The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 40

40 OBSERVER SUNDAY 26 JUNE 1988 WCHAflO Last seduction A yen for Shakespeare cat-on-heat-on-roof MICHAEL RATCLIFFE on tour in Japan with the National Theatre i THE Tokyo Globe, in whose mtugural season the National Theatre of Britain last week save six rjerfbrmances of Peter Hall's late Shikwprsres, Cym-beline', 'The Winter's Tale' and The Tempest, is an essentially Japanese mixture of perfect fas-aousness and cheerful opportunism, a scholars' matrix fbr testing seductive theories of the tSos his place in the Tokyo scene today. Culture is clout here: theatres, concert halls, galleries, an opera home are risnu by the year. Not a great deal of tiiought dways given what they wfflcogtato once they are open, but Serya Tamnra, senior matuiaing direc- tor of the SIlinmNishiUryama Development Company, 'onhe oegettet" of the Tokyo Globe, has netted the ESCs His- toriev the RSC in workshop, and the NT and Btegmsn's Stockholm 'Hamlet this sum- met, which is not bad for a start, A re-creation ot Shakespeare a xmXmmMMSSmSm THE QUESTION is whether Late Picasso shows late greatness or extending over 20 years sheer force of habit. Back in 1973, when his death was announced, one felt that history had at last overtaken Picasso and that a monstrous old irrelevance was being laid to rest. By 1980, when 'Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective' was staged by the Museum, of Modern Art New York, the reaction was one of excitement and amazement at such incessant activity: 80 years' worth of work ranging from a perfectly correct drawing (c.

1894) of a plaster foot to 'Young Bather with Sand Shovel', a stubby-toed conglomerate dated 17 July14 November 1971. And since then a whole new Picasso has been singled out and promoted: 'Late' Picasso who, in his eighties, dictated terms a decade ahead to the energetic painters-come-lately of the early Eighties. Seeing 'Late Picasso' for the first time, at the Centre Pompidou three months ago, I was most struck by the mob-handed way Picasso kept on and on into his nineties. 'Young Bather with Sand Shover, now called 'Person-nage a la Pelle' was accompanied by dozens more, each pop-up personage, bather, reader, stud or musketeer, similarly introduced, similarly twiddled and compacted. The paintings were interrupted every so often by print-runs in cloistered settings congested with people taking a good look at the sexual endeavours.

At the Tate prints and drawings are on their own, in a downstairs gallery, so "Late Picasso' is divided. This makes it less easy to appreciate his capacity for endless rehearsal and recall and the degree to which his etching needle provided a busy counterpoint to the slosh and dab of paint on canvas. In line Picasso continued practising the art of seduction, skimming the funny and not-so-funny side (i.e. showing himself past it but still interested), flicking lightly from knee to buttock, skirting the bold Hispanic aquatint shadows, fingering, dimpling. 'What is essential', he once said, 'is to create enthusiasm'.

At the start of 'Late Picasso' the shadow of the artist falls across the studio, the keyhole-shaped silhouette of the thestre, starting from the limited silence, which springs from evidence of seventeenth-century intense concentration, not bewil-artisu and allusions to the Globe derment. And knowing expats in the plana for the Fortune were tittering at the more sub-Theatre in 1599, the Tokyo lime naiveties of the play. The MMWt Mnwd hv Arnfa Iso- followins nurht. 'however. 'Late Picasso' at the Tate WILLIAM FEAVER head hitting a picture of a reclining nude which itself obscures the bed on which the model is lying.

'The Shadow, dated 29 December 1953, puts us in Picasso's position, creatine an image filled with internal rhymes, a picture referring back to Braque, perhaps also to Munch, and to several generations of Picasso nudes beginning with those of 25 years before on Dinard beach. Aged 72, Picasso had met Jacqueline Roque a few months earlier and within another few months she was to become his companion. Eventually she married him. In retrospect, therefore, 'The Shadow' marks the onset of the Jacqueline years, the threshold of what even he must have come to recognise as the final phase. But is it a new beginning? Hardly, for even those whose enthusiasm for the late Picasso is unconditional cannot claim that the whole, prolonged period is distinct.

Picasso lived not so much in the spotlight as in the shadow of his reputation. Much of 'Late Picasso' is a review of Picasso's idea of himself and his art in relationship to his old gods, now perceived as rivals. The 47 variations on 'Las Meninas' have not been lent by the Museo Picasso, Barcelona, and that's just as well, for they succeed only in terms of bulk delivery. The modernising of Delacroix's 'Women of Algiers is well represented, though, and the (after Poussin) 'Rape of the Sabines'. With renewed drive, in OctoberNovember 1962 he paints a walleyed cat on a fish stall clawing a Sabine lobster and, a day or two later, a dumping great horse, silly with lust, raising a hoof to smash a woman whose hair streams sideways and whose arms swell in supplication.

These two paintings are crucial to 'Late ncaaar? for they are more than restatements of the old Guernican panic and I 1 Jt.4m..jKNL George Harris as De Flores m' -fc zachTTarchitect of the Museum of Contemporary Art in las Anaata and the Snorts Hall for the Barcelona Orjmrics, holder of the Gold Medal of the RIB A. Among many things, Isozachi is TO realise inc acnoiar- ship of the hue Frances fates and her 'colleagues at the War-bunt Institute, which Droposed a common Hoe of magic, harmony, and proportion through intellectual Ine in the age of Shakespeare, Kepler, Bruno and the alchemist John Dee. The theatre's role was central to this vision of near-pagan survival at a time when most theatregoers could not read: it was the visible, rounded metaphor of the eartn itseit. ims SSSi? rtJfSJS Japanese, 'will tell the actor to an out into the middle of that stage, to feel all the organic energy of the universe, catch it physically, re-assemble it and then use it to change our perception of the meaning of the world. All this is a long way from the world of Mr Tamura, a maverick Maecenas whose company has built three tower blocks, two theatres (one open air), shops, restaurants and mmlyaiaa on to a precious sliver of land just north of the skyscraper district, of Shinjuku.

Tamura has dropped into the Tokyo theatre world unknown and rally armed, with the. Lust conquers all Now, at eighty, Picasso had practically no one, outside the animal kingdom, CO idf Hilly with. He could project slides of Rembrandt onto his studio wall but in reality he was, more than ever, going it alone. The work that one does is another way of keeping a diary'. That remark encourages the Stassinopoulos way of thinking, the view that art is simply colourful raw material for the biographer.

Late Pfcas-sos look garrulous, supremely unabashed. They play on themes like the erection of the easel between the painter and sitter, the reliability of sword and brush when all else nib, the absurdity of romance, die loss of nice. It's easy to assume that they tell us just what it felt like to be Picasso. But he was always an artful diarist, an inventor of characters, contriving masks. Compare 'Harlequin and his Companion', oa loan from the Pushkin Museum to the National Gallery and painted when he was twenty, to the work done sixty to seventy years later.

Same signature but utterly different, approach. Young fin de suete Picasso assumes an absinthe-induced melancholy and goes in for formal simplifications derived from posters. Old Picasso has none of that. From 1962 onwards the paintings are done for amusement surely, for exercise, for exorcism, for the very good reason that he had nothing better to do. No Harlequin romanticism survives in the final decade.

See instead the daffy smile on the face of 'Woman Pissing' (it sounds better in French: 'La Pisseuse'); the blue sky and am de nil sea, toes, tits and bleached shingle the ultimate skit, perhaps, on the consumptive property of the Blue Period. Picasso had only to astonish himself, prove to himself that he was still more than capable. One enormous room, a salon that serves as a sort of antechamber to death, house the main bid to prove Late Picasso a mighty conquistador. Here flowers are proferred, wild as fireworks. There are black olive eyes and biting embraces.

Musketeers (as seen on Jacqueline's TV set) flaunt their fancy dress, each a remake of Enrol Flynn. Every so often there is violent colour vol canic red or a clash of sour yellows but generally the painriwga are wmtewashy and nastily concocted. He had no inclination to go easy on the orifices. He had nothing to hide, no reason to be polite. So, with thistles breasts like alarm bells, with cocks and armpits and bunches of fives, Picasso conducted ins bouts.

Repetition was reassuring. Again and yet again he propped female heads with weathercock profiles on boomerang shoulders and abdomenal gourds. At worst he achieved trite scrimmages. At best he bought a marvellous impetuosity to his favourite snimping-grotiiids. 'Late Picasso' is more than a fine show of defiance, more than a blow-by-blow account of ageing; and truculence is only one of its virtues.

In a way Picasso is excusing himself, pretending that the longer he continues, confusing enthusiasm and ridicule, the less the need for true confession. The paintings don't admit failure, not even the befuddled 'Landscape' of March 1972, with palms planted like a matador's darts on collapsing hills; not even the unshaven 'Self Portrait' of 30 June that year, which is little more than Munch's Scream transmogrified, a skull agog with terror. A month earlier he completed what they call 'Reclining Nude and Head', a painting that reaches inside the skull and reveals the ultimate Picasso, the innermost self, horned and staring in a blizzard of white, a bogey after all. If 15 33 I THE ENTERTAINMENT CORPORATION PRESENTS I DIRECT FROM THE USSR I whatever he remiiresv He fcrvea'-H the company of actors anbTBas 'I MUlE 26 JULY i I would the Renaissance 'As You Like If and 'Much Ado'. Bog-danov's i.

Histories seem to have gone down almost as well with the Tokyo profs as- Tamum is now looking at Cheek gy JowI. tiroe to adiust betbre striking the oxnl. gan envisaged by After little extra rehearsal, and fresh from playbig a prosce- nium horseshoe theatre Tbi- liai, the NT Company negotiated the opening Cymbeline' with unriersnmdable care: it was their Wllii ins new zotk inw. mi nrst experience oi Japanese despiteBghring difficulties still onnmic enemv. or someuung, srrucK.

ine winter's Tale' leapt into sudden life as it had never done on the opening night at the Cottesloe six wcc ago. It was thrilling to watch Eileen Atkins stretch, test herself and take possession of the new staac as Paulina, totaled with her fingers itching to the kins. Tim Pftott- Smith's Leontes finally came true as a figure of schizophrenic passion and tearful despair beyond the help even of those who wish him well ('I am a feather for each wind that blows'). Ken Stotfs psychotic while stui strumming nrs guitar and preparingtosuu a decorous variation on the kakegoe shouts by which Kabuki favourites are encouraged from the audience Bleen Atkins Tingling with anger. hke football stars.

Mr Stott's chameleon art strikes affinities wherever he. goes: in Georgia he was taken for a Georgian, in Tokyo as an honorary Japanese. gZtteriSag tour. On the third evening, with Tony Haygarth the Caliban of a hretune, its complement of masks restored to it and Michael Bryant reclaiming the vicious majesty, of Prospero as an embittered- magus' caught between blasphemy; and belief, 'The Tempest unfolded in a single, unbroken arc on the stage of the Tokvn Globe Irlraltv. the fiimte .1 of this' inagnuicent' theatre should not depend on the unpredictable availability of first-class work from abroad.

9 One man who could define it with a Japanese ensemble as Tokyo's own Renaissance theatre of the world is currently directing 'Hamlet', five stops south on the Ysmanote Line, in a warehouse called Factory 2. Yutdo Ninagawa, a poetic and spectacular Shakespearian who transformed the Edinburgh Festival's mternational credit overnight with his binmtaking 'Macbeth' three years ago, is Japan's most acclaimed theatre director abroad. This success is now suspected in Tokyo almost as much as Tamura 's Perhaps they should talk. ind Mm Mption booMnai wrtcw-m lilt 1 30 JULY 198 For the first time in London thel sensational full length Russian production of A 1 CrlSELL Performance time: 7.30pm MU MlflMW HUM IW UB. At the same time, he is naturally, and exuberantly, aggressive.

Japanese critics are not invited to the Globe: they are expected to buy their seats. Tamura has delivered a playful thump at Sam-Wanamaker's Globe Theatre now going up in Southwark, dismissing it from the lush-tech Bankside of Shin- juku as a kind of Disneyland'. lyfhhiseimrtinctrvelyy the WVH4 froF hnnf onfl mo the secret fear we hope will not prove tine and reminds us that theatre management is one of the oldest martial arts. Mr Wana-maker-San, who has been battling his corner successfully against British indifference for years, fias everything to fight for now. Isozaki's Globe is clad in the fashionable architectural shade of the- late Eighties, chewing gum pink familiar, as it hapiiens, ta-Mllin ritaotaa III, i the Humana Building in Louisville to the rooms of the Ramada Hotel, Manchester.

It is not after your affection, but you get used to it. The interior is battleship grey a mistake which lowers the spectator's spirit while giving nothing back to the stage. This could be rectified in due course by an imagmative coknir-ist and spacemaker like-Ariane Mnouduune, Yuldo Ninagawa or Philip Prowse. The auditorium is round, modern and gal-teried, with three levels and 650 seats far fewer than the original Globe. It is not as beautiful as the Swan in Straford.

But it plays much better, with a wide and spacious stage. All it needs now is colour and life. The RSC's 'Titus Androni- NOW BOOKING LUST makes bargains in Mid-dleton and Rowley's The Changeling (Lyttelton). Beatrice wants Piracquo killed to win Alsemero, De Flores will murder him to enjoy Beatrice. De Flores (George Harris), usually-played as a foul-raced white man is here unsually taU, ugly and black and dominates in a glaring white suit that creeps up to his neck.

His race is scarred, his tongue lolls in his mouth. He is all appetite and rr Richard Eyre's production' is set in a ninereenm-Krerirury: Spanish slave colony: like thei decision to have a black De Flores, the choice brilliantly exaggerates what- is already there. William Dudley has designed an interior of blazing gold: honeycomb ceilings and burnished doorways. Fires and veils match the hist and concealment of the plot. In this setting, Miranda Richardson is perfect as Beatrice.

She appears gilded herself and her race has an incandescent quality. De Flores says she smells of amber. She looks like a piece of amber. And when she talks it is as if talking itself were a revelation. In each speech she: makes a discovery but the most important discoveries come toolate.

'The Changeling1 is charged with lust and revulsion and with a sense of their closeness. Richard Eyre's production is also charged with danger, a word that rings out repeatedly. Beatrice says of De Flores: 'I never see this fellow, but I think of some harm towards me, danger's in my mind still; I scarce leave trembling of an hour Alsemero tells Beatrice at the endi that she should never have crossed 'this dangerous bridge of In this production, the dangerous bridge of blood is at the top of the theatre and on it, in a tearful but Hirining scene, is Oil i I at the LONDON COLISEUM St Martin's Lane, London WC2 Box Office: 01-836 3161 Credit Cards: 01-240 5258 For lufbrnutloa oa new Bolihol tuidKfeovvkls writs (o FREEPOST London 3EM tXP I 'His tongue lolls in his mouth The Changeling', KATE KELLAWAY De Flares butchers Piracquo. Throughout, there is no embrace 'without 'fear, and passion is acted with iui ardour that makes you feel you have never seen an-euibiace on stage before. BUt it is an evening of wwqnai excitements thrills and lulls.

In contrast to the barbaric world beyond, the scenes inside the madhouse seem mild and recreational in spite of the fact that the lunatics live on a grey staircase and are regularly whipped. The point is perhaps that, unlike the rest of humanity, fools and madmen are safe. It is iixtriiMt and also unfair to compare Edith Sitwell to De Flores but her problem, like his, was to do with her face. Painters and photographers were- fascinated by it and now William Humble adds his portrait to the rest with Facades (Lyric Studio). Sitwell (Frances de la Tour) resembles a passionate crustaceon, bound by a black turban and weighty with She has a voice that disowns the body but the langorous beauty, of her.

speech and her superior intelligence can do notiung to change her race, spare her humiliation or win her love. Her poetry (at least on the evidence of what is quoted during the evening) does not provide an escape from self. Her striking, adult nursery rhymes flash with detail as gaudy as her brooches and with features as pronounced as her nose. Humble has chosen cunningly the images most tainted by her own obsessions: the sun, for instance, is a pockmarked, plague-stricken face. Humble concentrates on the period before 'the misery and the grandeur' when Sitwell was in love with Pavlik Tchelitchew (Garry Cooper), a homosexual Russian painter.

But Pavlik withdrew love, sympathy and himself. He attempts here to turn his lack into her gain: 'You have no physical life be proud of it. Frances de la Tour's achievement is to show that Sitwell never gladly renounced her physical life. In contrast, D.H. Lawrence (Garry Cooper) is a laughable figure who in FfMes THIS week Palaca Pictures Is offering two tickets to the premiere of Its latest film, John Waters's NsfispfiT.

The tickets also ghv entry to a private party after the film, attended by many ofcbritles of the Sixties. Halrspra. on release from 1 Jury, is sat in 1962 Baltimore, a time of oJaTOU'-crazed teens, angel blouses, and tab collars. The film stars OMne (shown above), Sonny Bono, Ruth Brawn, and Debbie Harry. As the premiere Is on Wednesday 29 June, your answer must reach us by first post on Tuesday, with your day-time telephone number.

MCA records are also offering to copies of the soundtrack for correct answers reaching us by first post on Friday. The question lor both offers What was OMne's real name? Postcards to Halrspray, co Marketing Dept. The Observer, Chelsea Bridge House; Queenstown Road, London SWB 4NN. Publisher Collins Is ottering 25 he Is all appetite and threat' between tubercular coughing attacks teUs Edith she's got "sex The word most frequently annliwl fit Vilitlt una WrinrfL narv. Simon.

(3attmBs nradue- rion, thanks chiefly to Frances ae la lours devastatmgly authentic: performance, is extraordinary too. Bruno Santini contributes an ugly mausoleum ot a set. silver ana areen suggests dead nature: ugly, -barren but sparkling nwnHuiacnai. riind'nVrinfkminatWNick Others (The' iCottesloe). Althoueh the set could, at a pinch, be a spruce version of unrmg uross image, tne tramps that doss beneath it are a romantic invention.

Ed (Michael Turner) has lost everything but his cultivated accent. Jimmy (Lermot urowieyj nom wortn-ern Iceland has charity but little to spend it' Their minds are improbably orderly; thought is tidied by the fact that is over. Resignation is shown to be Jimmy 's question about London is also the play's question: But has the bast a heart? When young Katy (Cheryl Maiker) and Carl (John Lynch) arrive in London they say love you' to each other as a panicky insurance policy against the city. Their words seem raw and will bum out before the night is done. Nick WanTs London is peopled with sample, characters Scorn different classes and age groups.

They range from a ragged prostitute to an mi'Tiitg policeman and Good-child, a posh politician. His family form an unhappy constituency: a punk son, a mother stifling a scream and an affair with her father-in-law, and an anorexic daughter who in a powerful scene overhears the family secrets and appears herself like a skeleton taken out of the cupboard. The problem is encounter the that we too fleeozuUv to care about' them. Ward conveys not so much the strangeness of others as their separateness, which makes for inert theatre. At the edges of the stage actors wait passivelythe space in between is a London in limbo, an unused dance floor.

At its weakest the dialogue dosses down on a bolster of cliche. But the attractive quality of the play is its attempt to end numbness and salvage tenderness. The beast has a heart but it needs to be faster on its feet. copies of Francssca Durarrifs novel The House on Moon lake (see this week's paperbacks) for the first correct answer to: Who wrote last years Booker Prize Winner 'Moon Tiger'? Answers by Friday, marked Last wnk 10 dnubli tickets to Prince's concert ram were won for talng us that Prince's pseudonym for the Bangta1 hit was Christopher. Two people won CDs of Bach's St John Passion lor tolng us that ft was written ki 1723.

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