The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 75

A "Si wmr IMS In a week of muddy dungeons, decadence and wartime devastation, Michael Coveney Sees CRITICS UNDER FIRE GO! tip of the week: keep the day job, Eddie. Eddie Izzard is the most brilliant new Lennox songs) and, with design by Charles Cusick-Smith, and lighting by Jenny Cane, arranges a fine spectacle of grills, ramps, backlit pageantry and harsh silhouette. The programmes of Rodney Ackland's Absolute Hell at the National and Ronald Harwood's new play Taking Sides at declares one of the club regulars. The play is a bracing mix of reactionary cosiness, symbolised in the garish pink interior of John Gunter's design, and Liberty Hall morality. The nighdy descent into alcoholic oblivion is supervised by Judi Dench's wonderful hostess Christine, snapping put first and last orders, precarious on high heels, with a hairstyle like a well-ordered bird's nest and a voice like a gin-sodden angel of death's.

The spinal narrative is that of Hugh's failing homosexual affair with a straight-laced dress designer (Pip Torrens) and his desperation to sell his screen version of 'The Blitz Story'. The existentialist mood touches all the characters, from Hugh, who looks in a mirror and sees nothing there; stand-up back-chatter in the business. But Marlowe's Edward II, the defining role in Ian McKellen's career 26 years ago, makes spiritual and technical demands beyond this performer's capacity. He's very good, Eddie, at dying in the muddy dungeon at Berkeley Castle. And, in Paul Kerryson's smart, modern-dress (courtiers in suits and pony-rails) and often beautiful.

staging at Leicester, he conveys the simple self-indulgence of a king putting pleasure before responsibility. But of impulse, elegance of thought, expertise in the phrasing and deliver)' of Marlowe's mighty fine line, we have very little, The evening's ups and downs are otherwise well charted: the cometlike career of the catamite Gaveston (Keith-Lee Castle), the anguish of the Queen (Vicki Pepperdine), the jostling rise of the devious Mortimer (excellent work by David Leonard), the final duet with the murderer Lightborn (Guy Oliverr Watts). Izzard 's a sympathetic presence. And you long for him to cut the unconvincing Kenneth Branagh imperspnation and jump back into his own frocks. Kerryson takes on board the gay politics and smokiness of Derek jarman's severely truncated 1991 film version (without the Annie to the displaced aristocrat, the 'treacle queen' (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who 1 despises herself for slumming it; and, especially, Christine, who clutches at men's Chichester both have pictures" of war-time devastation on their covers: the first of a Beaton fashion model in the ruins of the London Blitz, the second of blasted Berlin.

Ackland's glorious, sour play studies the aftermath of war in a louche drinking club between VE Day -the Labour Party's general election victory in 1945. Harwood has compiled a stern tribunal drama Sartre's Altona meets Hochhuth's The Representative in which the Nazi 'credentials' of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler are examined by a philistine American officer during the 1946 denazification proceedings in Berlin. Absolute Hell is a 1987 re-working (premiered at the Orange Tree, televised in 1991) of The Pink Room (written in 1946, produced in 1952). which Harold Hanson denounced as evidence of talent in its death throes. The West End impresario Binkie Beaumont considered the piece a libel on the British people.

Ackland wrote hardly anything else (he died in 1991) and his reinstatement at the National in Anthony Page's fine production -Page, directed the TV version and claims to have read the play in the early Seventies (and did nothing?) -is long overdue. Why the outrage? The drinking club of La Vie en Rose is a decadent boltholc for drunks, gays, bisoxuals, misfits, dotty old women and unsavoury showbiz types. There's an Irish madwoman (Alison Fiske) who yells Biblical hogwash at the club's window, a disgusting film producer (Peter Woodthorpe), and a drunk painter (Richard McCabe) who recognises a fellow spirit ('We keep it to ourselves') in the central figure of the failed writer Hugh Marrincr. The real objection, I imagine, was not to the bohemianism so much as to he picture of a nat ion falling apart when we had all supposedly just pulled together. Critics, of course, arc habitually rude about playwrights, that is their privilege.

But whereas a successful genius like Noel Coward survived years -of rejection and dismay while the theatre changed around him in the late1' Fifties, Ackland simply buckled and faded. Coward's own louche epic, Smiii-Monde (1926), ail Eddie Izzard as Edward II at Leicester Haymarket. Photograph: Neil libbert sticking closest to them. I strongly recommend David Kane's murderous theatrical-digs farce Dumbstruck! which I reviewed at last year's Glasgow Mayfest. Michael Boyd's Tron Theatre production transfers intact with Jimmy Chisholm's brilliant performance as a hip-shaking crooner with Las Vegas aspirations.

Edward II Haymarket, Leicester (0116 253 9797); Absolute Hell RNT Lyttelton, London SE1 (01 71-928 2252); Taking Sides Minerva, Chichester (01243 781312); Hot Mikado Queen's Theatre, London Wl (01 71-494 5040); Dumbstruck! Lyric, Hammersmith, London W6 (0181-741 2311) misdemeanours. The play ends on the beginning of the smear campaign. The American officer (Michael Pennington, acid and feral) reports that a tame journalist 'will write what we tell him'. The best performance is that of Gavvn Grainger as a timid. second violinist who needs authoritarianism -musical and political in order to function.

He ends up working as a security guard for the Americans. Here is the real play. Allegiance and moral dependency are much more interesting a subject than whether or not Furtwangler was an agency for both Hitler and Beethoven. The Hot Mikado is a modest shake-up of Gilbert and Sullivan, not a patch on The Black. Mikado in the mid-Seventies, wrecking the plot, but enlivening the songs in a Forties cool jazz setting when trousers in the small hours with shameless abandon.

Ackland's self-pitying contempt for the critics is powerfully expressed in Hugh's long tirade directed at Betty Marsden's lisping, nearly immobile lesbian literary critic, a drag compound, surely, of Hobson and his distinguished predecessor, James Agate. Greg Hicks delivers it with ferocious conviction. The critic has her wig brutally and she dies, hilariously, onstage. More critical wigging in Harwood's Taking Sides, scrupulously well directed by Harold Pinter. Daniel Massey's comically stricken, Mr Pastry-like Furtwangler sports a bald pate with tufty side-bits that crinkles at the temples as the play wears on.

It crinkles most, I feel, when the conductor is charged with having arranged for his disapproving critics be sent to the Russian Front. At the risk of incurring a one-way ticket to Regis? feel that the trouble wit!) this play is its bleating on about the sublimity of music, its banal evocation of Furtwangler' mystical powers of Intep Although Harwood cleverly loads both sides of the argument, we are clearly meant to respond to Purtwangler's cultural saintlincss as a mitigating factor in his kowtowing to Hitler, There is also evidence, well dramatised here, to prove that Furtwangler helped many individual lews escape from Berlin. But that might have been his insurance against greater wedged into corners or balancing precariously on the sloping floor, their very physical difficulties forcing a powerful dynamism into the language. Strindbefg's bitter, violently pessimistic text fuses wonderfully with the ethereal beauty of Lepage's imagery; echoing the play's Poet character a thinly disguised vSl rind berg -who pictures himself bathing in mud while composing verses for the gods. The result is a sensual flow of words and images moving seamlessly between pathos, comedy, anger and occult philosophy.

Strindberg wanted to place the audience in the role of 'lihed reamer' and with Lepage he has finally found a collaborator with the vision to achieve his aim. A Dream Play la at the Tramway Theatre, Glas'ow (() Ml 1 tonifjit and tomorrow. David play 'One Way Street la at the Tmverae Theatre durinf, the rdinlnirlh Taslival Deluge Friday 2nd and Saturday 3rd June, 1995 Queen Elizabeth Hall 0171 928 8800 ProtiuniiKi by llx South Hunk Cnntrn in oi.iiodiiilon wlili 1 1 ii i I'Vilrtfn Thitmii' nn I fit; purl ol itio Turnlno World ml i mi upmarket, upscale Absolute Hell set in the Ritz' Hotel remained unprodueed until 1977 at tin1 (Jlasgow Citi.ens'. 'if Labour gets in, they'll nationalise women,.