The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 39

OBSERVER SUNDAY 1 5 MAY 1 988 39. Sin in the Decoy-fox NEH.UBBEBT I second is the redcoat Molineux shrubbery chary 'The Shaughraun' and 'King John' MICHAEL RATCLIFFE DION Boucicaulfs The Shaughraun (NT, Olivier) begins with an estate on the West coast of Ireland about to be sold because the young owner is a felon transported to Australia. Except that he's not a felon, that is, and he's not in Australia either, but escaped, landed from a schooner, and about to walk on to the stage. It's that sort of play, and Howard Davies's gorgeous production realises all its greasepaint diversity and cunning with great intelligence and spectacular skill. 'The Shaughraun' (say something like Shockron and you'll get tickets for the right play) is an irresistibly well conjured, bold and exuberant piece of 1874.

Boucicault set it in 1868, 23 years after the Famine, and one year 'after the Fenian movement for the independence of Ireland had taken its first civilian English lives on the mainland; the romance of Irish injustice was still thought capable of resolution in time. All these things are indirectly addressed in the play, but Boucicault defines a neutral territory of patriotism and melodrama where Sligo society divides not between Irish and English but between the good-and the bad. Robert the fugitive (Fintan McKeown), his beloved Arte1 (Eve Matheson) and his pert sister Claire (Felicity Montagu) are, of course, among the good. Kinchela, the lank-haired magistrate (Stephen Moore), not only sent Robert to Australia on false evidence but plans to trick the estate out of the girls. No fewer than two heroes stop him one Irish, one English, which is where Boucicault's cunning comes in.

The first is Conn, the Shaughraun (Stephen Rea), a fearless, boasting clown prepared to play decoy-fox to distract the hunters from their man. The (Shaun Scott), a fellow of the most exquisite innoonce and correctness, utterly fazed by the Irish but a worshipper of Claire. Rea's Shaughraun is cleverly itched, light and dry on both, larney and charm, whilst, it would almost be worth seeing the play for Scott's delectabry funny performance alone. The cliffs, ruins, cottages, battlements and ravines of the Sligo coast (designer, William Dudley) turn, rise and sink in sections simultaneously on the National's now-functioning double-drum revolve. The company peoples it with the dexterity of goats while a darkly glittering sea throws a curve of expectant, protective magic around the whole play.

Both National and RSC strike form this week. Deborah Warner's production of King John (The Other Place, Stratford upon Avon), is, like all her work, distinguished by textual clarity, high collective energy and firm narrative grip. The appearance is timeless-modern, the clothes spattered and well used, greatcoats thrown hastily over civilian trousers and City shirts as though the wearers had been surprised by sudden civil war. (Designer, Sue Blane). On a square space bare but for steel siege ladders and plain chairs, Warner draws an ensemble performance of great consistency from which emerge as many individuals as the uneven writing permits: Susan Engel, splendid in reasoned grief and anger as the mother of young Arthur, pretender to John's throne; Robert Demeger, a Hubert transfixed by memories of deeds ill done, who chooses each word as though his life depended on it; Nicholas Woo-deson, a witty, bullish king, cool in ruthlessness but moving in remorse; and above all David Morrissey as Philip Faulcon-bridge, the Bastard.

Tall, young, impatient, humorous, big-hearted and big-mouthed, this Bastard speaks well with a warm, Northernish voice, and expressive understanding. Philip cuts a figure of great spirit, and Morrissey makes a Shakespearean debut of some note. Nicholas Woodeson as King John, 'cool in ruthlessness, but moving in remorse'. their centenary year, this cele GLASGOW MAYFEST musical cum Glasgow offers exemplary sentiments non-sectarianism and sportsmanship Electric shocks Carel Weight and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition WILLIAM FEAVER enough in itself. I note that Sir Lawrence Go wing has gone to Washington (hence 'The Dome of the Capitol' in his late late Cezanne manner) and that, to Lucy Jones, Big Ben is a vertical feature under threat from Blaue Reiter elements.

Ruskin Spear is on good form, bis Lord Grade a corker, his Lord Hailsham old roguish. Leonard Rosoman's portrait of Richard Eurich is a deserving tribute but fails to get close to the sitter or indeed to capture the spectacular mixture of plan-tlife and ships in his studio. The Eurichs proper include a fine, dusky 'New Forest Trees'. Gillian Ayres holds high the banner of abstract painting with 'August' a great ululation of heady colours and a relief after a roomful of 'Harebells in a Jam Girt with necklace by Bernard R. Sindall.

Jar' and the like. Nancy Car-line's' 'At Finistere', in which France's Land's End is nothing but sodden slopes with a browsing cow, corrects the prevailing view: that Abroad is sunshine all the, way. A corner filled with Bawden leafage some superb life drawings by Jeffery Camp is a defensive position under threat from endless nice little watercol-ours. Word has spread that the sculpture is. better, than usual this year.

I don't see it. In a room dominated by the black granite faces of Stephen Cox's rEtruscan II' and Barry Flanagan's attenuated 'Kore Horse', where Edward Kirkham's mino-taur-scenting competition-thinks, furiously, the average remains paperweight standard. Dhruva Mistry's 'Maya Medallion', hung above the: rest, maintains an aloofness born-of surieriority. What other reaction could there- be to die annual outing of -stainless- steel piping, bronze nudes in bronze dechairs, bite-size embracing couples and, ah yes, the flight of bronze, steps leading to the wee bronze threshold of Peter H. Jones's 'God's Front Door'? pions in the lipstick-coloured Dublin, oratory 'Cavalcade' on ana rawer context, of woman however, the streets.

McGuinness'8 (Tron, the story: Garry from the more woooiy ones, given tne on the Boer War and the place in The Game. The audience, cheers in the theatre and in Cheers also greeted Frank The Factory Girls' how Riverside: until Saturday), of a sit-in in remotest Donegal. Hynes's Druid Theatre: production is up to the standard expected finest Irish comoanv outside The question of charity remains. Political theatre in Scotland can be stirring, too, but is less a matter of making public the doubt voiced only at home than of telling audiences what they already know and never tire of e.g. throwaway Thatcher jokes in David MacLennan and David Anderson's The anecdotal and naive, casing the great society from an angle to one side.

Valentina shuts them all in as the Olympic flame approaches the stadium. The animal fury and desperation with which they kick, beat, shout and jump their way out and on to the roof to cheer, as the air fills with the deafening juggernaut music written for such displays of public, accord, brings play to an electrifvine end. But that moment. but the play is disappomting Griffith: Harrassment. KENNETH Griffith, the wild-eyed Welsh actor and anti-imperialist, has just completed ms epic lite ot Jawahalal Nehru, a film biography commissioned by Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi and endorsed by Rajiv Gandhi.

True to form, however, Griffith has fallen out with his bosses, in this case Doordarshan, India's State TV. After an intimate screening at his home, Griffith told me: 'The whole thing would have taken six months, but those bastards made me take two years'. Expecting to start in 1986, he was kept waiting 12 months in India before being given the final go-ahead. And the obstruction continued to the end. Griffith considers the Indians the worst bosses he has endured in a long history of scuffles with TV powers-that-be and will be getting his own back with a book, also just finished, about his experiences.

The completed film, however, shows no sign of harassment. It features Griffith posing as Nehru, Gandhi, Churchill, Bose and the other major characters in Nehru's life. As for a screening date? 'The rights belong to the Indians and I haven't even bothered to ask them. If I don't talk to them ever again it will suit SUDDENLY, Nehru projects are everywhere, because of the centenary of his birth next year. The Indian film-maker Shyam Bene gal, enjoying a retrospective at the NFT jthis month! has just been commissioned to make a series-based upon 'Discovery of India' for Indian TV; The Bodley Head are considering republication of the book next year; and MJ.Akbar, the editor of the Telegraph', Calcutta, has jttst delivered the typescript of his Nehru biography to Penguin Books, to be published in the autumn.

On the burning question of Nehru's indiscretions with Lady Mountbatten, Akbar has established a significant fact: physical contact only took place outside of India. THE last timel mentioned the good works of John Paul Getty HI, Anthony Smith, the director of the British Film Institute, telephoned me, more in sorrow than in anger, saying that I really shouldn't make fun of the Great Man for fear he might turn off the supply of money to civilized causes. It is difficult not to give him credit where it is due, however. His latest unlikely gift: is towards the restoration of Lord Leightotfs library at Leighton House a space which until now has been used as a broom cupboard and store-room. The Getty cash will mainly go to Cleaning a iintoretto (perhaps) titled 'Mark Antonion Brasadin'.

Other money has been raised by the rnenas ot xeignton House Christie's, who are not coy about the fact that they coughed up 5,000 towards gold NICHOLAS WAPSH0TT RATHER THAN face the 220th RA Summer Exhibition cold, I thought I acclimatise myself by going to Bedford to see what the local Art Society has done to mark Caret Weight RA's eightieth birthday. Weight in the Eighties is minimally catalogued and informally presented, split between Bedford Museum and the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, hung beside a reconstructed farmworker's kitchen in the one and next to Ruskin drawings in the other. The paintings have been shoved together, 'Hamlet', 1968, one moment then 'The Return of the Prodigal Son', 1938, with aproned Mum extending rolling-pin arms over the privet hedge. It's a scratch selection, an amateur set-up, a joke by Kun-sthalle standards and so what? Many happy returns from Bedford: Art Society to the ever-popular Prof. Weight.

Weight's is an unchanging world in aU essentials for, although kaftans are worn when the time comes and the most recent prodigal sons' are apt to sneak home in trainers, the circumstances remain curiously Stanley Spencerian. There are repeated reminders of the hole-and-corner arrangements of "The Nativity', 1912, the painting that established Cookham: as a Biblical setting, and Spencer's 1926 Resurrection is rougnly where Weight came in, relishing the parochial. 'Village Cup Tie', 1946, is charged with double excitement as the: wind whistles and the crowd shouts and the ball's deflected from the goal mouth in front of the church porch. Never one to take the heat out of a situation, Weight makes trees, stream and meadows surged he edges along the Thames, from Mortlake to Gra-vesend. skirting the clinches ('Sailors and Molls', 1951) but making note or tnem nut tne same.

way he paints is discursive, painc being the prompt, couched though in a conversational manner' He lingers over the brickwork. Time and again his fugitives. pause at the. end of the lane waiting for retribution to A lively sense of sm brightens Weight's shrubberies and; rattles the railings. the devil, eager to teased leaps after a flasher and all Putney is startled -by the screeching of brakes.

It's not the stuff of Modernism and never was, for even when, in the late' Thirties, young copperplate sig nature; carel weignr paintea strange suburban encounters and skips of the imagination, he kept wellu4rozga He wa. andV remains, His incongruity, i ne noticed, visiting -Bedford-' -the other day, that the site of Bun-yan's cottage is now occupied by Box (Jharaocu, Plumbing at Heating Engineers? From Weight's 1948 into Jerusalem', a. tall painting filled with', cloth-capped spectators and angels at twelve o'clock, to'. The fivasion', which has won him the Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the 1988 RA Summer Exhibition, is no distance at Approaching a road junction the pursued, his legs going 19 to the dozen, finds himself strafed by barely identifiable flying objects straight out of the Douanier Rousseau. The apparitions with their trumpets, and megaphones and pet dog are coming, down over a green land with no habitation in sight apart from a row of farmworkers' cottages.

This is Carel Weight at his most spooky, suggesting that as in Cookham all those years ago amazing occurrences are no big deal to a resourceful painter. So it goes: 'The Invasion', two pictures away from Sir Sidney Nolan's vast and absurd 'Homage to Uccello' (a 'Rout of San Romano' without the difficult bits) and five away from Norman Blaney's 'Sir William Rees-MoggYa study of buttoned leather, grained wood and impervious skin. Elsewhere, in 'The Land of the Birds: A. Dream', Weight is back at the riverside, hinting perhaps at Stanley Spencer's sSwan Upping', while in his 'Primavera a Botticelli figure finds herself dishevelled on agribusiness acres, greeted by yokels and perimeter daisies. Enough of Carel Weight for the present, except to say that if anyone demonstrates the Royal Academy virtues, it's he.

His paintings keep reverting to formula yet there's always some escape clause, some fresh twist. Turning to the rest, all 600 or so exhibitors, excluding architects, it is as obvious as ever that by, say, Bedford Art Society standards they have done jolly well. To be able to share a wall with the likes of Carel Weight is disinfected Pavilion andwawrtten wx years awiu nuiuii ooiu tuu, ochjiv mcuuinncss iuuna 1115 too, is brief, and the ilaiiie pasra ALEXANDER GALEA'S triumphant and courageous 'Stars In The Morning Sky' (New Athenaeum, Glasgow, last week; Riverside, from Wednesday until 28 May) asserts the unsentimental truth that men beat up whores all over the world, that soldiers are tempted from duty, and that societies cruelly reject those they cannot accommodate or understand. Where it grows dangerous, perhaps unprecedented, is in stating these things of the Soviet Union, on a Russian stage, and taking the message abroad. Last Monday's performance of Lev Dodin's magnificent production, designed by Alexei Porai-Koshitz, was the first outside Dodin's Maly Theatre in Leningrad.

Images of sorrow ajtd pity going back to Dostoevsky and Christian art cradling, lifting, -supporting, comforting recur throughout. A Russian soldier bears in the beaten, half naked body of the young girl he loves, the doubt of shock and desolation unmasking his normally closed, obedient face; a prostitute holds a disturbed young man in her arms, their bodies illuminated like an Italian Pieta. The sense of a common humanity between all' the characters and between them and us is overwhelming. This is a theatre of passion and consolation: it could be American or Irish, but it would be unlikely to have come out of England today. Four prostitutes have been removed from Moscow during the official clean-up of the city before the -Olympic Games.

They are billeted in a thin, peeling, tinder-dry barracks formerly used by mental patients, and are watched over by valentina, the fire safety officer and her soldier son. The conversation is street-wise, sharp iiiIii-- -i-i-i-V- Philip Prowse's production of lady Windermere's Fan' (Citizens) is the third, and best, of a Wilde cycle in which Prowse has played the moral melodrama for aU it is worth and left the wit to take care of itself, which, on the whole, it does. The result is as truthful as a painting by Tissot or a Du Maurier cartoon, picture of a world where women sit bolt upright and dispense mischief which seems positively civilised compared to the brilliant and languid unpleasantness of the men. Prowse toughens up the ending: instead of taking the hand of her husband (Giles Havergal) in Lady Windermere (Yolanda Vasquez) smacks him loudly across the face for his hypocrisy, and leaves him alone in the Belgravian twilight turning to stone from fury and shame. Sumptuous sets and costumes, dramatically fit by Gerry Jenkinson throughout.

MICHAEL RATCLIFFE Fallen Stan Lara Devil's tunesmith where he was obliged to spend their whole lives together denounce the emigre Stravinsky. JgUkaSasHJ on Vision Farm. They're shaped Celtic Story1 at (Irena Seleznyova) in 'Stars from Palmer's Testimony' and Travelling North' PHILIP FRENCH love, the SOish divorcee Frances (the excellent Julia Blake), Frank quits dank Melbourne for a retirement home in the Paradise of Queensland. They leave behind her demanding daughters (Goneril and Regan to Frank) and in the hot north this antipodean Lear comes to know himself and to confront death with the help of stand-ins for the Fool and Kent. His Fool is a sharp, realistic Jewish immigrant GP (Henri Szeps), the Kent figure is the apparently tiresome neighbour (Graham Kennedy), a conventional suburban type (the sort Williamson used to score off) who turns out to be the voice of humane decency.

This quiet, witty, unsentimental film is not only about coming to terms with our mortality. It is also a penetrating study of different kinds of Australians from the generation that experienced World War II and their relationship to the disillusioned post-war generation. And in bringing the play to the screen Williamson and Schultz make dramatic effective use of the visual differences between staid, temperate Melbourne, booming, confident Sydney, and the Edenic Queensland coast. There are beautiful images too in On the Black Hill (Gate Not-ting Hill, 15), the accomplished first feature film of its writer-director Andrew Grieve and his cinematographer Thaddeus O'SuUivan. It's based on Bruce Chatwin's captivating saga of farm-life on the Welsh border from the turn-of-the-century to 1980.

At the centre of the movie are the identical, symbiotic twins, Lewis and Benjamin Jones (played from age 14 to 80 by Mike and Robert Gwilym) who and lavishly ub 'MuwiiuHuim Satan' cycle. For 2000 years the anti-Christ has been kept bottled up by a secret sect called The Brotherhood of Sleep, and since the sixteenth century his container has been concealed in a Los Angeles crypt. Now this avatar of evil threatens to escape and Father Donald Pleasance, special consultant on diabolism to a California cardinal, enlists the help of scientists led by UCLA's Professor of Applied codology (victor 'The Prince of Darkness' is a fairly routine exorcise, with certain fringe benefits: e.g. casting Alice Cooper (listed as 'Street Schizo'1 as leader of the back alley zombies drawn by satanic power, and iokily calling the church above the crypt St GodardV The scriot is attri buted to 'Martin Quatermass', who is (according to the production notes) the son of British rocket-scientist Bernard Quatermass and a graduate in theoretical physics of Kneale University. Has Carpenter written the film as a homage to 'Quatermass and the Pit' or is Nigel Kneale pseudonymously re-working his own material? I suspect a collab oration.

Philip French oh Ingmar Bergman, page 41. IN ASSOCIATION WITH THBM WHAT'S NEXT FOR THE HAMMER? the Morning ana aistortea oy tne narrow culture of their world and the troubled marriage between their resentful, anglophobic, chapel-going Welsh father (Bob Peck) and their genteel, middle-class mother (Gemma Jones), daughter of an English vicar. The picture combines that hardy perennial of British cinema, the celebration of the pastoral idyU in our green, and pleasant land, with the perennial Hardy of English literature, a tale of bitter feuds, pregnant daughters banished, harsh visitations of nature, the working of a playful fate. At times it makes 'Jean de Florette' look like 'Emmerdale Farm', at others it resembles a promotional documentary for the British Travel Association. Ultimately if fails to examine the national and class bitterness that informs the earlier, better part, and Grieve's attitude towards social change and the rural revolution remains undisclosed.

But the acting is splendid. So is the make-up. In his Geordie gangster movie 'Get Carter', Mike Hodges successfully took Hollywood codes to Newcastle. His new thriller, A Prayer for the Dying (Leicester Square Theatre, 15), a cross between 'The Informer' and 'I Confess', is about a repentant IRA gunman (Mickey Rourke) on the run from the London police, his ex-comrades, and the underworld, who compels an ex-SAS officer-turned-priest into professional silence through a crafty confession. In this nsible mishmash of religion, politics and morality, all is incredible melodramatic cliche that never approaches half-cock, let alone Hitchcock.

The current release version has been disowned by Hodges and Rourke; it would take a cinematic alchemist to transform this dross into a serious movie. With Prince of Darkness (General Release, 18), John Carpenter gets back to basic horror with a contribution to the unending 'Desperately Seeking HOW do you represent a totalitarian monster like Joseph Stalin without diminishing his malevolence or making nun into some sort of demonic hero? Four British playwrights have recently confronted the challenge with varying success. In his earnest liberal docu-drama for the National Theatre, Robert Bolt saw Stalin as an opportunistic man for all treasons, exploiting a time of social ferment. In the 1983 television film 'Red Monarch', Charles Wood treated life in the Kremlin as black farce with Stalin and Beria as a charnel-house Laurel and Hardy. The same year, in the ironically named play 'Master Class', David Pownell imagined Stalin and his cultural cornrnissar Zhdanov 'entertaining' Prokofiev and Shostakovich around the time of the 1948 Conference of Musicians at which the composers were denounced as anti-social formalists.

Now, David Rudkin, in his' screenplay for Tony Palmer's Testimony (Curzon West End, PG), has combined elements from all three. The film has a documentary basis in Shostakovich's memoirs as related to and edited by his amanuensis Solomon Volkov. The expressionist style, at once sonorous and darkly comic, draws both on the exuberant springs of Russell (Palmer was once his assistant) and the still, deep waters of Tar-kovsky. And the film focuses entirely on the relationship between the composer (Ben Kingsley) and the dictator (Terence Rigby) from the late 1920s to Stalin's death in 19S3, though in fact Shostakovich lived for a further 22 years and didn't join che Communist Party until 1960. The film is a study of a survivor, of an artistic genius who trimmed his sails without wholly changing his direction.

He avoided both the road to the Gulag that many friends went down and the craven conformity of-so many others, but despite his compromises his survival was something of a miracle. Of course he did suffer terrible humiliations, among them being despatched as a star delegate to the phoney 1949 International Peace Conference in New York ana criticise ms errant ieuow Soviet artists Prokofiev and Khachaturian. At the end this deeply wounded man can only 'say: Ask me nothing anymore, ask the music' Looking rather like Woody Allen, Ben Kingsley catches something of the inward nature of Shostakovich as the anguished artist trying to serve the musical avant-garde and the revolution. Terence Rigby's Stalin is a portrait of an ignorant, self-satisfied peasant occupying a seat of infinite power. The desk where he sits ticking off names on a list of opponents is situated in a gigantic empty hanger whose shadows seem to reach out to the edges of his dominion.

The pair meet only once when Shostakovich has been forced to enter a competition to write a new national anthem, an event which Rudkin and Palmer switch from the war years to 19S0, and render much less funny than the composer's own account. Those little acquainted with Russian history will not find 'Testimony' easy to follow; the well informed may find it simplistic. For my part I was not always clear about the precise political points Palmer was making through the music, though I enjoyed listening to it. But the picture is an impressive achievement, and the visual authority considerable. The film is shot in a richly textured monochrome, and wide-screen, with only occasional moments of colour, so Palmer can incorporate material from Soviet feature films and newsreels.

Adapted by David Williamson from' one of his best plays and sensitively directed by Carl Schultz, Travelling North (Cannon, Shaftesbury Avenue, IS) brings Leo McKern back home to appear in his first Australian picture. As the septuagenarian domestic despot Frank, an ex-Communist with a love for humanity but little patience with individual people, McKern is superb. Accompanied by his new MALY THEATRE OF LENINGRAD PRESENTS STARS IN THE MORNING SKY BY AUEXANDCR OAUH DIRECTED BY UEV DODIN 1 828 MAY 18 MAY 7pm19-2SMAY 8.15pm 21 S2SMAY 130pm 20-22 May In this issue of the magazine we look at garden antiques and statuary at auction. Some pieces are now so 7 valuable they deserve a good home indoors! Available at Newsagents now. SOVIET PLAYWRIGHTS SYMPOSIUM A unique opportunity to meet and join in discussion with leading Soviet playwrights, theatre critics and representatives from the newly formed USSR Theatre Art Workers Union.

ThedelegationincludesMikhaHShatrov.AlexanderGalin.Lev Dodin, Alexei Dudatev, Nina Sadur, Mikhail Shvidkoi, Kazie Saya and Alexander Svobodin. Sessions chaired by Michael Ignalieff and Richard Imison For further details and booking information ring 01-748 3354. Places will be limited. litem 0 JUNE-JULY 2.50.