. But Black gets immediate compensation in pressure on the eo knight 14 Nc4 Sacrificing a pawn for the two bishops and a (temporary) initiative. 15 Nxd6 Qxd6 16 Bf4 Qd5 17 Be5 If Qxd4 18Rdl Qxdl- 19 Qxdl Bb7 the queen is vaguely threatening but I imagine that Black is fine.

18 c4 Qco 19 QRV. Qxe5! 20 Qxa8 Qc7 Vassily Ivanchuk (Black) Richard Leaf as Jack Bristol in the premiere of Tennessee Williams's Not About Nightingales at the Cottesloe. Photograph by Neil Libbert THEATRE By Susannah Clapp early play by Tennessee Williams has 111 been given its first-(J ever performance at the cottesloe Theatre. Written in 1938, for a seminar at the University of Iowa, Not about Nightingales is based on an incident which took place that year in a Philadelphia prison. A group of inmates who went on hunger strike to protest against their conditions in particular, against the monotony of their diet were locked up in an isolation unit furnished with a massive bank of radiators.

The heat was turned up, the windows closed and the water shut off. When the building was reopened after some 15 hours, four of the men were found to have baked to death, their hearts shrivelled to half their normal size. Williams puts on stage the revolt, the punishment and the deaths, and adds a feeble subplot in which the secretary of the brutal prison governor falls for a hyper-literate prisoner to whom, in a particularly ridiculous scene, she reads a Keats sonnet. The result is a sprawling, often slow-moving piece, with a strong, horrific central sequence, some plodding explications and purple passages. Last week there was torture on the stage, courtesy of Irvine Welsh; this week, more torture.

Not about Nightingales has the considerable documentary interest of its real-life story. It also has the biographical interest of belonging to a period before Williams's writing was acclaimed, when he was producing socially-committed plays: earlier works had included a melodrama about coal miners and an attack on war profiteering. But Not about Nightingales doesn't cohere. It doesn't, as it attempts to do, bring together in an iHuminat-ing way images of personal and institutional captivity. It fails to develop its ideas about society7 and its dictators: the leader of the hunger strike, who promises his followers a heaven and takes them to hell, proudly compares himself to Mussolini and to that German 'monkey with the trick moustache'.

It gives the impression of being a first draft. Nevertheless, it allows James Black to fire up convincingly as the tyrant of the prisoners, and Corin Redgrave to put in a well-judged performance as the bullying governor, so confident of his power that he is relaxed and impassive almost to the end. The to break it up with 32 Bxg6 Kxg633f4! when eg 34 Rde2 f5 35 Nf3 is a real mess. Instead Ivanchuk forces the queen to a bad square, 32 Qd3 Not 32 While if 32 Qb4 Black can just take the pawn with Nxf3 33 Nxf3Bxf3. The black centre remains secure since the white queen now interferes with the bishop.

33 Qd6 34 Rc2 e4! 35 Qc4 If 35fxe4 Ne5 followed by regains the exchange with a won game. 36 Qc7 Qb4 37 Rdl Bd5! 38 Bxd5 Rxd5 39 fxe4 Nxe4 40 a3 Qb5 Reaching the time control Black's massive centralisation combined with the monstrous dpawn and play against the white king now quickly proved decisive. 41 Ka2 was one threat 42 Reel d2 43 Rc2 Nd3 44 Ne2Nf3 or 44 Rdxd2 Nb4 45 axb4 Rxd2 46 Rxd2 Qa4 47Kbl7Nxd2 48 Kcl Qxb4 49 Qe5 Kg6 wins easily. 44 Rcxd2 Rc5 45 Qd8 Qc4 46 b3 Nc3 47 Kal Ra5! And Shirov resigned. A beautifully artistic finish.

Richard Ziman as Schultz (left) and play also allows Trevor Nunn as director to put to telling use his gifts for choreography and the staging of spectacle. The most expressive sequences in the play are those in which the prisoners act as a body, stifled but stubbornly resistant: whistling and banging in unison in their cells, struggling against steam in the isolation unit, shuffling mutely across the stage, with their hands on eachother's shoulders. These sequences are greatly-helped by Richard Hoover's harsh, looming, monochrome design, which sets the two worlds of the prison that of the governor and that of the inmates at opposite ends of the stage: the action bounces between them. In the governor's corner, a huge wall of gleaming metal lockers frames a long, light window which looks out on, but doesn't show, the world outside. In the prisoners' corner is a jungle of grids and mesh and sliding-doors in front of which appears the Hades of the isolation unit, with its huge horizontal pipes.

Gaiherine HcCormack in Loaded VIDEOS By Philip French I Loaded (19M. 11 fis DdSei ikalrfial) Directed by Anna Campion, sister of the better known Jane, this mterestmgpsycho-logical thriller centres on a group of bright, middle-class London school-leavers' making a gothic horror movieiat a sinister country house they've been lent for the summer. The trouble comes froml within and an experiment with LSD has tragic consequences. Thandie Newton and Oliver Milburn lead the band of surly Thatchers children, Fmian'sainbow (1951 U. te a-xtes tea In his final movie musical, Fred Astaire charms as an Irishman coming to America with daughter Petula Clark to plant a pot of gold near Fort Knox.

The 1947 Broadway hit (which flopped in the West End) is an uneasy blend of Irish blarney, American -whimsy and social satire' (directed against Southern racists), but it's handled with freshness and vigour by Francis Coppola in his first job for a Hollywood major. Astaire, Clark and Tommy! Steele (playing a leprechaun) make the most of a lively E.Y. Harburg-Burton Lane score that includes "That Old Devil Moon' and "How Are Tiings in Glocca 1b Square Girele (1335. 15BtE Diplm. Unusual, rather bold Bollywood melodrama, a Hindi road movie about a village girl taken under the wing of a kindly transvestite entertainer after being abducted on the eve of her wedding and raped by- teenage thugs.

Travelling disguised as a boy. she gains new understanding of sex. gender, masculinity and fennhinity from her stoic companion. A curious mixture of naivety and sophistication, it is very well performed by NirmalPandrey and Sonah Kulkarnlj filling Zoe 13. 4 from.

Ratal) Directed by Quentin Taran-tino's friend and collaborator Roger A vary (they shared an Oscar for the screenplay of Pulp Fiction) this stylised heist thriller stars American independent regular Eric Stoltz -as an ace safecracker joining a band of French psychos to rob a Parisian bank on Bastille Day. Bloody, ultra-violent, it flaunts its amoral-iry-like a banner. Julie Delphy is an unlikely graduate student moonlightihg as a whore and a bank clerk. GHESS ByJonSpedman Super-Grandmaster tournament in Linares in the South of Spain is draw ing to a close with the penultimate round today and conclusion tomorrow. With seven of the nine top rated players in the world (in order) Kasparov, Ramnik, Anand, Ivanchuk, Topalov, Shirov and SvicSer, millionaire organiser Luis Rentero Suarez has assembled a quite magnificent cast.

Even the extras are special, with no less a player than Nigel Short acting as a second for his friend Peter Svidler. 1 A full report of the final outcome next week. But this time I'll concentrate on one of several interesting opening battles which have been fought during the tournament. After nine rounds no fewer than four of the 27 games had been in my favourite Caro Kann Defence. This was surprise out of stock, sometimes corny, ingredients and situations.

There are a number of smoking guns in this play, some predictable reversals, and a strong flavour of old-fashioned spinster-slaying in the mam thrust of the plot. The most obvious smoking gun is Barbara: single, middle-aged, bound up in her office life a pre-Bridget Jones figure for whom repression rather than confession is a natural condition. She is a Gorgon of the kind. who used to be asked in movies to let down her hair and take off her spectacles. It's difficult to imagine her in any modern film, or indeed anywhere off a stage, but Ayck-bourn gives her an engaging idiosyncratic crossness vegetarianism 'just sort of generally irritates her' and Jane Asher immaculately unveils her varied demeanours: she is a martinet under her shower-cap, an ice maiden in her office suit, and finally a roaring, whooping bedfellow.

The conclusion of The Things We Do for Love may seem to suggest that most women would prefer to have a man and be duffed up than to be single and unbruised: that there is something finicky or spinsterly in minding about the odd black eye. It is hot a conclusion which sits easily with the real merriment of much of the play. But then much of that merriment has to do not with human responses, but with comic contrivance. This play is a near-perfect piece of stage machinery. It is not just the characters' speeches that are revealing.

The set split into three layers, on each of which a different kind of love is enacted -also makes a point. As do the props. When, towards the end of the play, a scrapbdok is hurled against a set of shelves, a point is made about the collision of two worlds, and their destruction, without a word being spoken. The Things We Do for Love carried much more of a sexual charge than Girls' Night Out, which has arrived at the Victoria Palace after touring Eng- landfor more than a year. The flimsy excuse for a play is a hen party, made up of three gormless woman and one shrewd one, who attend a show of male strippers at a joint called The Feast of Flesh and, in doing so, manage to solve a variety of sexual problems and mysteries.

It is the strippers that form the not very hard core of the piece. Four comely young men do bumping and grinding and smirking dressed as highwaymen (lots of poking up of blunderbusses under cloaks) and as monks (tasselled girdles are wiggled at navel height and big candles loom large. When they get down to jock-straps (which is where they stop), they rub water over their chests and play with foam and bananas. The piece has none of the edge or. charm of The Full Monty, with which it invites comparison; the double voyeurism, of watching people watching strippers, which could have provided an extra twist to the occasion, is neglected.

It's a bad night out. itifc? IBS i flU its underground grills through which a red light glows, and its great spouts of steam. There is no place of comfort anywhere. The Things We Do for Love includes the following deeds: the betrayal of a best friend, the bestowal of a black eye, the shredding of an unfaithful lover's socks and ties, the pressing of a bulky male body into a Nicole Farhi gown and the complete reneging on the stated principles of a lifetime. Alan Ayckbourn's play his fifty -second is a farce.

It was first performed last spring at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where Ayck-bourn is the artistic director, and where he directed this piece, as he does now. At the Gielgud Theatre, it seems set for a long run. Ayckbourn's achievement in The Things We Do for Love is not so much that he manages to make humour from a series of ugly, dire and painful events the darkest episodes are likely to be the funniest in any farce. His real skill can be measured by the extent to which he squeezes DOOo fJXSU 0 CCDS Alexei Shirov (White to play) While the position is still far from clear, Black already has good practical chances, with a strong centre pawn for the exchange together with some pressure along the 21 Qc6 Qb8 22 Qf3 Bb7 23 Qa3 If 23 Bc6 Bxc6 24 Qxc6 Black can play Ke 71 to be followed by 24 f3 g5! Restricting the white knight, making room for his own king; and by controlling f4, strongly discouraging the undermining f4 after his next move- 25 Ba4 e526 Rhel Kg7 27 Bc2 Nh4 allows the counter-sacrifice 28Rxe3! dxe3 29 Qxe3 which is quite pleasant for White 28Rd2Rc8 29Kbl A miserable decision. But if 29 Qe7 Rc5! (threatening followed by Ng8 trapping 30 b4 Ng8 31 Qd 7 Bc6! 32 Qg4 Rxc4 Black has a huge advantage.

30 Ngl Rc5 31 g3 WTiite can try -jJT REDUCED PRICE PREVIEWS TV FROM 18 MARCH REDUCED PRICE PREVIEWS FROM 18 MARCH.