The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 68

10 ihe Observer Review Simday 22 October 1 995 the Clitics A week in the arts Seven splendid days for the subsidised sector: new productions at the National and BSC; plus big lottery award The tabloids' attempts to start a class war over "toffs and tutus" are particularly phoney in the case of the Wells' 'A sombre counterpoint to the cheeriness of the white-boys-with-guitars school of English pop whimsy' Heckerling has triumphed with her Jane Austen in Los Angeles. For what she has done in Clueless is transpose Emma to Beverly Hills' Philip French on clueless 'It is, in that sense, a classic product of its period. One wonders how long it will be until Rupert Murdoch will add it to his collection' John Naughton on Classic FM Jailil Parry on lottery money Sean O'Hagan on TricKy MICHAEL COVENEY "Dandies9 inferno They maybe separated by 265 years but Congreve's and Osborne's studies of manners and bad habits both make successful revivals The fashionable London beau monde in Congreve's The Way of the World (1700) has come up to date in Phyllida Lloyd's -new production at the National. The characters-convene not in St James's -Park but in a white gallery showing large red abstracts. The women wear the sort of puffed up satin dresses you only see on catwalks, and the gossip WItwoud, in flyaway ginger hair and a loud checked suit, is a dead ringer for Malcolm McLaren, the pop impresario.

The transformation works brilliantly. This whirl of posing and intrigue is entirely suited to the airy archness of Congreve's wonderful prose, and Fiona Shaw's crop-haired MiUamant in a flimsy white shoulder veil and black culottes is an amused, but.detached, participant in the circus. She plays with much agile, whimsical grace, if not the deadly panache of a definitive Mil-lamant such as Maggie Smith. Her" reading, however, is always fresh and intelligent, her deep longing for pensive solitude fully explained in the glorious marriage-contract scene (where she may 'dwindle into a wife', shimmying sarcastically to the floor) and the escape she finds in Lady Wishfort's attic. That room is at the top of a town house which designer Anthony Ward reveals in full facade in the last act, and where Lady Wishfort resides in a pink interior.

Roger Allam is a splendid Mirabell, making this dull role more varied, and much' funnier, than usual, and the totting duo of Fain all and Marwood Richard McCabe and Sian Thomas- are exceptional. But the show is stolen by Geraldine McEwan's outrageous Wishfort, an-emaciated amalgam of Barbara Cardand and Lindsay Kemp as designed by Yivienne Westwood, white-faced and desperate, fluffed "up in a rose tutu and reaching for the cherry brandy, and her last romantic gasp, delicate dancer's legs before. collapsing on the bin bags-outside her own front door. John Osborne's A Patriot For Me (1965)," expansively revived by the. RSC at the Barbican, was banned by the Lord Chamberlain for its depic-tion of men naked in bed and of a central, brilliantly metaphorical Having a bait: The brilliantly metaphorical drag scene from John Osborne's A Patriot for Me (Denis Quilley fourth from right) Photograph by Neil Libbert claim her kingdom; not much sex going on here, though.

Ian McDiarmid's Almeida version of Otway's 1682 tragedy Venice Preserved is. gorgeously set by Julian McGowan. But the chief performances, save those of John Quayle as a sado-masochistic senator ('Let's have a game of rump, NackyL.spit in my faceL.then I'll be a and Alphonsia Emmanuel as his pliant whore, are woefully, inadequate. Tiie Way of the World RNT Lytteiton, London SE1 (0171-928 2252); A. Patriot For Me and Son of Man (Pit) Barbican.

London EC2 0171-638 8891); The Master Builder Theatre Royal, Hay market, London SW1 (01 71 -930 8800); Venice Preserved Almeida, London 1(0171 -359 4404) a clean-cut professional soldier. Ideal spy materia; in fact. He only betrays emotion in the bedroom. Those scenes, with whore, boy and the Countess he marries, are shot with a burning, urgent intensity. Alas, Gill's careful production, handsomely designed and costumed by Tom Piper and Pamela Howard, runs at four-and-a-quarter hours, which is mstrpportabte.Going to the Barbican is anyway like going to prison.

Leaving the place should fee) like release on parole, not the end of 1 0 years' porridge. Next door in the Pit, Joseph Fiennes, Ralph's brilliant junior bro; is playing Jesus Christ as a sob-in-the-voice, pious, huh-huhing demagogue who fondles the wood that shall constitute his cross. the spot, many stripped to the waist The ball scene overrides Osborne's requested ambiguity, as a horde of screaming queens squawk with pleasure at the Susanna Figaro duet and a camp Carmen's habanera. The only surprise is that Denis Quilley, in full Queen Alexandra regalia, does not launch into one of his old numbers in the musical of La Cageaux Folles. But this is a wholly different approach to that adopted in the Chichester revival 1 0 years ago, and one meticulously sustained around a performance of enigmatic detachment by James Wilby, a cool, tall, blond Fox family-lookalike, as Redl.

Unlike Alan Bates at Chichester, Wilby does not present a portrait of a man on the run from himself, but (1964) and Scorsese's The List Temptation of Christ (1988): Bryderi's trusty team, of designer Hayden Grrffin and lighting designer Andy Phillips (who has also arranged some beautiful illumination of A Patriot For Me) and, especially, composer John Tarns, delivers the goods: 'popular' theatre on a cruciform stage with great performances not only from Fiennes but also from a quizzical John Standing as Pontius Pilate and the increasingly zany Philip Locke as Caiphas. Alan Bates is a guiltrridden, evasive Solness in Peter Hall's staid new version of Ibsen's The Master Builder, ably supported by Gemma Jones as his frozen, grief-stricken wife and the talented new Victoria Hamilton as the girl who comes to This is the one interesting idea in Dennis Potter's translated TV play, Son of Man (1969) spiritedly directed by Bill Bryden in the macho, memorable style of his 1980s RNT heyday.and that of Ihe Mysteries. Potter's text, however, is not a patch on Tony Harrison's modernised medievalism. Admittedly the jejune cry of 'You cannot love money and God in the rewritten Sermon on the Mount sounds fresh and unusual, in the same way that Priestley's socialist baftfe-cry in An Inspector Calls takes an audience marinated in Thatcherism by surprise. But Son of Man cannot begin to compare with the radical beauty of the 'Jesus' films which flank it, Pasolini's erotic and dignified The Gospel According to Saint Matthew Viennese drag ball.

The play is about lying, spving and self-deception. Alfred Recfl is a shooting star in the Austro-Hungarian army. His sexual predilections entangle him as a spy for the Russians, gain him promotion to head of Intelligence, and. ensure a messy end. The First World War is precipitated and Red! -who shares the rabid anti-serrutism of his.

fellow officers is revealed as having been half-Jewish. Did Osborne despise Red! or identify with campaign to have Osborne posthumously signed up as a closet homosexual will point to Peter Gill's emphatically 'out-gay' production with its continuous, well-marshalled chorus line of soldiers moving scenery, sauntering into the wings and running on WILLIAM FEAVER Ruff times for the Tudors Portraits were paramount and clothes the stuff of image manipulation Modern management jargon readily applies to Dynasties at the Tate. Here are unsmiling Tudor performance indicators and haughty Jacobean, mission statements in ruffs and doublets. Confident of their high standing, these personages outstare posterity. In Tudor arid Jacobean portraiture1, everything had to be 'transparent', as lawyers say, meaning ostensibly open to saiiuny.

A royal portrait was a declaration of royal virtues. Henry VllPs obesity became strength arid Edward VTs tuberculosity became samtliriess. Management consultants will be impressed by the 'prioritisation' in Dynasties. Portrait, portrait, portrait, portrait. Elsewhere in Europe, in the period 1530 to 1630, artists diversified.

Titian, for example, did religious subjects besides portraits, and scenes from classical mythology, thanks partly to Hapsburg patronage. In England, iconoclasm, linked with Church nationalisation (or regal privatisation, as Henry VIII regarded it) meant no more altarpieces. Agenda-setting allegories, yes, occasionally; but really portraits were the only genre. Dynasties is displayed as palatially as the Seventies wing of the Tate allows. Richly coloured walls, below the missile-silo skylights, are.

the Tate's idea of a welcome to the sizeable contingent from the National Portrait Gallery and dozens of others, poised to preach, to marry, to administrate and to rule. The preoccupation with lineage, or with being gorgeous and powerful, wouldn't be so limiting were it not that Europe, proper, is tangential to Dynasties. Holbeiri comes and draws prime specimens of the English nobility and gentlefolk, but Holbein in England doesn't do anything for "English art apart from being exemplary. His Lady with a Squirrel could well be yellow-stockinged holds. up a drawing and places the other hand oh his hip.

A fine fellow indeed. What's more, in a big still-life with kitchen maid hepiles on an abundance of peaches, grapes and turnips. Bacon's cabbages proclaim him a painter of almost Hispanic perspicacity. In working visit to England, Rubens was sounded out about designing The Apotheosis of James for the ceiling of Inigo Jones's Banqueting House in Whitehall, Here was a Stuart thinking himself greater than a Hapsburg, higher than any Holy Roman Emperor, positively How could Rubens resist? Well, other projects intervened; but in 1629, as Charles I refined the theory and practice of Divine Right, he produced a grisaille sketch of the late king acutely foreshortened, ascending in a swirl of rumps and drapes to a heavenly rewatd for what Hamlet perceived to be 'the insolence of office'. Way below, ah anonymous ('Angles Dutch School, circa 1630') painting of London from Southward, extends from leafy Bankside to the Tower and across 'the river to the City and St Paul's.

On the gate guarding London Bridge, a dozen severed heads are displayed. Traitors or poachers, presumably, but they are too small to be identified After such a run of suits and frills arid conventionalities it's refreshing to see heads on sticks. Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630 to 7 Jan, Tate Gallery (01 71 -8878000) Critical choice: AMrTTieArtofa.O)ntinento28)aii, Royal Academy, London Wl (0171-439 7438); Henri Gaudier Brzeska: A Sculptor's Drawings to Nov, Leicester Galleries, London SWl (01 7 1-930 6059) German. Like the emblematic pet busy with a. nut, Holbein made the best of the opportunity to be unrivalled.

His Edward, Prince of Wales as a baby, wielding a gilt rattle, became the prototype for his Henry VIII, that massive, lightly bearded baby-face, represented here In one of the many post-Holbein versions. The marriage of Mary Tudor to Philip of Spain could have brought England into fruitful contact with Hapsburg patronage. Successive paintings of Mary insist, that, though dour, she had it in her to grace the Spanish court and conceivably supply a genetic input to rid the inbred Hapsburgs of their grotesque family jaw. But in 1558 she died; riot long, incidentally, after Philip commissioned from Titian his sublime Metamorphoses. Diana andActaeon and Diana and Calisto, now in Edinburgh, and the Death ofActaeori in London's National Gallery could never have been bought by a Tudor.

Hans Eworth, from Antwerp, who became the first English signature artist, gave Mary substantial lips. More remarkable, his painting of Sir John Lutterell wading through the Firth of Forth in ah allegorical representation Of the Treaty of Boulogne, 1550, has the strange airs and drownings that decades later. to haunt Vie Tempest. Metaphysically or anecdotally, Eworth's portraits have much to recommend them. His stout Mary Neville, Lady Dacre, stands by her sallow son, in a double portrait, determined to restore die good name of the Dacres, thrown away by her late husband who had been beheaded at Tyburn after a poaching expedition that went horribly wrong.

There is much explaining to do. An Allegory of circa 1570, involves a Christ-like figure popping up as the target of the seven deadly sins in a celestial shooting alley. An Allegory of the Reformation has Edward VI sitting pretty while theologians advise, iconoclasts get busy and the Pope col- lapses with 'All Fleshe is Grasse' inscribed on his cassock, 'Feyned Holihe(ss) alongside. Feigning blamelessness, Elizabeth Tudor becomes Virgin Queen holding thesieve of chastity- arid stands tiptoe on a floorcloth England, an icon reborn. With squared shoulders and whited face, she promotes herself to Britannia, her fan whisking the Spanish fleet onto the rocks of her scepter'd isle.

In the Armada Portrait she's as heavily jewelled as a Seville Madonna. Mistress of the elements, Bride of Britain, her radiant riiajesty puts one hand possessively on the New World part of her orb. Gloriana has eclipsed the Hapsburgs. The image of Elizabeth hovers, like a smirking goddess in the finale of a masque, over rank upon rank of Jacobean courtiers painted in dense finery. Several of these deadly paintings of eminen nonentities in fancy dress, often by John de Critz the Elder, correspond with Iriigo Jones costume designs.

Each nymph showing off what Robert Herrick poeticised as 'that liquefaction of her clodtes' falls victim to TinkerbeU Baroque. Plain statement, in the English tradition that was to extend through Hogarth to Bewick, is the alternative. George Gower considers himself in a 1579 self-portrait. Weighing the merits of a palette in hand against an inherited coat of arms, he maintains, admirably, that 'pencil's trade' is worth more than breeding. The caption inscribed beside him is a manifesto: 'my skill rnaynteftes the prayes'.

Gower's pride in-being a professional artist is matched by Sir Nathaniel Bacon's pride in being a leading amateur. Bacon extends a i ft) tiHTGfi illll) ft! 0 hSm2.