The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 55

SUNDAY 31 JANUARY 1993 THE OBSERVER. ARTS 355 Music Andrew Porter Cinema Philip French Fangs, but no fangs Pastor put to the test dp does, 'however, get to speak, and relish, the immortal lines I never drink blood' and 'Listen to them, the children of the night, what sweet music' Seeing that it is the preferred sport of show-business, golf figures surprisingly rarely in the cinema. One thinks of Grant meeting Hepburn on the golf course in Bringing Up Baby, Jordan Baker faking her score in The Great Gatsby, Bond taking on Goldfinger, Sid Field reprising his golfing sketch in London Town, Basil Radford and Naun-ton Wayne competing in Dead of Night, Glenn Ford as Ben Hogan in Follow the Sun. Now out of an odd bunker comes Triple Bogey On A Par Five Hole (ICA, 15) not a home movie featuring Bob Hope but the work of Amos Poe, an independent New York writer-producer whose films usually cost less than a year's golf-club subscription. A French screenwriter, Remy Gravelle, has been hired to script a film about three rich orphans the 24-year-old bestselling novelist Amanda Levy, her 15-year-old brother, Satch, and her precocious 13-year-old sister, Bree who live on a luxurious yacht called Triple Bogey, which constantly circumnavigates Manhattan.

Always shot from behind or in half-profile, like the investigative reporter in Citizen Kane, THE Royal Opera plans to stage all Verdi's works by 2001. Its first production of Stiffelio is an earnest and largely successful endeavour to show the strengths of an unfamiliar, uneven, but arresting piece. After Traviata, Verdi said that, while he was willing to abandon some of his operas as mistakes, there were two worth saving: Stiffelio (which only four cities had heard) and La battaglia di Legnano. Work on a revised Battaglia petered out, but the Aroldo fashioned from Stiffelio soon reached theatres from Novara to New York, Vienna to Valparaiso. Stiffelio has the more interesting subject: the distress of a pastor who preaches the forgiveness of sins but cannot bring himself to forgive his adulterous wife.

In Aroldo, the protagonist is a Kentish crusader, and its finale is not a service at which a minister opening the Bible lights on John 8 ('He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone') and is moved to forgive the sinful, repentant woman kneeling at his feet, but a Scott-influenced encounter on the banks of Loch Lomond, where Harold has become a hermit and the heroine and her father are cast ashore by a storm. Stiffelius was one of five roles that Verdi composed for Gae-tano Fraschini, whose voice was likened to 'a great silver plate struck with a silver hammer'. Domingo sings it at the Met next season. At Covent Garden, Jose Carreras (who recorded the opera 14 years ago) sang it with seriousness and strength, weighing and shaping each phrase, uttering it clearly. He was impressive.

But, intent on vocalism, he hardly brought the pastor to life: his demeanour features immobile, action limited to graceful poses and gentle arm waving belied the ardour of what he sang. The dramaturgy, in which five letters play a part, is clumsy. In the play from which the opera was drawn, Lina is a forester's daughter (like Agathe in Der Freischutz) easy prey for a noble profligate. In the opera she is a countess and lives in a castle. Verdi skipped the acts that told of her seduction Hear my confession: actress and able singer, invested Lina with pathos and dignity.

'Photograph by Neil Libbert. champion of new music, celebrated a Silver Jubilee with a day of Barbican concerts recalling the past (a tremendous performance of Varese's Integrates) and creating the future (new works by Robert Saxton, Oliver Knussen). Felicity Palmer's fearless, coloured account of Berio's Folksongs was a highlight. So was a suite of Broadway songs, conducted by John McGlinn with his masterly command of tempo and balance; George Dvorsky's timbre the archive, divulged the original pages, and enabled Stiffelio to be heard as Verdi first wrote it. One must not make too much of that: the differences are not great, mainly verbal.

Edward Downes edited and conducted the pristinated score with care, with devotion, with reverent handling of even the tawdry episodes. Early Verdi needs to be taken not so earnestly but with Schwung and a smile: Stiffelio is no Otello. Often the music, exquisitely played, was held to metronomic tempi, without singer-determined, sentiment-inspired flexibility. Back home, I listened to Cal-las's free-phrased, moving account of Lina's preghiera seeking (and finding) reassurance that Stiffelio I Aroldo is a more emotional opera than what I had just heard. Moshinsky falsified the close: no forgiveness and C-major reconciliation; Stiffelius sang of pardon through gritted teeth, not looking with love at his wife.

The London Sinfonietta, Covent Garden runs on a tight budget. The scene and the costumes (by Peter J. Hall) were handsome. They created an atmosphere in which one almost expected Lina to appear at the last wearing a Scarlet Letter. The set, built on a platform well behind the proscenium arch, precluded any advancing to the footlights to engage the audience.

Not for the first time, I admired the intelligence, per-ceptiveness, and distinction of a Moshinsky production while missing the straightforward emotional surrender that less polished but more direct (more Verdian?) presentations among them, Stiffelios in Parma, Boston, Brooklyn have stirred. Creating Aroldo, Verdi consigned Stiffelio to oblivion: he ripped the score apart, changed names in the pages he thought worth keeping, shoved the rest into his private archive. Modern revivals have been from variously faulty copy scores until, for Covent Garden, Gabriella Carrara-Verdi opened VAMPIRES in various guises are currently in the air or at our throats and pop sociologists are only too eager to provide us with explanations for their ubiquity. We live in a time of millennial anxiety, of polluted blood, insane blood-letting and exploitative blood-sucking. Sex seems as dangerous to us now as it did to our late-Victorian ancestors.

And so on. To show that he has returned to the true fountainhead that first gushed in 1897 when stiff-necked London solicitor Jonathan Harker travelled across Europe to meet the new legendary aristocratic blood-banker in his Transylvanian castle, Francis Ford Coppola calls his film Bram Stoker's Dracula (Odeon Leicester Square, 18). Coppola began his career helping Roger Corman make low-budget horror flicks for drive-in audiences. This $50 million gothic extravaganza is designed for a rather different carriage trade. It is a lavish Hammer and fin-de-siecle affair that spares no expense in creating authentic period detail.

If you liked Howards End, it says, you'll love Harker's Echt. Coppola and his screenwriter, James V. Hart, begin with a prologue explaining Dracula's role as a fifteenth-century defender of Christendom against the Turk (a red-and-black battle scene inspired by Kurosawa's Kagemushd) and the source of his eternal curse. He was punished for his blasphemous protest against the church's treatment of his wife, who had committed suicide after false reports of his death in action. Thereafter, they stick closely not only to Stoker's storyline but also to his narrative method of mediating events through letters, diaries, medical reports, newspaper stories, recorded messages.

Coppola gives Harker's fiancee Mina (Winona Ryder) a new-fangled typewriter that could provide her with a liberating vocation; Dr Seward (Richard E. Grant) contacts the Dutch vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) via telegraph; in London, Dracula (Gary Oldman) meets his long-lost love, re-incarnated as Mina, at a cinematograph show (the perfect example of the preservation of the dead) and attempts to seduce her as images repeat themselves in the background. But all this detail is part of the way Stoker's text is buried by the film's texture. A splendid and familiar story disappears beneath a welter of special effects, exegesis and stylistic tropes. Intellectual baggage about Aids, the threat of Islam, new terrors being unleashed from eastern Europe, the menace of unrestrained female sexuality and God knows what else is piled upon the tale to show us how aware the authors are of what they're up to.

From the frenetic start there is little change of pace, no descent into the mundane, and while there is much to admire visually, the film rarely grips and only occasionally shocks. Except for Oldman's Dracula, the performances are either wan and bloodless or (in the case of Hopkins's Van Helsing and Tom Waits's mad, incarcerated Renfield) climbing up the wall. Initially, Dracula appears as a fragile old man with a weird pompadour hairdo and clawlike hands. In London he is a neurasthenic dandy wearing a top hat and blue-tinted pince-nez. He is sad and menacing, but lacks the aristocratic presence of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee or the flesh-crawling terror of Max Schreck and Klaus Kinski.

Oldman Theatre Michael Coveney Spouses to add spice to questions of sanity while Stiffelius was away, and plunged in at his return. Two powerful husband-and-wife interviews were something new in his art: whirling thoughts push the music away from convention on to new tacks. In the first, Stiffelius, noticing the absence of Lina's wedding ring, embarks on a denunciatory cabaletta of fierce, dull monotones, 'hollow with rage', against the chromatic scales that are recurrent in the score. In the second, after Lina's guilt has been established, he demands a divorce; she signs the deed and, in a famous phrase that the censors forbade, addresses Stiffelius not as husband but as priest: 'Ministro, confessatemi'. Both interviews are interrupted by a summons to the pastor to join his flock.

('Never a moment's he testily exclaims.) Both were improved in Aroldo: Verdi's intentions were ambitious but the execution, by standards he later set, was rude. In 1858-59, Seville played Stiffelio and Aroldo side human relationships, destroyed by the American dream, can only be perceived in supervised glimpses. Two depressive inmates on either side of middle age are estranged in limbo from their respective husbands. Patricia (Zoe Wanamaker), mother of seven, is of suicidal Swedish stock; older Karen (Helen Burns) has been failing to interest her racist, Chevy-dealing redneck hubby in her musical hobby. The slightly embarrassing and bizarre climax is a dodgy tap-dance by Karen in top hat and tails to the strains of Gershwin's first and biggest hit song, 'Swanee'.

The play opens with a tentative encounter between the two spouses in the waiting room. The writing is taut and funny, perfectly pitched before detonating under the subsequent quartet in the ward, where a third female patient lies anonymous and ignored. Young Leroy (Peter Davison) is a carpenter descended from one of America's oldest families. He has just built an altar (Patricia later declares that 'the church I'd really love hasn't been invented yet'). Goaded by John Frick's (David Healy) nosiness, ignorance and snobbery, he explodes into defining himself, he hopes, as the play's title.

Not only does Miller keep us on a moral knife-edge. He also queries an official definition of sanity by producing supple, touching dialogue that continuously switches the characters around on the shifting sand of delicate misunderstanding and Menacing: Gary Oldman. Remy interviews the wilful trio, their beautiful Italian guardian, Amanda's agent, the family lawyer (a hilarious performance I by Robbie Coltrane) and a policeman. It turns out that the cop shot the kids' parents in the 2 back 13 years earlier after they had staged an armed robbery on the eighteenth green on a golf 7, course in Maine. The parents (who happen to be called Harry and Sally) usually robbed banks, having taken to crime when they got tired of working.

Filmed in elegant black-and-white and incorporating grainy home-movie footage in colour supposedly taken by the chil- dren's mother, Triple Bogey the movie, like Triple Bogey the yacht, goes round in circles apparently getting nowhere. But in fact it involves us in the I lives of its characters, manages to be constantly amusing and is performed with conviction. In Annabelle Partagee (MGM Picadilly, 18), an actress with the delightful name of Del-phine Zingg plays a languid ballet student who spends her time making love to a middle-aged architect and a young aid worker, exchanging banal profundities with them in bed or on the phone, cycling around Paris and smoking interminably. The one notable moment of Franceses Commencini's mildly feminist directorial debut is an erect penis, slightly out of focus and looking rather like a toadstool, seen in the foreground of the opening shot. This might be a small milestone, so to speak, in popular French cinema.

'Catherine Malfitano, a compelling by side; Venice did so seven years ago; Londoners can make the comparison when the Chelsea Opera Group presents Aroldo in March. Each opera has merits and drawbacks. Catherine Malfitano, a compelling actress and able singer, invested Lina with pathos and dignity. Gregory Yurisich, as her father, was fine at full volume, rather woolly at anything less. The bit parts were well taken by Gwynne Howell, Robin Leggate, Lynton Atkinson, and Adele Paxton.

Elijah Moshinsky, the producer, and his designer, Michael Yeargan, moved the castle and its company from Austria to mid-America, with striking photographs of a Nebraska chapel as a front drop and a Montana glacier behind the cemetery scene. A box-set in forced perspective, with tall practicable doors, served (with modifications) for the four interiors. It was a pity to have no temple, merely (as in the original, censored production) a family prayer meeting, but Zoe Wanamaker: Note perfect. uncontrollable anger. And, as usual in Miller, it all hinges on the difficulty we find in granting our fellows their rights of dignity and fallibility.

Thacker's cast does not miss a trick. The acting is uniformly superb. Helen Burns is finally convulsed in sadness, while Zoe Wanamaker's Patricia hits every note with unfailing tact and humour, dropping half a scale to growl out the funniest lines. Talking vegetables, she jogs Helen's memory on kale: 'You might as well salt your shower curtain and chop it up with a Shelagh Kee-gan's chic design of an illuminated raised floor and oh-so-slowly descending beds MR exercise in cultural Pelmanism. The writing has no texture, and Jim Culleton's production no motor, so that the denouement is implausibly kick-started with the late revelation that one of the brothers, a supposed shle-miel, has collected the insurance on the burnt business and bought the house himself.

Excavating the past in the present tense is a preoccupation of poets from Homer to Hea-ney. You rarely find a truly revelatory dig in the theatre, though Tony Harrison's The Trackers of Oxyrynchus came close. In Empty Space's The Curse of the Pharaohs at the Croydon Warehouse (moved, with cast changes, from the Lyric Hammersmith), playwright Robin Brooks hangs a few post-colonial political punches on the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. His point is that archaeology is a form of robbery, and the soul of a nation is defiled when its stones are disturbed. Thus the famous 'curse' which allegedly struck down Lord Carna-von (an infected mosquito bite was especially pleasing.

McGlinn called the Sinfonietta a Broadway pit-orchestra unrivalled. Pierre Boulez's exciting days with the Birmingham Symphony, carried by Radio 3 through the country, came live to London in a South Bank concert where Petrushka had a stunning performance every strand clear, newly alive, alert, and astounding and Webern's first and last orchestral works were eloquently played. Special praise to the first flute, Kevin Gowland. led to pneumonia) is a form of anti-imperialist revenge. Theatrically, Brooks does not fully exploit his own idea, and he complicates a plodding scenario with a fictional romance between Carnavon's daughter and his colleague in exploration, Howard Carter.

The other main theme is a contrast between Carnavon's aristocratic dilettantism and Carter's gruff professionalism. Their disagreements faithfully reflect the Egyptian career of the enigmatic Carter which dated from 1891 and is the subject of a fascinating exhibition, Howard Garter Before Tutankhamun, at the British Museum (until the end of May). There is something offensively neat and cosy about Andrew Holmes's production, but Anna Georgiadou's evocative design of muslin drapes, and Robin Welch's excellent performance as the troubled, mustachioed Carter, do convey the excitement of that distant November, as the explorers scratch away at the outer chambers in the Valley of the Kings. MESMERISING a film by Louis Desire. THE reputation of Arthur Miller has become confused in a debate about the state of Broadway; Miller, always his own chief advocate, attributes his American decline to the dispersal of his old Times Square constituency and the arrival of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

In Britain, an academically sponsored campaign has reclaimed Miller in a series of worthy books and articles and has even raised a building in his honour at the University of East Anglia. One cautious critic, happily identifying the familiar Miller themes, last week declared Miller's notes more welcome than the 'reedy tunes' of our own dramatists. Well, I don't think they are. Miller's sententious brand of liberal humanism is terribly old hat. And the plainer truth is that Miller, now 77, has not written a really impressive full-length play since the bumpy exorcism of Marilyn Monroe in After the Fall more than 30 years ago.

The Last Yankee at the Young Vic, Miller's unofficial London home, is certainly his best for some time and a vast improvement on The Ride Down Mi Morgan two years ago. But it is a minor piece. Playing at 90 minutes, it is portentously strung out in David Thacker's inspirationally cast production. Intellectually coherent and neatly constructed, the play is at once short-winded and too dense. Not for nothing is it set in a psychiatric ward of a New England institution.

The metaphor hits you on the head: mxMrfd raw! LJI.Lli.II.UJ adds the required, but off-putting, mythic dimension. At which point it would be convenient to announce a new homegrown play of devastating quality. No can do. The Ash Fire (Tricycle, Kilburn) by Gavin Kostick, presented by the Pigsback company of Dublin, is an awkward, undernourished treatment of a promising subject: the arrival of a small number of Eastern European Jews in Ireland before the last war. From Lublin to Dublin, as the programme has it.

Kostick's three brothers, the first of them a Milleresque cabinet maker with a stern, Orthodox outlook, are fictional equivalents of his own Polish antecedents. The central offstage event, the anti-semitic arson attack which destroys Nat's timber yard, is crudely symbolic of the Holocaust. Nat (Peter Hanly) is appalled by his brothers' pat assimilation with two Irish girls, one the landlady's daughter, the other a political activist. He receives a vision of the new Jerusalem and departs with his wife (Kathy Downes) and baby Padraic (named after Pearse) to the non-existent homeland. It is all rather like Neil Simon by numbers, without any jokes.

Jewish domestic ritual is contrasted with Catholic flirtatious-ness, the kaddish and the wedding dance with the songs of Count McCormack and the romantic foxtrot, schnapps and herring stew with Jameson's whiskey and a visit to the Abbey. But these antithetical references amount only to an NATIONAL OLIVIER 071-928 22S2 COMPUTERISED BY wmm CC. W0.CQME 071-497 9977 CC. HO TUNE (8QQKING FEE) SUPERB MOVIEMAKING IMPECCABLE AND BRILLIANTLY ACTED. MALLE IS A NEWSWEEK Jeremy Irons Juliette Binoche Malle Deceit.

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