The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 26

26 SUNDAY 7 FEBRUARY 1988 review Lout of our OBSERVER 3335 RICHARD MIIDENHALL Africa mash stew I 'White Miscftier and 'Robocop' PHILIP FRENCH gesting the anti-colonial struggles and -rejections to come, an effect underlined by using the same actor (Edwin Mahinda) who played the boy crushed between settlers and Mau Mau terrorists in Harry Hook's "Kitchen Toto'. Nevertheless, 'White Mischief offers a good deal in the way of coarse entertainment, and it is handsomely designed and photographed. A couple of years ago the lovely Greta Scacchi was persuaded by the producers of Defence of the Realm' that it would be artistically justified to keep her clothes on throughout the picture. She has reverted to more familiar ways here and is continually in and out of some gorgeous, costumes. As the editors of the National Geographic Mag-azine used to say, there's always something nude out of Africa, though they meant the natives.

From the murky recent past to the murky near future, and the confident Hollywood debut of the dutch director Paul Verhoeven, RoboCop (Leicester Square Theatre, 18), a ferocious black com- Lindsay Duncan as Maggie Hie cat with 'carnivorous lips of the mid-Fifties and a wicked, provoking grin'. "nJ MICHAEL RADFORD'S White Mischief (Curzon West End, 18) has been adapted by its director and Jonathan Gems from James Fox's engrossing book about the unsolved murder of Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Enroll in 1941 in Kenya, a supposed crime passional for which his fellow Old Etonian Sir Jock Delves Broughton was tried and acquitted. -Not since Adolf and Eva farewell party in their Berlin bunker have so many unredeemedly awful people been gathered in one place as the collection of British upper-class expatriates on view. The title is intended to suggest Evelyn Waugh, who generously called this bunch of promiscuous, drunken, degenerate, snobbish, thieving boors 'a community of English squires established on the Equator9, and the movie aims to be something like 'Out of Africa' re-written by Waugh and Agatha Christie. It might have been called 'Murder in Happy Valley' or (to adapt the title of Edmund Wilson's essay on whodunnits) 'Who Cares Who Killed the Earl of This is Radford's third film about the appalling consequences of a powerfully erotic, illicit love-affair that challenges social taboos.

But with 'Another Time, Another Place' and '1984' we felt sympathy for the people Here we feel nothing but contempt for the lecherous Erroll (Charles Dance), the middle-aged Sir Jock Joss Ackland), and Jock's beautiful young wife (Greta Scacchi), who conducts her affair with Erroll so openly that even their decadent Nairobi set is shocked and her permissive husband humiliated beyond control. Their story is pathetic, not tragic. This is not to say that the movie shows them in a worse light than the book. On the contrary. Radford, for instance, doesn't disclose that Broughton was a crook or that Erroll was once a member of.

Moslems Brit- ish Union of Fascists. Fox, however, provided a dense web of. social detail and infected us with the obsessive interest in the cast he inherited from Cyril Connolly, who worked with him on the investigation and introduced him to the milieu. Radford, one supposes, is try- ing to create an image of a society, the way Renoir did in 'La regie du Jeu', a classic film that also dealt with a murder committed in a gathering of decadent aristocrats at roughly the same time. But Renoir's picture had a moral centre this picture lacks, though Radford tries to make something out of the taciturn Gilbert Colvile (John Hurt), an eccentric Old Etonian who took a serious interest in farming and African culture.

A better comparison perhaps is 'La Dolce Vita' and FeLLini clearly inspired the hallucinatory, hieratic final scene, though (his is made dramatically possible only by a drastic alteration of the known facts. The picture ends on a close-up of a young Kikuyu servant staring at us in accusatory fashion, sug- on the city, as an indestructible creature programmed 'to secure the public interest, protect the innocent, and uphold law'. But this cross between Frankenstein's monster, Robby the Robot and Dirty Harry develops a memory and a conscience. This displeases his employers for the corporate king-pin is in league with the underworld on one hand and the military on the other and doesn't want a just peace on any front. Verhoeven, his writers and designers have given RoboCop' the energy of a comic-strip.

Their picture uses special effects in a purposive, witty manner (the fight between RoboCop and ED 209 is modelled on King Kong Godzilla) and has an outrageous sense of humour. The Franco-German Terminus (Cannon, Tottenham Court Road, 15, from Friday) also attempts a fable of violent adventure in the near future and falls flat on its face. This 'Mad Max' road-race picture, shot on Hungarian, loca-itions and starring Boat-faced Jur-gen Prochnow as a sinister scientist, Karen Allen as the driver of a computerised truck and Johnny Hallyday as a hard-boiled outlaw, is the disappointing directorial debut of Pierre William. Glenn, one of France's best tinematographers. Ten years ago Glenn did a won- derful job as lighting cameraman on Bertrahd Tavernier's bleak, futuristic 'Death Watch', using Glasgow and the surrounding countryside, to dazzling effect.

Sadly, me confused, visually dull 'Terminus' can't hold a candle to that beautifully lit picture. Between 'The Left-Handed Gun' in 19S8 and 'Missouri Breaks' in 1976, Arthur Perm made an unbroken series of ambitious, memorable films. Since then he's been fighting far below his weight and does little more than shadow-box with the featherweight script of Dead of Water (Cannon Panton St, IS), a stagey thriller starring Mary Steenbergen as an actress lured to a snow-bound mansion in upper New York State to be used as an expendible pawn in a blackmail plot. This is an old-fashioned dam-sel-in-dis tress tale with no sexual threat from her captors, an elderly psychiatrist (Jan Rubes) arid an epicene handyman (Roddy and it begin to compare with Frederick Knott's terrifying 'Wait Until Dark', which Penn directed on Broadway in the 1960s. even uses that old movie trick of divesting the villain of the last vestige of sympathy by having him ill-treat an animal.

Just before Jack Broughton goes to meet his maker in 'white Mischief he shoots his wife's dbg. The authors of 'Dead of Winter' prepare us to exult in the violent death of the crippled shrink by showing him stamp on a pair of innocent goldfish. Come to think of it, how would you identify a guilty goldfish? Lindsay Duncan in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Vanessa Redgrave in 'A Touch of the Poet' MICHAEL RATCLIFFE IT HAS taken the National Theatre more than 25 years, bless it, to stage a play by Tennessee Williams, and if Clause 28 of the Local Government Bill gets onto the Statute Book by Easter as now seems possible they have ot round to Cat On A Hot Tin loof CLyttelton)just in time. The hero is a former college sports star whose friendship with a buddy now dead means more to him than his marriage to a beautiful, unhappy wife.CouId this be what the Member for Spelthorne means by the 'prombtion'of homosexuality? The last time this play was staged in London, 30 years ago by the young Peter Hall, you had to pretend to join a club for the evening in order to see it (in Liverpool, too). Williams is a dispassionate moralist: the unhappy Brick (Ian Charleson) is pursued, by Furies as fierce as any that went after Orestes.

Skipper's death has driven him into sullen alcoholic despair, and the fear planted by his father, Big Daddy (Eric Porter), that thie friendship was somehow 'not right', together with his own guilt at the way he rejected it, will certainly keep him knocking back the sour mash long after the play is done. This second act, in Howard Davies's production, is an absolute cracker. The quarrel between Brick and Big Daddy circles with a lazy and deceptive pointlessness over familiar ground until the older man sees an opening and plummets for the kill. Charleson, having bided his time on the edge of things-for one-and-a-half acts, repels Big Daddy's accusation with a choking, barely coherent force, scrabbling and leaping across the floor, lashing out with the crutch that supports his brc- ken foot. He strikes back at his father with the only forbidden truth he has: that Big Daddy has terminal cancer and only a short time to live.

Porter, in long grey hair and beard, plays a role conventionally thought so inaccessible to English actors that even Olivier mistook it for Colonel Sanders when playing it on television. He allows Big Daddy an intelligence that tern- 1 Computing young, keening peasant face, makes Sara excessively shrewish and sour and employs a mannered form of delivery from the back of the throat which, at present, strangles too many words. The main reason for hurrying to see the play on the intimate arena stage of the Young Vic over the next two weeks it transfers to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, after that is to see Redgrave's radiant Nora dose up. It is a smallish role which she invests with a soft giggle, indestructible meekness and loving pride from which all traces of sentimentality have, been struck. Much more adventurous and rewarding, however indeed an event of exceptional richness and interest is die British premiere of Botho Strauss's dark and disturbing variations oh 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', The Park men King rages against London Trans-, port r- At the Hampstead Theatre, storms are brewed in staff-room tea cups.

Ton Robin Baitz's The Film Sodety is set in 1970 at Blenheim School in South Africa. The place has, unfortunately, not changed much in 100 years. Ivy-choked red brick walls and odd autumnal lumps create a dominant impression of rust, matching both dialogue and mood. Michael Attenborough's production successfully demonstrates the tedium of staff-room politics and the doubtful enlightenment of a 'progressive' teacher who still talks of 'kaffira'. There are no pupils on stage, so the audience become the class stuck in school, the clock, waiting for the bell.

KATE KELLAWAY pers his irritability and a worldli-ness that begins to look wise. It is a wonderful, refining and truthful performance that transforms our preconceptions of the role completely and makes it his own. The virtuoso first act still needs more energy, panic and speed. Lindsay Duncan plays Brick's wife Maggie with the pale mask and carnivorous lips of the mid-Fifties, and a wicked, provoking grin. She employs two specially acquired walks a pugilist's strut and a debutante's sway with which to defend herself and her sexual frustrations in the hostile environment of Brink's family home.

She is a keen listener, and a wit, but her voice, at present, is letting her down. The heroines of Tennessee Williams are quasi-operatic roles which demand a lyrical diversity, strength and Ehrasing to put across the bright ysteria of their lives. In all recent performances including Joanne Woodward's in the filmed 'Glass Menagerie' that musical strength and colour have been missing, and. they are missing here. The rest of the company, led by Barbara Leigh-Hunt's flushed and blundering Big Mama, is inventive and strong.

Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet, directed by David Thacker and designed by Saul Radomsky at the Young Vic, is, like 'Cat', a play about booze, greed, the human wastefulness of hypocrisy, and the pain caused by an obsession with the falsified past. The comparison, on this occasion, goes against O'Neill, for 'A Touch Of The Poet'(I957, premiered after his death) finds O'Neill at his most prolix, rewriting till kingdom come. It is a comedy-melodrama of resilience and recrimination set in (Crucible, Sheffield). It is translated by Tinch Minter and Anthony Vivis, directed by Steven Pimlott with Clare Vena-i bles, and designed by Tom Cairns. You will see nothing more ambitious outside London all year.

r1 Oberon (John- Ramm) and Titania (Cecily Hobbs) return to me derelict cities to teach the joyless citizens again the finer ints of love. Mr Strauss, like ennessee Wffliarns' and Eugene O'Neill, belongs to the passionate school ot romantic anti-materuu-r ists, so, naturally, tJiey Titania, however, falls in love with a i bull the myth of Pasiphae and the Minotaur is stirred into the i mix and ends up a matron at her own silver" wedaing with only four guests the previously quarrelling, now frozen with respect and her own, dis-: creedy hoofed, son. Oberon loses his powers completely, forgets die words of 'know a and cannot even get a job. Not all of it works, particularly after the interval, and for this the: playwright, translators and directors must all share responsibility, but' the first half grips the spectator unforgettably in a landscape of urban desolation where: graffiti have replaced arthen no longer fight for-their women but come to gen-tlemens'agreements, and reality dissolves in the fear that they i have all ceased to exist and are merely dreaming one another's -olives. Pimktt and Cairns pulled off the same trick in a 'Twelfth, Night this time last year, when Ramm.

was an outstanding and dangerous Feste. He confirms himself here as one of the most I gifted yoimg; actors around, mix- ututgu Wliu and gentie despair. old the dining room of Con Melody's tavern near Boston in 1828. Only four characters count: Con (Timothy Dalton), a drinker and veteran hell-raiser of the Peninsular 'War; his adoring wife Nora (Vanessa Redgrave); their rebarbative daughter Sara (Rudi Davies) and Deborah (Amanda Boxer), the mother of Simon, loved by Sara but never seen. How Sara gets Simon despite the devastating asperity of Deborah's intervention, how Con throws off his false Peninsular self and how the Irish and the Yankees give each 'other bloody noses to the general satisfaction of all is the matter of the play, which lasts three-and-a-half hours.

Dalton is a very good actor elegant, devilish, witty but Con is a huge part or a resourceful monster-rjerfonner, and that he is not. Davies, with her pale, MR BONG has retired from London Transport and now plans to return to his native Trinidad. To celebrate he takes his daughters out to a restaurant. Over dinner it becomes apparent that Barrie Keeffe's King of England (Theatre Royal, Stratford East) is a witty modem version of 'King Lear'. Mr King (Rudolph Walker) tries to make over his house to his two daughters, but when he proposes a toast to England, aa if to thank a benign host, Susan, a tough nurse (Claire Benedict), refuses to raise her glass.

King's other, daughter, Linda (Ellen Thomas) has a phonily sparky personality to match her gold lame dress and will, drink to anything. Philip Hedley directs this zestful, touching production with its diverting 'storm scene' in which Bates Form Group Our client manufacturing impressive Reporting will be insurance company. This post with good decision-making. with previous The importance benefits package progress to For further (Law), 88MLI5ULSG Daniel Bates Manchester Apply in strict Daniels General Scacchi: Familiar ways. edy that may be a little too violent for some stomachs.

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