The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 85

Arts 11 MARCH 1994 Michael Coveney AshMwalkfiomBechttiiEmaSh who has now been barred by the author's trustees from staging it again. Photograph by Neil Libert Such good behaviour at Pinter's Party MODERNISM took, another few luncon- vincing, crotchety knocks from Paul Johnson on BBC TV's The Late Show on Tuesday night, but recovered in time Distinguished living playwrights are, on die whole, less meddlesome than renowned dead ones, who claim rights of inviolabiliry. through iheir estates and copyright. I am sorry to learn that the keepers of Beckett's flame have become as meanly protective as the Brecht mob. They have withdrawn the performing rights on Deborah Warner's superb, poetic, and clarifying production of the 20-minute Footfalls (Garrick) which closed last night and will not now be seen, as planned, at the co-producing Maison dela Culture, Bobigny, in Paris.

Words in the theatre are words, but also prompts, and stage directions, whatever the Beckett profiteers might think, merely hints. A playwright (as opposed to a novelist or a poet) provides a springboard for a relationship between the actor and the audience. It is fitting that Beckett's cerebral theatre of anti-theatre should be continuously tested, unshackled by academic pedantry or misplaced reverence, as real theatre; The work itself demands practical resolutions of the tensions between granite despair and flickering sensuality. Fiona Shaw's performance achieved precisely this effect, creating a disciplined howl of rage as the suppressed daughter-spinster, an extraordinary, pathetic supplementary to the scenes with her mother in Engel intoned the decrepit old crone beautifully and invisibly somewhere at the back of the theatre. The design was by Hildegard Bechtler, the atmospheric night-time candle-lighting by Jean Kalman.

The audience- the event, for all its brevity, had a real sense of excitement and oddity gathered in the front stalls the circle and the side-boxes. Shaw shuffled across the main stage' in a scuffed red dress, medical stockings and clumpy shoes, and made her. way, dolt-like and stricken, to a platform flung over the front few rows of the circle. After each unit of nine, quickly trudged paces, she wheeled around, pushing up against the upper circle like a tormented caryatid. In series of short, surprise, manoeuvres, we heard a fine text, we saw a sad life, we experienced a great theatre building.

What more, apart from feathers, high kicks, and a couple of intervals, do you want? The masterstroke: Shaw regained the stage at the half-way break into 'sequel', a narrative account of old Mrs Winter ('whom the reader will remember' there's a quaint googly for you) and her mystified daughter, Amy, who did not, to put it mildly, observe anything strange at Evensong, and who may or amy not be this, same May or Amy. The actress quivered poignantly, resentfully, creased in filial agony, snapping out of sight, back to limbo, or another version of same. I have seen this piece performed twice before (by Billie Whitelaw in London and Susan Fitzgerald in Dublin) to Beckett's exact specifications, and the suffocating aroma of High Art hung thickly and off-puttingly about. Shaw arid Warner's work is a Beckett breakthrough, redefining the play's theatre-ness while honouring, most remarkably, Beckett's Irish rhythms and cutting humour. I hope the officers of the estate are deeply affronted and incensed.

May they creep away to rot in front of endless, mildewed productions of Waiting for Godot that meet with their skinny, nit-picking methods of approval; Everyone's doing Ibsen's A Doll's House (Poole Arts Centre) this year, but you won't see a better Nora than Kelly Hunter's for the English Touring Theatre: skittish, gaily ginger, beanpole bulimic, baby-talking, alienated and finally resolute. Stephen Unwin's patchy production, which closed last night, had a fine Torvald from Pip Donaghy, who is ageing and filling out to become an interesting version of Anthony Hopkins. Awake and Sing! (Birmingham Rep), Clifford Odets's sentimental 1935 family drama of the Depression, was not a good choice for the big Rep stage by director Bill Alexander. Bad microphoning and a Bronx living room as big as a hotel lobby deny the cramped quality of the piece which nonetheless survives in the wonderful Jewish idiomatic text (unevenly rendered) and the frustrations of Daniel Isaacs and Daphne Nayar as the escapist Berger siblings: he, in the exemplary wake of suicidal, Caruso-loving Marxist grandad (the excellent Harry Landis); she, like Nora Helmer, away from child and husband, through the front door. A grating June Brown and a grinning Joe Melia are the offkey, senior, far too ham, Bergers.

The Flag (Bridge Lane, Battersea) marks a cheering, if worthy, debut for Corin and Vanessa Redgrave's internationalist new company, Moving Theatre. Alex Ferguson's adaptation of Robert Shaw's 1965 novel shows Britain in economic and ideological crisis on the eve of the General Strike. The Orwellian world of unemployed war veterans on the road, in spikes, marching with and against the flag-waving, storm-tossed Rockingham (John McEnery) towards a tragic reunion in John Calvin's parish church, is thrillingly done against a huge wooden jetty designed by Philippe Brandt. Corin Redgrave himself (co-directing with Gillian Hambleton) gives a wonderful performance as Calvin, the principled socialist vicar. The Eagle Has Two Heads (Lilian Baylis, Sadler's Wells), an irredeemably bad 1946 Cocteau, bumpily directed by Susannah York, pits a reclusive monarch (Lisa Harrow) against a would-be assassin (Stash Kirkbride), a sort of souped-up Michael Fagan crashing the security barriers.People say stupid things like 'All love is a little death, and great love is suicide'.

Even worse, Omma (Young Vic) is a pointless Greek tragedy conflation of Oedipus, Seven Against Thebes and Antigone, flattened out in a chatty text by Kenneth McLeish, directed stiffly by Tim Supple, and performed by four unknown actors (the original cast wisely resigned en bloc) in dark suits and flashy lighting. 'Omma' is Greek for 'eye'. So why doesn't blind Oedipus sing to Jocasta about the affectionate shepherd who saved him: 'Omma, he's making (sheep's) eyes at me'? Choices L'homme qui (Contact, Manchester, 061-242 2555). Peter Brook's latest, to Sat. Discussion 3pm today, with Brook, Oliver Sacks and Jonathan Miller.

Oh What a Lovely War (Glasgow Citizens, 041-429 0022). Visiting Wildcat production of anti-war musical classic. The Master Builder (Dundee Rep, 0382 23530). Brian Cox's fine Edinburgh performance on tour here for two weeks (from Weds) Copacabana (Theatre Royal, Plymouth, 0752 267222). World, premiere of Barry Manilow's 'spectacular fantasy musical', with Gary Wilmot, en route to London.

for the safe and glamorous revival of Harold Pinter's first play, The Birth-day Party (RNT, Lyttelton). With Dora Bryan gurgling away brilliandy as Meg, die seaside landlady, Sam Mendes's production was never going to be all that disturbing. The anti-Modernists might even now claim the piece as their own. Tom Piper's grubby living room emerges from a painted canvas street and a warm glow of Workers' Playtime wireless music. Anton Lessees hapless Stanley Webber, the former pianist who drew the crowd to Lower Edmonton but found the concert doors locked against him second time out, is a highly controlled picture of whey-faced, distracted edginess.

His persecuting visitors, Goldberg, the nattily suited Jew, and McCann, the explosive Irishman, are given a powerful, but slightly inauthentic ethnic gloss, by Bob Peck and Nicholas Woodeson. Peck mixes flatulent oratory with quickfire patter in a tremendous, third-act crescendo, while Woodeson scuttles, furtive and simian, between his outbursts. The scenes of interrogation and brain-washing watered the wicket at 'We'll renew your season ticket') work as well as the climactic scenes of the drum-beating and the framing of Stanley's putative rape of the triumphandy buxom next-door neighbour Lulu (Emma Amos). But you sense that the revival is weighed down by authorial approval..