The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 79

s9 SUNDAY 5 MARCH 1995 lj tap to wj Felicity Kendal thinks of England in Indian Ink. Photograph by Neil Libbert Arcadia are missing, and Peter Wood's production, with trundling designs by Car Toms, looks bitty and old-fashioned. Even more so next to Phyllis Nagy's riveting and equally complex The Strip, which the director designer team of Steven Pimlott and Tobias Hoheisel place on a split-level limbo incorporating a huge yellow sphinx and a neon-ribbed pyramid. This is the Luxor Hotel. Las Vegas, where the play finally transfigures its disparate, but ingeniously related, components, in a solar eclipse.

Nagy is a brilliant new London-based American writer, and her opening line is already a classic: 'Female impersonation is a rather curious career choice for a woman, Miss Ava Coo (Deirdre Harrison), a big-busted, butch amalgam of Madonna and Judy Garland, wants fame and a break from her mother (Amanda Boxer), who cleans out toilets in Vegas and communicates by dictaphone. Coo, equally adored by a repo man and a lesbian journalist, heads out for the gambling strip from Long Island. Meanwhile, in Earl's Court, London, a Ku Klux Klan couple (Nicholas Farrell and Cheryl Campbell) become separately embroiled with a gay fitness freak (Patrick O'Kane) and his dissatisfed pawnbroker friend (John Padden). The dramatic brew is one of fantasy, mystery and synch ronicity, as if Snoo Wilson had bonded with Ken Campbell then smartened himself up some. The controlling, sleazy figure of Otto Mink (Nicholas le Prevost) has a finger in all plots as a showbiz entrepreneur and 'political media After the sleek-splendours of The Butterfly Kiss (directed by Pimlott at the Almeida last year) and the current, touring Disappeared, perhaps Nagy manipulates her own plot too callously.

But she's plugged into here and now, and she writes like a dream. Joe Orton's final play, What the Butler Saw (1969), an outspoken farcical masterpiece set in a psychiatric doctor's study, now delights us in its assault on political correctness. Jokes about every kind of sexual practice, child abuse, mental health patients and white golliwogs arc expertly propounded, at top speed, in Phyllida Lloyd's superb RNT revival, playing in repertoire before touring. John Alderton, Nicola Pagctt, and Richard Wilson (over-emphatic to start with, excellent as he becomes more manic and Christopher Lcerlikc), Debra Gillctt and notable new name (to me) David Pennant are eveiy bit as good as their predecessors in Lindsay Anderson's 1975 rescue job after the disastrous premiere. Hamlet Hackney Empire.

London E8 (01 71-312 1995); Indian Ink Atclwych, London WC2 (0171-410 6003); The Strip Royal Court, London SW1 (0171-730 1745); What the Butler Saw Fn. Sat Lyttolton, Royal National Theatre, London SE1 (0171-928 2252) Hollywood's hero in Hackney? Michael Coveney says the hype is justified as Ralph Fiennes strikes the right romantic chord hit. Fine music, too, by Jonathan Dove. The show has glamour, simplicity and real style. The same cannot be said, alas, of Indian Ink, Tom Stoppard's elaboration of his wonderful, evanescent BBC radio play In the Nattue State (igai).

Like another less-good Stoppard, Night mid Day (1978), this play deals with 'abroad' and presents a heroine in the buff and a great gnarled tree. Felicity Kendal nude on radio was funny. Felicity Kendal nude On stage is merely decorous. She plays Flora Crewe (1895-1930), a fictional erotic poet partly inspired by the travelling writer Emily Eden (1797-1869), who is following the trail of Sir Joseph Chamberlain tO Jummapur on a literary lecture tour. She is also dying of pulmonary congestion.

Simultaneously, 50 years later, Flora's sister (matronly Margaret Tyzack) is sifting through her letters with an importunate American biographer (Colin Stinton) and discussing the conflicting evidence of two portraits with the painter's son (Paul Bhattacharjee). While Flora poses for her painter -the evening sparks to life whenever Art Malik as the artist moves towards her issues of the British abroad ('I wouldn't trust some of them to run the Hackney says Flora, throwing critics a link line rather than a good joke), Indian supremacy and sycophancy, the language of interpretation and idiom, arc batted around in parallel time-schemes. But the spinal coherence and narrative thrust of bite and superb phrasing. To be or not to is given at a seductive, controlled gallop and signals an interior jburney from 'madness' to madness. Crawling between heaven and earth, this boy needs help.

His action is suited, literally, to the word, but not to real deeds. He might kill Claudius, en route to the closet, but only because he has borrowed a player's cloak and half-mask, His passion is sublimated in torrential advocacies: peace for his father's perturbed spirit; celibacy for girlfriend and mother; tips to the players as he moves the chairs into position; survival for the touching Horatio of Paterspn Joseph. The surrounding fall-out is well delineated. Tara Fitzgerald's sturdily affecting Ophelia loses her mind and her hair, which she cuts off in strands and calls wild flowers. Francesca Annis's sexy, full-blown Gertrude has no inkling of Claudius's, crime and is unhinged by the news.

Terence Rigby plays a notable treble of Ghost (seen, thrillingly, on a rising platform), Player King (With' cigar and trilby) and sole Gravedigger. James Laurensen is a brisk Claudius obviously the right man tor the job. Damian Lewis (a Regent's Park Hamlet) is nearly, though not yet, a fiery Laertes, and Peter Pyre (a' Greenwich. I ianilet) a busy, donnish and slightly dim Polonium, with the best long pause in tile Roynal'do scene ('What was I about to since Michael Bryant the gag in the Day-Lewis RNT version. A hit, a very palpable clashes, not dollops.

I have much enjoyed other new Hamlets of Mark Rylance (pyjama-clad neurosis), Kenneth Branagh (noble agitation) and Alan Gumming (speed, wit and Lycra bicycle shorts). But Fiennes succeeds on the patch left disappointingly vacant, by Daniel Day-Lewis and Alan Rickman: that of the well-bred, well-educated and confused aristocrat. Such a Hamlet, twenty years ago, was a public school anachronism; ten years ago, a spoilt yuppie. Today, he strikes a fresh Romantic chord. The time is right for Pienncs, who glints to such overwhelmingly sinister effect in Schintllcr's List and shines more delicately, and ambiguously, as the upper class cheat in the On film, Pienncs' lower jaw is fragile to no purpose.

In the theatre, it quivers to technical advantage, as his truly glorious voice the most compelling and musical, perhaps, since Ian Richardson's hangs 'on the air and explodes, without mannerism or tricksiness. Fiennes' Hamlet is a just fulfilment of his' RS.C performances a few years back as Edmund' to John Wood's Lear, Troilus and, especially, Uerowne. The soliloquies are delivered with For once, the event lives up to the hype and billing. Ralph Fiennes, the Hackney Hamlet, leads an exciting, intelligent and absorbing production by Jonathan Kent for the Almeida Theatre (in partnership with The magnificent Frank Matcham auditorium in Mare Street where Ken Dodd and Rose English have lately attracted me, if not Demi Moore crackles with spoken fire and billows with dry ice. The cuts arc sensible, the playing swift (three hours, with an interval as Fortinbras marches towards Poland), the atmosphere electrifying.

A Renaissance court, (lagged and shuttered, is starkly studded with Edwardian, frock and trench coats. The Players evoke both Vincent Crummies and local lass Marie Lloyd. The court tableaux watching The -Mousetrap' and the duel arc beautifully arranged bathed in light. The play dances from the stage. Kent's smart collaborators in design and lighting are Peter Davison and' Mark Henderson.

Their readiness is all, their attack whole-hearted. Unlike Stephen Dillane in Peter I tail's recent West Unci revival, Ralph Fiennes exudes the appeal of a true star and the appetite of a thoroughbred. I serves the cynicism in.