The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 69

Sunday 26 May 1996 the Observer Review 13 the Arts From the cluttered chaos of Degas's studio in his later years came the extraordinary pictures he both painted and collected Fine old cannibal. 1 WILLIAM FEAVER egas, particularly late. -I Degas, excites bodily sen sations. Our eves nose around gaping armpit and clenched belly, get the feel, of hands and the strain in shoulders. This is what's so immediate in Degas: Beyond Impressionism at the National Gallery, and so powerful: charcoal lines kneading the small of the back and the nape of the neck; the confident tug of the comb, the bracing towel rub.

These often faceless figures were "Degas's menagerie of performing bodies, given ironingto do ortold to knees-bend until he' was through with them. Their function was to be there to be drawn, and then, to be reiterated in their absence as creatures'of his, a corps d'art progressively worked over and made ever more vivid. For Degas used -to take impressions from his pastel drawings and recast the mirror-images; he also took tracings as well as making freehand copies. A fascinating aspect of this marvellous exhibition is seeing the blending of one pose into another, drawing into drawing, drawing into sculpture, or drawing into sculpture into painting into drawing again. bear-ing out his remark that 'an -does hot axpand-irfepeats itself.

The remark itself is worth repeating as confirmation of Degas's habit of begetting drawings from drawings and affirmation of-bis belief in the continuity of art, a belief that he backed by purchase. Degas as a Collector, a subsidiary in the National Gallery's Sunley Room, reassembles a number of the works he cherished in his later them are thefrag-rhents of Manet's Execution of Maximilian, Delacroix's Baron Schwiter, andTngres's sharp-eyed de A-orv ins all of which now belong to the National Gallery' -two Gauguins a generous impulse buy) and a Cezanne Bather with outstretched arms.lent by its latest owner. Jasper Johns. Degas corralled his allegiances in bis collection; Ingres he revered for his uncanny technical perfection. Daumier for his readiness.

He was stimulated too by Japanese female form: Degas's Before the Ballet (1890-92). He gradually went out of business. '1 work he wrote in 1902. Within a few years, by then in- his seventies, he stopped working altogether. In 1912 he had to move from die rue Victor Masse.

Caught on. film in 1915 near, his new place. in the Boulevard de Clichy, the greatest, living painter was a forlorn figure in a bowler and long white beard. There's no need to. sentimentalise about the aged Degas tottering into cinema history; for even tiien he was alert to potential motifs.

The first aeroplane he saw was a disappointment to him. He said howsmail it looked. Perhaps it reminded him of the hippogriff in a painting he owned: Ingress AngelicaSaved byRuggerio, an exquisitely contrived scene in which die hero astride his flying curio on die sea monster. Dqgas; Beyond Impressionism! Degas as Collector, to 26 August, National Gallery, London WC2 (0171-839332'D the combing looks stubbed out. The richness of this late work partly comes of Degas ignoring conventional divides, using oils like pastels and charcoal like, a scraper.

The wax sculptures of figures turning, stretching, heaving themselves, were only cast in bronze after Degas died: he considered them provisional and treated them as amplified drawings. Equally, the figures he drew could be transformed into landscape. There was the knavish pleasure of erecting a phallic monolith in what a casual observer would take to be a high spot of Gauguin's Brittany. And'the recliningwomen as headland, a drawing preempting Henry Moore's one big idea. For Degas, art was practised deception.

Just as his ballerinas sweated to appear weightless, he was laconic about the sensational: the stomp of Russian dancers in ethnic costume, the heat of a dying day in the Somme valley done with an ofihand of milky white on an orange ground. A lasting obsession with the woodblock prints. His copy of Nishikawa SikenobuV.4 Hundred ofWomen involving lots of geishas updating their social skills), obviously prompted ideas on posing the models and the oblique angles on them too. During most ofthe period covered by the exhibition Degas lived at 37 rue Victor Masse, in Mont-martre. He occupied three floors: a discreedy bourgeois middle apartment where he had Torii Kjyunaga's Interior of a Bath-House, a print rich in compositional hints, hanging over his bed; a lower floor, where he kept the bulk of the collection, and the top iloor, which was his studio.

Legend insists that Degas aged into a curmudgeon holed up in a dismal studio where, increasingly blind, he fumbled with charcoal and modelling wax to admirable effect, in the circumstances. The truth though is less like a morose closing chapter from Balzac. Degas's failing eyesight was one good reason for his taking to sculp Reds in tooth and claw An extraordinary Russian fable and Sarah Kane's new twist on Seneca 30 years in Degas's studio in her own glass case. Themes are reflected into one another. The statuettes join chorus lines where synchronised arms beckon and limelight bleaches shoulders and foreheads.

Charcoal and pastel strokes rest lightly on The richness of this late work comes of Degas ignoring conventional divides tracing paper. 'In oil painting one should proceed as with Degas told Sickert, hence die paint rubbed paint caked. In the National Gallery's Combing the Hair reds on red suffuse maid and mistress: a pulverised aUnospliere. In the Oslo NasjonalgallerietV Combing the Hair the red hair is a colour swatch arid-the face of the woman submitting to Off the wall: Claustrophobia Michael Attenborough's fine production is further thicketed by Susanna's servant, Hester (a lovely-contribution from Jay Mclnnes), being in lovesick thrall to Rafe, whom Joseph Fiennes makes a figure of scintillating hesitancy and innate decency with a troubled stoop and a weeping voice. 'My tongue's niy confesses die dissolute Jack Lane.

In pj Jg iHShi ture (a blind man's trade, he said) but hardly the only one. The fact that he couldn't stand bright light may account for the dirtiness of the studio windows but perhaps he welcomed the grime anyway, as a subtle light Filter. The chaos of the studio was what happens when work proceeds and accumulates, feeding off itself. Richard Kendall, the selector of the exhibition, emphasises in his excellent catalogue Degas's 'astringent radicalism'. This manifested itself in his unsentimentality.

Sicken quotes him as saying that in painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false. 'A picture is something which requires as much knavery, trickery and deceit as the perpetration of a His studio was crammed with deceptive elements: drawings for transfer or cannibalisation, screens to suggest bedrooms or rehearsal spaces, sculptures that (as he showed Sicken one evening) threw lively shadows. COVENEY the motherland and urinating over his wife. 'Old' Russia returns in bread queues and vitriolic mendicants. A new farm co-operative, or gulag, is blighted and destroyed.

At the unforgettable young artists rise from the dead to proclaim a soundless symphony. Their instruments have been confiscated. With her new version ofSeneca's Phaedra, Phaedra's Love, Sarah Kane has been accused of refuelling the controversy over her impressive first play, Blasted, wliich one or two critics including the chap from the Telegraph, the author of a low-grade novel offilth, vomit and self-abasement! promoted as 'disgusting' and 'controversial'. Phaedra's Love is an entirely serious, utterly absorbing attempt to re-imagine themes of revulsion, audacity and vile lust discerned by public and personal 'morality' in Phaedra's obsession with herstep-son Hippolyius. Seneca's tragedies are brutal and direct, as Cary! Churchill showed in a recent new version of Thyestes.

Kane translates Hippolytus's cult of chastity into 'virgin rites' of masturbation, junk food eating and television addiction. She invents an incestuously related sister; Strophe ('Don't be stroppy, Strophe'), to reinforce the picture of a modern dysfunctional royal family with whom the populace is growing extremely tired. After Theseus condemns his son (wonderfully well played by a dead-eyed Cas Harkins), actors among the squatting audience rise like a lynch mob to lake matters into their own violent hands, a powerful, genuinely effective equivalent of the monster rising from the angry sea to frighten die prince's horses. The goiy dismemberment is done before us, as isfheseus's rape of his daughter, and a couple of ujstelully simulated blow-jobs. Phaedra (Philippa Williams, tall.

The basement galleries of the Sainsbury Wing have been paint: ed maroon a colour reckoned by Kendall to match the h.aut bourgeois gloom of 37 rue Victor Masse. Milliners, dancers and a laundress are introduced first in the exhibition as representatives of Degas's earlier subject matter. Next to them, wonderfully fresh, is a large painting of tub, bed arid washstand and a woman drying herself, the whole thing done in one session, bistre for tone and black lines for accent. Under-painting only, but perfect. Degas let it go at that.

On the wall opposite is Mademoiselle Rouart 'standing in the study of her father, a collector-friend of Degas, She is resigned to being one of Papa's possessions, The glass case beside her, containing Egyptian statuettes, makes her die housekeeper of a mansion of the dead. Yet the statuette in profile resembles Degas's Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, the wax figure in a real tutu which stood for red-dressed and jangled) dies offstage in Seneca she commits onstage suicide a neat twist at one with the sharp potency of Kane's creative desire to make the play come alive, assume more reality. Pure theatre. Orrather, impure the-au-e: dirty, alarming, dangerous. In Edward Bond's Bingo (1973), Shakespeare sat in his garden at New Place in Stratford in 1 616, was harangued by his second daughter, Judith, and committed suicide.

Peter Whelan, a milder, less dogmatic waiter, moves round the corner to Hall's Croft where, in The Herbal Bed, Shakespeare's first daughter, Susanna Hall, wife of die physician John Hall, is struggling within an ice-cold marriage to progress from preparing 'comfort cordials' to making her own medical preparations. One of diese, using lead plates, is a treatment for gonorrhoea-her father's. Taking die bald facts of what we know about Susanna, Whelan coiit cocts a.riveting play of emotional complications, treachery and cross-examination, and of the importance ofthe gentle handlingofthe truth. The play is set in )b)3, the year in which Susanna brought a charge of defamation against a neighbour, John Lane, in the diocesan court at Worcester. The slander was diat she 'had die runinge of die reynes lie, the clap) and had been naughtly! with Rale Smith'.

According to her epitaph. Susanna was 'witty above hersex' and 'wise to salvation'. Whelan goes further, abetted by Teresa Banham's luminous performance. His Susanna is confidently acquiring her husband's alchemical and medical nous, while dealing with her illicit longing for Rale, a local haberdasher. The couple meet in the herbal garden by night, fondle briefly, and this leads to die slander.

Whelan also proposes that John, here lack, Lane (David Tonnant, litis a local gentleman fium Alvestun is a defeated admirer of Susanna and a spurned apprentice of her husband. The emotional Uiicket in Ihere was a tremendous reception at the N'omngham Playhouse on Tuesdav nisht for the British premiere of the Malv Drama Theatre of St Petersburg's Claustrophobia. Don't miss it this week in Glasgow the week after at the Lyric Hammersmith-Lev Dodm'sgreatcoiimajiy. regular visitors to these shores since their Glasgow Mayfest debut in 1988, provide the most visceral and tumultously theatrical' ensemble work you will see all year, a companion piece to their Gaudeamus, a savage look at life in the sewer battalion of the Soviet army. A sexy, liquidly mobile company, dressed in white, floats through a white room in a school once attended by Mandelstam and Nabokov, this, their real-life rehearsal room in St Petersburg, is the start and the end of all their journeys, a playground of dreams and music where the past is re-imagined, the present decried.

A lecture on hydrochloric acid becomes a teacherpupil seduction scenario, the teacher's skirt riding above her buttocks as she lifts the curtains: girls tumble from the win- FT 1 MICHAEL dows and remove their blouses in an org' of erotic fantasy. A brass band crashes gracefully through the windows at full blast. A Nijin-skyesque boy of magnetic star quality reaffirms the allusion to the famous Spectre de la rose flying scene. An elfin girl goes for the emotional jugular like the gymnast Olga Korbut in die 1972 Olympics. Actors shin up and down pipes, speed on skateboards, cartwheel through dreir own adventures.

Dodin's production is shamelessly manipulative in its use of lights and music (Mozart, Rossini, Chopin, national folk tunes). But the looseness ofthe compilation finally coheres into a sardonic dramatic hymn at a time of acute national uncertainty. An irreverent resurrection of Lenin is followed by a 'typical' domestic scene with an army officer swiiling vodka and scoffing home-made ravioli before saluting at Nottingham Playhouse. Gurriey's amiable Sylvia, a Manhattan couple (Robin Ellis and Maria Aitkeri) acquire a stray dog with a tongue in the clownish, anthropomorphic incarnation of brilliant Zoe Wanamaker; Last chance this week to catch Beast on the Moon, a really fine play by Richard Kalinoski about Armenian immigrants in Wisconsin in the 1920s, deftly directed by liina Brook and superlatively played by Simon Abkarian and Corinne Jaber. Claustrophobia Glasgow Tramway (01412873900); Phaedra's Love Gate, London Wl 71-2290706); The Herbal Bed The'Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon (01 789295623); Sylvia Apollo, London Wl (1)171-494 5070); Beast on the Moon BAC, London SWl I Wl 71 -223 2223) IV ffriTtmn barclays siage I Royal Academy of Arts Piccadilly, lwndon Wl until 23 June 1996 Book now (0171 (494 5676 by Socicte Ucncnlc in the L'K Gustave Caulebotte 'i The Unknown Impressionist.