The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 57

SUNDAY IK APRIL 1993 THE OBSERVER. ARTS 357 Theatre Michael Coveney This year's nominations include: Head-scratching in Stoppard's Arcadia Rowe for Carousel; Chris Langham for Crazy for You. Best Comedy Performance Simon Cadell for Travels With My Aunt; Sara Crowe for Hay Fever; Guy Henry for The Alchemist; Robert Lindsay for Cyrano de Bergerac. Best Director of a Play Stephen Daldry for An Inspector Calls; Simon McBurney for The Street of Crocodiles; Sam Mendes for The Rise and Fall of Little Voice; Adrian Noble for Henry IV (Parts I and 2). Best Director of a Musical Nicholas Hytner for Carousel at the RNT's Lyttelton; Sam Mendes for Assassins at the Donmar Warehouse; Mike Ockrent for Crazy for You at the Prince Edward; Harold Prince for Kiss of The Spider Woman at the Shaftesbury.

Best Choreographer Kenneth MacMillan for Carousel at the RNT's Lyttelton; Marcello Magni for The Street of Crocodiles at the RNT's Cottesloe; Susan Stroman for Crazy for You at the Prince Edward; Tommy Tune for Grand Hotel at the Dominion. Best Opera Production The Royal Opera's Death In Venice; The Royal Opera's Der Fliegende Hollander; The Royal Opera's StifTelio; The Royal Opera's The Fiery Angel. Outstanding Achievement In Opera Sir Edward Dowries for conducting The Fiery Angel and Stiffelio his performing edition for Stiffelio; Bernard Haitink for conducting Die Frau Ohne Schalten; Philip Langridge for his performance in Death In Venice; Julia Varady for her performance in Der Fliegende Hollander. Best New Dance Production The Australian Ballet's Catalyst; The Royal Ballet's production of Kenneth MacMillan's The Judas Tree; London City Ballet's Triple Bill (Les Patineurs, Witchboy, and Donizetti Variations); Rambert Dance Company's Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues. Outstanding Achievement In Dance David Bintley for choreography of the Royal Ballet's Tombeaux; Les Brotherston for scenery and costume design for the Northern Ballet Theatre's season; Joseph Cipolla for his performance in Birmingham Royal Ballet's The Green Table; Siobhan Davies for choreography of Rambert Dance Company's Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues.

Observer Award in memory of Kenneth Tynan The Almeida, Islington for The Rules of the Game. Medea, No Man 's Land, The Deep Blue Sea; Kenneth Branagh for Hamlet; Eddie Izzard, an accomplished and original comedian; Robert Lepage for Needles and Opium; John Osborne for Dejavu; Billy Roche for The Wexford Trilogy. Best Actor Kenneth Cranham for An Inspector Culls; Paul Eddington for No Mini's Land; Paul Scofield for Heartbreak House: Robert Stephens for Henry IV. Best Actress Stockard Channing for Six Degrees of Separation; Judi Dench for The Gift of The Gorgon; Jane Horrocks for The Rise ami Fall of Utile Voice; Alison Steadman for The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. BBC Award for Best New Play Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare; Someone Who'll Watch Over Me by Frank McGuinncss; The Gift of The Gorgon by Peter Shaffer; The Street of Crocodiles, devised by Theiitrc de Complicite.

Best Revival An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley; Heartbreak House by Bernard Shaw; Henry IV (Paris 1 and 2) by William Shakespeare; No Man's Land by Harold Pinter. Best Comedy Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon; On the Piste by John Godbcr; The Rise and Fall of Little Voice by Jim Cartwright. American Express Award for Best Musical Assassins, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; Crazy for You, music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin; Grand Hotel, songs by Robert Wright and George Forrest; Kiss of the Spider Woman, music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb.

Best Musical Revival Annie Get Your Gun, music and lyrics by Irving Berlin; Carousel, music by Richard Rodgcrs, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammcrslcin II; Lady Be Good, music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin. Best Actor in a Musical Brent Carver for Kiss of the Spider Woman; Henry Goodman for Assassins; Michael Hayden for Carousel; Kirby Ward for Crazy for You. Best Actress in a Musical Kim Criswell for Annie Get Your Gun; Ruthie Henshall for Crazy for You; Kelly Hunter for The Blue Angel; Joanna Riding for Carousel. Best Actor in a Supporting Role Robin Bailey for Pygmalion; David Bradley for Henry IV (Part 2); Julian Glover for Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2); Martin Shaw for An Ideal Husband. Best Actress in a Supporting Role Annette Badland for The Rise and Fall of Little Voice; Elizabeth Bradley for Billy Liar; Rosemary Harris for Lost in Yonkers; Barbara Leigh-Hunt for An Inspector Calls.

Best Supporting Performance in a Musical Ian Bartholomew for Radio Times; Janie Dee for Carousel; Clive AS I POSSESS a son called Thomas Coveney and a colleague called Benedict Nightingale, I had better tread carefully in grappling with Tom Stoppard's new play at the National, Arcadia (Lyttelton), in which the two chief activating characters are named Thomasina Cov-erly and Bernard Nightingale. Stoppard has already written the nightmare of a critic turning up a play he has innocently gone along to review in The Real Inspector Hound; and if there is one predominant theme in the new firework display of coincidence and collision in a nineteenth-century Derbyshire country house, it is that if you really exist, and sometimes even if you don't, you will, one day, finally appear in a Tom Stoppard play. Thomasina is a pupil of Byron's fictional Cambridge contemporary, Septimus Hodge, in 1809, two years before Byron high-tailed it to Europe (for reasons soon to be tendentiously explained) on the Lisbon packet; Nightingale is a querulous academic visiting the Cover ly household in the 1990s. The sumptuous classical room, designed by Mark Thompson, is a period setting and an alterable habitation. There is a theodolite for surveyors and a tortoise (called Lightning) for a paperweight.

Claret cups and coffee mugs. Landskip gardening. Puns. Ponds. Lacks and lakes.

Seduction and learning. Future and the past. Research and speculation. Classicism and romanticism. The trigger was Stoppard's reading of James Gleick's Chaos, an American pop-scientific treatise about the chain-reaction theory of historical incidence; I find all this much less fascinating than the world of alternative science and syn-chronicity which has been so brilliantly exploited in performance by Ken Campbell.

Campbell imposes order where none exists; Stoppard tweaks chaos from suppositions of intellectual rigour. At Tuesday night's premiere, I was enthralled by Trevor Nunn's witty and transparent production, set in Mark Thompson's handsome, curving creamy country mansion, but frankly perplexed. Nightingale is not the only sleuth. Stoppard makes detectives of us all. And there is also Felicity Kendal as Hannah Jarvis, who is writing a history of this garden at Sidley Park.

She has also written a book about Lady Caroline Lamb, which Nightingale reviewed with a pat on the bottom and a thousand words in The Observer. Floating through the house are a minor poet; a butler; a landscape gardener called Culpability Noakes; Thomasina's mother, Lady Croom (Harriet Walter dispensing brutish poli-tesse); and various other descendent Coverlys, one of whom, energetically played by Samuel West, an example of 'Brideshead Regurgitated', is tracing details of past grouses through a system of iterated algorithms. No one like Stoppard for making you feel both spoilt and inadequate as an audience. There has been an erotic encounter in the gazebo and eAs a Stoppard actress, Felicity Kendal has quite subverted her reputation for daffy decorousness3 Ezra Chater, a poet whom Byron excoriated in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, has been shot. Chater never existed; the reference has been divined by Nightingale in a pencilled superscription on Septimus Hodge's edition.

But this fictional Chater may also have been a botanist who discovered a dwarf dahlia in Martinique in 1810 and died there of a monkey bite. The genius of the place is decribed as a hermit with a tortoise, and that explains, or at least contributes to an understanding of, the scientific investigation running parallel to the literary speculations. The combustion Stoppard seeks is in gelling a murder mystery with intellectual acrobatics. Nunn's production does everything possible to ignite the proceedings and the acting all round is superb: the central duel, echoing the supposed tiff between Byron and Chater, is joined with fire and precision by Bill Nighy as the hapless Nightingale and Felicity Kendal as Hannah. The relationship between Hodge and his pupil is engagingly played by Rufus Sewell and Emma Fielding.

The play finally bursts its bounds in the sensual submission to the strains of the waltz, which invades the past and the present. A discussion about carnal embrace was the play's starting point. As a Stoppard actress, Ms Kendal has quite subverted her reputation for daffy decorousness. She speaks his sinewy, supple lines with pungency and bravado. In Hapgood, she stepped fully clothed from a shower as a spy chief whose smart toughness was only gradually thawed by emotional considerations.

And in Stoppard's recent, magisterial radio play In the Native State, she embodied to perfection this classic Stop-pardian conflict of sense and sensuality as the poetess Flora Crewe sitting for her portrait in India ('Heat has had its way with me'). The elevation of footnotes in cultural history is all part of Stoppard's humanist instinct as a writer. He installs pride in people's identity, moves them centre stage, be they Rosen-crantz and Guildenstern, or the minor British consular official Henry Carr in Travesties, or Flora Crewe who apparently just failed to sit for Modigliani, or poor old insignificant and cuckolded Ezra Chater. Arcadia has been heralded as some kind of rebirth for Stoppard. But he has never really gone away, although writing movie scripts sometimes amounts to the same thing.

In the Native State, split like Arcadia between past and present, may be his finest work to date, a noyelistic, Forsterian epic of painting, poetry, imperialism and literary reputations. In Arcadia he doesn't change tack, but in a general sense, picks up from where he left off. Brief notes on two striking London fringe productions. Schiller's The Robbers, in the Penguin translation by Frank Lamport, has been heavily cut and courageously presented by the London Stage Company at the Latchmere in Battersea Park Road. Pre-Byronic Romantic passion curses through this play of destiny, vengeance and fraternal strife, and Paul Miller's production in a cool, blue box is by no means under- Felicity Kendal: Speaks with pungency and by Richard Mildenhall A.vt V-fP ac5ed by Hammersmith studio.

I first the Yom Kippur War is entirely colm Neill as the duped, saw this compelling troupe in a engulfed in its own special char-tragic Count and Alan Gilchrist sexy conflagration inspired by acter, and those of the impas-and Dominic Taylor as his frac- The Unbearable Lightness of sioned, gestural company. Some tioussons. Being in its pre-Daniel Day of the show is as impenetrable as And welcome back to Nava Lewis state. The prompt here Stoppard, but there is no mis-Zuckerman's astonishing was Malcolm Lowry's Under the taking its quality or its luminous Tmu-Na company from Tel Volcano, but the scenario of intensity. Or its creative debt to Aviv in Real Time at the- Hnnm in Um- rn krmlr re vu vii iiiv.

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