The Observer du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 77

11 Away with the birds: Bernard Cribbins as the Professor in La Grande Magia. Photograph by Neil Libbert asw 0Si tins, Sjg WSstZ. Michael Coveney enjoys illusion, allusion, antony shers riveting titus and a promising new Irish writer giant-size cageful of doves and a couple of dodgy Scouse sidekicks (George Raistrick and Christopher Ryan) who cry up his act among the hotel clientele. I never saw Giorgio Strehler's allegedly momentous production of this play, but can imagine it behind the throat-grabbing sensuality of Eyre's, and designer Anthony Ward's, lavish, no-expenses-spared staging. The basic -humour, squabbles and anxieties work best, not so much the high-flown stuff about third eyes and atavistic memory.

All caution is thrown to the winds with David Ross's unforgivably funny Lancashire policeman, cavorting. cheaply while Cribbins bides his time in a suspended state of either disbelief or disapproval. Even better than this valiant and diverting evening is Antony Sher's South African Titus Andronicus, which played in the West Yorkshire Playhouse last week, and is in the RNT's Cottesloe this week, A magnificent, barbaric pantomime follows an election and precedes a new era. Gregory Doran's production for the Market Theatre of Johannesburg (in association with the the way in which she accepts the. memories of her friend and husband as though they were gifts, then smiles away their curiosity in a constant reassertion of her own privacy and dignity.

Joseph O'Connor's Rod Roses and Patrol serves notice of another talented young Irish novelist turning to the stage with profit (after Dermot Bolger and Sebastian. Barry). O'Connor's first play, directed by Jirn Culleton for the Dublin-based Pigs back Theatre Company, is a scabrously written family wake for a university librarian who comes back into the room on video. Unknown to his widow, he had a lover for 30 years. Hence a boycott of the wake except by his daughters and an offensive, motorniouth son (Paul Hickey), who picks furiously at all visible emotional scars.

A division of old Enda's ashes in plastic lunchboxes evokes moments in Alan Bennett's Prick Up Your Ears film and Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt. O'Connor is in the jaunty misappropriation business, and has a good go, too, at O'Casey and Yeats. The use of flashbacks is a mistake he won't make next time. La Grande Magia RNT Lyttelton, London SE1 (01 71-928 2252); Tltua Andronicus Tues-Sat, RNT Cottesloe; Old Times Wyndham's Theatre, London WC2 (01 71-369 1 736); Red Roses and Petrol Tricycle Theatre, London NW6 (01 71-328 1000) 3QMl i 1 I INI Ml nc of the continuing themes at the Roval National Theatre is a productive dalliance with the Neapolitan drama of Eduardo de Filippo (1900-1984). La Grande Magia (1948), in Carlo Arditb's 1992 translation, is an.

astonishing play about, illusion and belief -fGrarid iMagic' that cloaks an adulterous affair in the collaborative cabaret of a bogus, small-time magician up to his armpits in debt. Professor Otto Ma rvuglia. in the unexpected, bulky shape of Bernard Cribbins. is playing the garden of the Motel Mctropolc on the Italian Riviera. Into his Egyptian sarcophagus steps slim, beautiful Marta di Spelta (slim, beautiful Fiona Gillies).

"She is whisked away ro the harbour where, rising rapidly from the Lyttelton's pit, her lover's speedboat outbids any magic trick of the professor: theairieal illusion itself will eclipse the illusionist. The abandoned husband, Calogero di Spelta (Alan Howard), cries wanly, 'Excuse me, would you be kind enough to rematcrialise my The professor gives Calogero a glinting silver box. If he opens it, the husband will find his wife or lose her forever. He. is still fretting over this dilemma four years later, i toward dominates these last scenes with a compelling display of testy, darting neurosis.

Cribbins aspires to Richardsonian dottiness but is much better at the truthful downside of his persona, a failed Lancastrian-accented has-been with a shrill wife (shrill Alison Fiske), a lc Corsiiirr, which opens on Wednesday), even though its 19th-century vision of India is risible: the tangled tale of misplaced passion, betrayal, death and' hallucination' involves temple maidens, fakirs, stuffed parrots, a terminated tiger and an elephant on wheels, 'Ethnic' routines for blacked-up performers resemble Red Indian war-dances from old movies, while Minkus's idea of exotic, oriental music is equally implausible -but you don't go to ballet for authenticity. What you want from these old war-horses is lashings of emotion and dancing to die for, which is precisely what the Kirov provides. Kirov Ballot nt the Coliseum until 12 August: vSvv.in Luke continues Mod, Titos; Lit Bay fulcra return 10 .12 Auffuat; Masterclass on SUif'e, Sunday 30 July (0171 632 8300) production on a tilting, faindy surreal design by Julian McGowan, has the inscrutability of a mysterious picture, and the tension of a good thriller. Deeley picked up Kate in a near-empty cinema showing Carol Reed's Odd Matt Out. The pub philosophers known as the Edgwarc Road gang, the Maida Vale group, have dispersed.

When Deeley, a crumpled filmmaker, played more lightly by Lawson than by Colin Blakely (in the original) and Michael Gambon (in 1985), looked up Kate's skirt in the Wayfarers' Tavern off the Brompton Road, she was vvoaring Anna's underwear. Is Kate now dead? Was the women's friendship a conspiracy to which Deeley did not have access? The play still shimmers and retains its erotic and its fascination. stage voice is small, but her serenity impermeable, her raptness enchanting. She looks very beautiful, of course, but the radiation of that beauty is what counts. There is haunting grace to first expressions of titanic grief by hissing out 'the wilderness of tigers' speech, ripping off his medals and opening to full diapason on 'I am the sea'.

Rome on the veldt buzzes with conspiratorial whispers and dangerous insects. When Titus delivers his angry elegy for the murdered fly, he starts a campaign of feigning madness at the head of a loony army. Swamped with sorrow, he declines into real madness, serving Tamora, queen of the Goths (sensuously. played by Dorothy Ann Gould), with her own sons baked in a pie (pate de diuxjils serui cn croutc). In stark contrast, Harold Pinter's poetic, Proustian Old Tlmea (1971) is a surgical idyll in a farmhouse, Julie Christie, serene and smiling as Kate on a reil sofa, tolerates the contest of mcinorics between her husband, Deeley (Leigh Lawson), and her host friend of 20 years ago, Anna (Harriet Walter).

First seen at Theatr Clwyd in May, Lindy Davies's fine RNT Studio) is wholly successful in its new setting; an emergent state in a state of emergency. The stage is littered with old tyres and petrol cans, suggestive of ritual killings by 'burning necklaces and random arson attacks. Sher's Titus, a barrel-chested Afrikaner with dyed yellow hair and beard, who reminds you fitfully of Spike Milligan, tearfully re-salutes liis country from an open Jeep. Aaron the Moor (Sello Maake ka Ncube) sites a black baby, the country's future; the infant is wrapped in black dustbin liners, as are Titus's mutilated left arm and the heads of his assassinated sons. I lis ravished daughter Lavinia (Jennifer Woodbume), cries a wordless aria of pain throughout the evening.

I lis other son, Lucius, returns to take, over in Rqniv at the head of an army of Goths who dance a 'hakka' like a pumped-up rugby team. The South African accent slows down the speaking but refurbishes the cruder passages with a new emphatic vigour. Slier builds lo his.