The Observer du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 40

40 OBSERVER SUNDAY20 MARCH 1988 fi0 NEIL UBBERT THEATRE Latin lessons fill less OBS TWO GERMAN playsjof radical and historic importance, sepa- 5. rated- by nearly -200 years, lie-' embalmed uv the deadening and--; didactic entertainment which surfaces as' TheTntor at The Old Vic. 1W 'j-" IfUgr ROMEO is not in his first youth. To rejuvenate himself he performs a merry little jump aiming for his Juliet, an old bag on a balcony. The joke in Terence Rattigan's Harlequinade (Royalty-Theatre) is not merely that -Romeo is old enough to be a grandfather but the discovery that he actually a grandfather.

The feet that this play is about bad acting: does not insure it against the real thing. But, directed by Tim Luscombe, Paul Eddington's tormented old hack is amusing and Dorothy. Tutin proves, diver tingly, that it is. not possible to flatter someone success-' fully while eating a The evening picks up in the second half with Rattigan's The Browning" Version; first "staged with 'Harlequinade', in 1948? In a mellow, disordered study Xdesigned by -Carl Toms) a -Ilatin Crocker-Harris --(Paul Eddington), swallows medicine, sherry and his pride with pained decorum. He is '-retiring in both senses of the word.

His -abrasive, tweedy (Dorothy, Tutm) stares out through-French- windows! omo greenery and is obsessed with a young master Frank Hunter (John Duttme) with whom, she is havmg an afrair. Dorothy -Tutm shifts skilfully from tyrant to victim and shows how -misery- translates into cruelty. Paul Eddington brings -out the point that manners maketfuand at the same time breaketh man, and shows eloquently a man who knows how to plan a timetable while filling his own time wretchedly. His pupil, Taplow, stoutly played by Darnel Beales, describes him as a likeable-but -shrivelled nut. The vnut cracks when, In the only generous moment of the play, TapfoW presents his schoolmaster with Browning's translation of Aeschylus.

The scene brought a lump to mythroat and 'tears to my eyes, long before: Crocker-Hams had carefully translated jts touching Latm dedication. KATE KELLAWAY The Tutor' and two Cherry Orchards MICHAEL RATCLIFFE listless translated by Pip Broughton and designed by. A. Christian Nothings more rinifiless replaces" them; A' play written -for Germany in 1950 is played: to'an'English audience in the spring of 1988 as though nothing 'in the' theatre or in our perception of life, the eighteenth century or Brecht himself had ever changed. Steiof designs a- sentimentalised Brechtian view of eighteenth-century society in which the exploiting rich wear garish colours and wigs stiff as meringues while the poor are not only dumb but virtuous in gentle browns and greens.

swish' across in front of a landscape derived Caspar David Friedrich as exemplary scene, follows exemplary, scene, and each is located with Gothic captions suspended overhead. The principal actors among them Niamh. Frank Thornton, Windsor Davies and Sheila Reid appear to have been taught movement there is a witty skating scene but little astringency or attack. They thus fall back on their own devices, often! skilfully, occasionally, not. The lesser and middle orders, however, are something else; the scenes among the young scholars of Halle and, worse, in the village schoolroom of the pedant (Vernon DobtchefT) whence the philandering Lauffer flees, are quite agonisingly bad.

The audience listens in polite and melancholy silence broken Kevin McNally as a 'randy-slob tutor with 'deadening: and didactic entertainment'. The first was written in 1774; by Jakob Reinhold Lenz, cracked genius of the und; Drang movement, chucked out of Goethe's' Weimar for. unspecified bad behaviour and found dying on the streets of Moscow in 17921- Thcsecond is Bertolt Brecht's. rewriting; of Lenz, one of the first and apparently most brilliant creations of his Berliner Ensemble. This is the play we see.

'The Tutor' is a play for 1950. The German Republic had just christened itself, was barely a year old and had just severed itself with exquisite completeness from the Third Reich and the Second World War. Brecht saw more clearly, and devised 'The Tutor to hose down the dark cellars of German history and teach all Germans, not-only the intellectuals who failed to resist Hitler, a lesson in their own servility and weakness. Lauffer (Kevin McNally), randy-slob tutor to the daughters of the gentry in an eighteenth-century Prussian country town, literally castrates himself when he realises that only by removing all sexual temptation from his work will he ever keep a job. 'The positive declared Brecht when later defending the play from charges of.

negative thinking, 'is the bitter anger against inhumane conditions of: indefensible privilege and narrow-minded What bitterness? Which anger? No sulphurous whiff of these old dangers and brave victories survives in Angelika Hur-wicz's loyalist, clinical and Niamh Cusack as Gustchen in a Salty Crabb), with a huge oil-painting of the idealised orchard filling sky and horizon in the second act and half -the stage, like a creeping at the dance on the day of the sale. Sheffield's thrust stage would raise the walls of naturalism round a play at its peril (I'd like to see it tried, chough) and Simon Vincenzi sets 'The Cherry Orchard' on a scrubbed white floor' scattered with toys and sheeted furniture or empty save for one park bench in a deep, limpid, summery' space. Very Crucible, very Europe. The lighting (designer Jonathan Church) is exceptionally sensitive to the moods of the play: the barely perceptible shift sunset to rooonrise as daughter of the house and eternal student organise with irony and fervour by the wild bursts of individual laughter, which are true of goodwill crumbling under the provocation of sus-. tained tedium into deep unease.

To pretend, otherwise, or this is a welcome occasion, is to lower the high expectations set by Jonathan Miller's European ambitions for the Old Vic: That one may, after all, play a bore without driving an audience into the night holding its collective head in self-defence is an old lesson new-taught by Lorcan Granitch as the insufferable Tro-fimov in The Cherry Orchard at Bristol Old Vic. You hate him, but you listen. Chekhov's most elusive masterpiece isthe kind of project by which a theatre company tests its return to confidence or its existing strength. It is directed by -Paul Unwin in Bristol, where the Old Vic is merging from a crisis of funding and identity, and is onto its third artistic director, Mr Unwin, in two years. He looks like a stayer.

The Crucible in. Sheffield, on the other hand, is one of the most distinctive successful theatres in the country and their 'Cherry Orchard', directed by Clare Venables with Steven Pim-lott, may be seen until the end of this week: Two telly-queens much experienced in theatre lead the companies as Madame Ranevsky: temporarily shakes off simpering Mavis Riley ('Coronation Street') in Bristol; Sheffield has Anna Carteret ('Juliet Bravo'). Both productions reject the naturalistic settings of convention: Bristol partially (designer, of tempered steel. Two first-rate, unalike, Lopakhins succeed to Ranev- sky's worid-David -Ross (Sheffield) a genial terrier well on the way to acceptability in -big business but taking no passengers on board; Patrick Malahide 1 (Bristol) passionate and Irish, forever the peasant kept at bay. Sheffield uses Ronald Hingley's translation which is fine but lacks a gut sense of theatre and, combined, with the reformist zeal of Venables: and Pimlott, produces a 'Cherry Orchard' almost abstracted and dry.

Mr Unwin has the balance about right, and the Bristol company is enormously aided by using Trevor Griffiths superb English version whose very abrasiveness makes it surely the most moving there is. Steps up The great French mime artist Jacques Leeoq talks to JIM Moving heaven and as children jeering at spastics. Yet how are we meant to react to able-bodied dancers imitating twisted limbs and uncontrollable shakes? One performer, David Massingham, was genuinely funny because he established a self-important twit of a character whose super-cool illusions could be shared and mocked: The others were pitiful inadequates, supposedly comic because they dreamed of being normal. Although the dance hall routines were sharp and ingenious, Marley did 'not seem in control of the tone or implica- 1 tions of the Yet 'Crimplene' has estate lished the company's reputation as a group to watch on the dance-theatre circuit. AMICI DANCERS move only when they have something to convey, not for the sake of filling the stage with movement: their stilkiess is compelling.

The power of intensely felt gesture is something that needs to be learnt by able-bodied dance companies, searching for a new form of physical theatre. Most of Ami-ci's members are mentally handicapped or blind; but their bodies are adept at expressing the motions and images conjured up by Wolfgang Stange in Ruckblick, his tribute to the German artist, Kathe Kollwitz, performed at the Riverside Studios last week. Stange and his. group, have produced a remarkable piece of Expressionist theatre, using dramatic lighting and makeup to enhance the effect of characters from Koll- there is time to get to know each victim and watch how the light falls on his supplicant head, resting briefly against the blindly impartial hand of Death. Most moving of all is the duet between, Kollwitz (Hilary Beard) and her son Peter (Chris Collins).

The Pieta images are universal and particular to Koll-witz's drawings: the movements are beautiful because they are true. By any criteria Collins is a dancer rather than a disabled dancer. Adventures in Motion Pictures is still The impact of 'Ruckbhck; comes from the finding its way: its stylishnessand lack of unusual aualitiesjiaisurenessjof focus is tvnical of thelnMdrofi'small witz's drawmgs 'Rucbhck' recreates ei froma work tBritisb companies. It was--epner to mcmuncs as iur uuee vtouch that missing sherlpVecV, suajiy uiMDicu f.o n-iPiace by a group i QUO, white-faced nstalktilepjeople pKKUig lueni oil middle ofVFlace'sSpruis Motion Pictures; Jacob Marley's Does Your Crimplene Go All Crusty When You Rub? is set in an institutional dance hall peopled Here were dancer-choreographers knew exactly what they wanted to they wanted to say it. -Two Apartment turned everyday movement dance, conveying -an mtimateand relationship between the two performers the society that determines their very way they move.

Stange uses his large cast to show the suffering of the defenceless, as anonymous cannon fodder and concentration camp victims or as sharply delineated individuals. In a chilling game of musical chairs, each excluded player appeals for compassion from his fellows before bong condemned. The game builds slowly and inexorably; by misfits. I he dancmg, once it gets going, reflects the fantasies of the ill-assorted patrons, most of whom have terminal twitches and tics. The laughter' these antics generate seems to me misplaced, as mindless the necessary world to come ('There is! is the kind of effect this theatre 'brings off with, breathtaking simplicity and skill With one important exception, both productions take a briskly Chekhovian view of the play and, avoid the tearfulness with ivhich the playwright claimed its first director, Stams-; lavsky, had destroyed it.

The exception is Miss Carteret whose Ranevsky is a handsome, forthright woman proud of her Parisian figure but so radiant and so weepy by turns that it1 is know what she feels about anything. Miss Barlow's landowner, by contrast, conceals behind her. wwitchingty pretty face and girlish flirtatiousness half a lifetune of conviction, a sweet touch of cruelty and a will Jacques. Lecoq: 'Mdyemeht 1 India, complete with female impersonators and a 76-year-old clown. Organising -this gruelling extravaganza is the street conjuror and Admiral's son, Jamieson, who considers his festival the beginning of a 10-year programme to 'shift the very emphasis of theatre'.

Jamieson argues that only a visually-led theatre can serve a multi-cultural society such as ours. Along with several distinguished teachers he has recruited for the festival, Jamieson first found liberation at the feet of Lecoq. The great man's school occupies a former boxing hall behind the uneasy cosmopolitan crush of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. You discover its galleried splendour buried among poky courtyards, where long-standing tenants plaster 'Silence' notices for the benefit of their new Arab neighbours' offspring. Lecoq's establishment is mod-esdy funded, and little known among non-theatrical Parisians.

In an office shared with four heating boilers, his tumbling words are snapped up for translation by his Glasgow-born wife, Fay. At the core of his philosophy, he explains, is the actor's HILEY earth dents, he is constantly challenging himself, plundering new areas of research, then reporting back to vast assemblies of disa- pies every four or five -He finds the highest inspiration, he says-in Greek tragedy and: corn-media dell- 'But I don't bury myself in historical references. I try to, rediscover, the -spirit of these Cofftmedia nothing tqrdo.vwith;;those about world', where llrkV oMiiinim- AFT amnV early career was spent in Milan, where he founded the first school for the celebrated Piccolo Theatre. But he adds this irreverent wjunctJori: 'If you're thinking of forget about Perhaps more surprishig, his obsession with has prompted Jiim to explore architecture over tht; years, and he has even collaborated on build-ing design. His students fabricate and rehearse with abstract' or suspended structures, like the 'mobiles' of Alexander Calder, whom he admired.

For Jacques Lecoq, the age of mixed media has only just begun. Despite his informal nature, Lecoq classes proceed with a certain brisk 'I don't want my pupils to" love me. Good and evil don't-exist in teaching, nor do prescriptions, only analysis of how move. I'm like a gardener: who knows how to make a carrot grow better than others. But I could never turn, it As for the London festivalj it's a measure of the burgeoning interest in 'wider theatre' that Lecoq's classes 'were "over-subscribed within days of 1 booking opening.

Juliet Stephenson and five other mdependentTrriinded actors from the National or'RSC were among those isiginng up. Lecoq declares mmself delighted to endorse the event, even if the organisers, as! he puts it wryly, 'are not; the top 'Your young people are proposing a new form of theatre. I hope they'll be given a chance to flop occasionally, or their imagination may be destroyed. Youngsters today are afraid of failure. They imitate what's successful: This kills their In the nearest he comes to proselytising, Jacques Lecoq adds: 'It's best that youth should practise rnirhe rather than speech.

Later in life, they will have only the memory of The London International Workshop festival runs from 26 March to 3 June. Jacques Lecoq's performance 'Tout Bouge? will be at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 31 March. RICHARD MILOENHALL is the basis of body and how it moves in space. These can be both as eloquent and profound as Shakespearean verse. But he quickly asserts the importance of stillness too: You can't talk about movement unless you have equilibrium.

You must know about the horizontal to undertake being vertical. What we give the public comes from within. There's a link, a. reverberation between inner and outer space. If I make a physical action pulling or pushing it's analagous to internal emotion, love or hate.

An oblique gesture can be sentimental, melodramatic. A vertical gesture is tragic. I indicate passions in space. His teaching begins with careful observation, but the results are more poetic than imitative. 'I see a tree.

I become a tree. I see a cow. I become a To the casual observer, his charges' class work can appear rough arid raucous, idiosyncratic self-expression without a hint of illusion. Lecoq stresses that he is not hostile to language, though, and encourages his pupils to scrutinise poetry at length. Again, the task is not to interpret.

'You must relive each phase physically If Lecoq can be tough on stu ONE of the world theatre's most radical" figures is an avuncular, 66-year-old, tubby, slightly stooped teacher of mime who seldom leaves Paris. For 30 Jacques Lecoq has drilled devoted pupils from over 50 nations, restlessly a style of movement light years from the prettified illusions of Marcel PMarceau. rKSubvefsivelv, gesture as the essence oflheatre. 'ThuiP lffi1 clisulenges life lmn- stranglehold, tighter in Britain' than anywhere, of acred text and directorial supremacy. 'Movement is the basis of he declares.

'We call the art of acting lejeu -it's a physical i His system took no less than 600 hours of videotape to record for posterity. The French government-funded the project, and in 1982 awarded him the Legion of Peter Brook is among the many pilgrims to have visited him: Colleagues have included Dario Fo and the Theatre National Populaire's Jean Villar. Former pupils range from the most audacious of memuses-en-scene, Ariane Mnouchkine, to our own abrasive oracle of the backstreets, Steven Berkoff. Lecoq graduates also started the Footsbarn outfit, Theatre de Complicite, and the late, much-loved 'Moving Picture Mime Show'. Such imagistically anarchic, groups exert a crowd-pulling power and influence on their peers rarely acknowledged in Arts Council 'With the smiles Lecoq, 'I have to strip down their interpretative training.

Mine is a school of creativity. I remind the actors that they are This sort of stuff doesn't go down well at the RSC and the National Theatre. But it is uttered at a new dawn of actor power, led in classical theatre by Simon Callow and Kenneth Branagh, and by a whole breed of determinedly autonomous talents too glibly dismissable as 'performance artists'. Lecoq and his followers' successes have made the most eloquent case yet for the practitioner as art-form, and the abandonment of make-believe. Now Jacques Lecoq is corning to Britain, heading this country's most ambitious manifestation of theatre 'beyond words', with five days of tuition and his seminal performancelecture, 'Tout Bouge'.

The London International Workshop Festival will be a two-month binge of intensive classes and unlikely performances, embracing physical disciplines from mime and acrobatics to massage, and a Gujarati story-telling troupe which has never before left ii in the must find a strength greater that surround him. v.R-5aigf, mi imtfinS 1L Loaded season. who say and how Roomed into complex and lives and the TO A STEVEN SPIELBERG Film To survive in a world at war, he than all the events Sounds real CAPITAL RADIO in London had the idea of sending out 60 reporters (do they have 60 reporters?) to cover 250 events on Leap Day, and editing the result, 150 hours of recordings, into a two-hour portrait of the city. This enterprise failed for various reasons. The skill is in matching time, place and mood; a microphone is as difficult as a camera lens to use properly.

For all the 60 little machines whirring away, only a few fragments rose above a sort of card-index banal FROM TUESDAY MARCH 22 WARMER WEST END ra: inmminuuF.iMmn CANNON SCREEN OUT THEGREEW SHAFTESBURY AVENUE i ISLINGTON 2283520 8360881 rTOmm CANNON roUIAURO 8702836 FROM FRIDAY I I ADVANCE BOOKINC 4943001 IHX North Country stripper and her adventures amid the grimy flesh-pots. On the one hand, said Tracey, she got a kick out of unn dressing for all these men. On the other hand, 'you feel manhandled all the time, it's just awful'. Were these contradictions part of a genuine train of thought, or mere words trotted out for the interviewer we never heard? Still, a reality came through, spiced with bump-and-grind music in the background and diabolic club comics talking through the smoke. But of the three 'Soundtracks' to date, the most riveting was the first, a plain piece (out of harmony with the rest of the series) called 'A Lone Voice', in which the admirable broadcaster Glyn Worsnip discussed the disease that has recently struck him down in early middle age, cerebellar ataxia.

This resembles multiple sclerosis, and, because it affects speech as well as limbs, threatens his livelihood. His account, with was both matter-of-fact and teartbreaking. ity. Even these were modest stuff, like a babv beine born and a breathless meat-por ter telling Sid to hurry up for Christ's sake. Radio has always hankered after realism on taoe.

Peter Everett's outfit at BBC Man BARBICAN CAMDEN PLAZA I GANNON I MAYBOX THE POINT CENTRE I CAMDEN TOWN I BAVSWATES 2294149 I SLOUCH 0753692244 MILTON KEYNES 661 882 628879S 4852443 chester, which specialises in it, has a new series called Soundtrack making what it calls Delta Blues', which described a Saturday night in a Manchester police division, while driving down the M4. It was on a BBC cassette, but I had to give up and hear it at home. Even then the back-chat, laughter, noises, grunts, shouts and general overlapping of sound made sections hard to follow. As an exercise in atmosphere, building up its rhythms like a piece of street music, it was extremely good, not to be confused with the simplistic stuff from Capital. 'Stacey's Story' was even better, both more concentrated and easier to follow, the tale of a WYCOMBE 6 HIGH WYCOMBE ADVANCE BOOKINC 049448S66S SOUTHEND Cannon STAINES Cannon STREATHAMCaiwon SWANSEA Film Canta WEST BROMWICH Kinos (TOw) WIMBLEDON Odaon MARCH 25 PUTNEY Cannon READING Cannon RICHMOND Odaon ROMFORD Cannon OXFORD IGeorca SU Cannon CA1F0RD QUAYS OXTEO Plaza Cannon PLYMOUTH Cannon THESE CINEMAS SHEFFIELD Angel SOUThWTMCaraion Ctmon EMUURGM Cannon HARROW Cannon MUKHESTER Cannon ENRE10 Cannon HULL fernnwyl Cannon NEWCASTLE Catmon GATESHEAD AMC JERSEY Odeon NORWKH Cannon Metro Centra 10 UNSSTGMOptiont MOTTtNSHAM Cannon 'films for radio As in the Capital programme, no one links the material.

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