The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 39

ft I 1 OBSERVER SUNDAY 7 AUGUST 1988 30 SUE ADLER Don't love, 1 1 AIW I2BT don't hate 7U i flf i mmm- dlflYV ifc-JF Antony Sher in ffi 7Sir WW gk 'J-HS NATALIA Makarova, now StK3 'Hello and Goodbye' WWSaBmi WZ aged 47, defected from Jfc Leninerad's Kirov Ballet 18 NATALIA Makarova, now aged 47, defected from Leningrad's Kirov Ballet 18 MIHHAFI QA lP -f XmSXS years ago, on the company's immWU years ago, on the company's mmrm: r- -h Makarova: rediscovering her old colleagues. Twenty-eight writers are currently under commission, 10 for the main auditorium (at 3,500 a go), 18 Upstairs a piece). Two thirds are likely to prove stageable. Myself, I'd commission young George Farquhar on the strength of his current Sloane Square hit, 'The Recruiting Officer', the liveliest play I've seen there in years, to come un with plays Johnnie Smit like a cross between a cunning schoolboy and a bewildered rat. last visit to the UK.

The Kirov is currently in London on its first visit since then. Last Wednesday, at the Business Design Centre, Islington, Makarova took part' in a practice session with the company. Journalists and photographers were invited to witness and record the training session, as if to prove that glasnost lives and that Makarova looks younger and more waif-like and can lift her legs higher than anyone else. Last night Makarova should have danced the white swan's pas de deux from act two of 'Swan Lake with her old colleagues in an evening of 'Divertissements'. Had she told her mother, still in the USSR? 'I haven't had a moment to tell her that I've rejoined my ballet Her husband, Lebanese businessman Edward Karkar, looked proud.

His and Makarova's 10-year-old son has yet to meet his grandparents. WHATEVER Mrs Huffington may think, Pablo still has his way as an aphrodisiac. As I stared solemnly at one of the more erotic etchings at the Tate exhibition the other day, a man behind me said to his female companion: 'Let's go home; these are making me feel ever so LAST weekend in Edinburgh I visited the National Gallery of Scotland and was appalled to find that controversial newish director Timothy Clifford, in Thatcherite fashion, has rehung the paintings as they might have been exhibited a century ago, all crowded together and on top of each other. With a touch approaching genius, he has hung the finest canvases (Goya's 'El Medico', for instance) up by the ceiling so that they cannot be examined. He has also cluttered the galleries with furniture, so that the once sober, but inspiring, place looks like Kensington Church Street run amok.

You can no longer enjoy Tiepolo's sumptuous 'The Finding of Moses' because your eye is distracted by candlesticks, dressing table and other bric-a-brac no doubt all authentic and Antony Sher remains a mystery: Beau-champ's tape recorder on which he is recording folds of silence, like linen in a box may, after all, have recorded the mere swatting of a fly. 'Artist Descending a Staircase' presents Stoppard in high form, allowing his characters to chatter lightly and often truthfully about skill, talent, craftsmanship, imagination and art, while abandoning the blind object of their devotion to suicide in the street. Sophie (Sarah Woodward) fills the heart of, the play with great feeling, and the three younger artists Karl James, Gareth Tudor Price and John War-naby match the bitterness of their older selves with the ingenuous heartlessness of youth. A West End transfer, which is deserved, should remove the interval apparently required by punters of pub theatre and play for 90 minutes without a break. Some frrvllhlp has hpon talron to present sympathetically the wona premiere ot a may bv the essence of thinking, urban Irish America, and he plays Georgie Porgie as an elegant dude who taps his feet and shadow-boxes his fists to fight the terrible pain.

We should be seeing him in better, plays by Miller, Williams, Thomas Murphy or O'Neill. The sun not only appeared for last Wednesday's opening of Babes In Anns at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park; it set gracefully behind the clapboard wall of the Cape Cod summer playhouse in which Rodgers and Hart's backstage vacation musical takes, place. This did not prevent -two enterprising persons from bringing along a large, wire-haired dog to place across their feet as the August chill set in. The show dates from the great partnership's peak, between 'On Your Toes' and 'Pal Joey', but although it contains two outstanding songs ('My Funny Valentine', 'The Ladv Is A Tramn'1 and at least William Saroyan seven years after the playwright's death. Don't Go Away Mad (Don-mar Warehouse) is directed by Keith Hack, designed by Voy-tek and imports Michael Mor-iarty, a star from New York.

Set in the recreation room of a terminal cancer ward in San Francisco around 1947, it proves, however, a garrulous and rambling piece about affirmation and survival. Messages shrill like dinner bells throughout. It is easy to accept the concluding hope, as surviving patients work their way through the letter A in the dictionary, that knowledge is a kind of salvation, but portentous analogies abound, and when you lance the windbaggery and verbose-ness of the speeches, the meaning is always the same: rage, rage against the dying of the light. Had the text been trimmed, the pleasures might have stood out more clearlv. MoriarHr with his round, gentle face and suotie intelligent manner, is another.

He is in tune with our times. This season, at Stratford and in London, the RSC is mounting eight new scripts, four commissioned (including Doug Lucie's Fashion'), four not (including Havel's 'Temptation'). They have 17 plays waiting to be delivered or put on, including one by (a woman!) the ubiquitous Fay Weldon. The NT, apart from its Studio (14 being written) which is a law unto Peter Gill, has commissioned 12 plays in the last 12 months, plus five new 'versions' as the National understandably prefers to label translations, especially when the dramatist cannot read the original language. Forthcoming goodies include Tony Harrison's 'Manhattan Project', a play by Christopher Hampton on Suez, and a version by John Osborne (welcome back) of Strindberg's "The Father.

Nicholas Wright's 'Mrs Klein', about Melanie, is previewing. It was not commissioned, if only because Wright is the NTs literary manager. WATCHING last Sunday 'Early Stages', the first of John Miller's two televised conversations with Sir John Gielgud (the second is tonight), reminded me of my standing in a meandering queue one lunchhour in December 1979 at Hatchard's bookshop, Piccadilly, to have Sir John inscribe some television-derived book about his life, put together by the same dogged John Miller. By the time I reached him, Gielgud looked whacked but a courteous smile was offered. 'How kind of he muttered as I proffered the glossy tome.

Then I produced from my raincoat my treasured copy of his first book, 'Early Stages' (1939), and asked if he would do me the honour of signing it. His face lit up. 'With he said. 'It's a much better book than this He had written it too, unlike the compilation of transcribed conversations. I was hustled out of Hatchard's for having abused the conventions of the signing session.

GILES GORDON four really good ones (among tnem 1 wish i were In Love the desperate attempt at survival aaainst the odds in thfi Aeain''). it is a cheerful, shane less affair by the standards of Kodgers and Hart. A series of teenage tiffs and reconciliations is strung with insolent disregard for the subtleties of cueing, between songs which may belong to the revue that Valentine White (Paul Reeves) and his chums try to stage against the manager's wish or to 'Babes In Arms' itself: it is not always clear. An open air musical is a smashing idea; a musical actually about summer theatre fits very sweetly into Regent's Park. Ian Talbot's production improves on the vulgarised version which toured larger theatres a couple of years ago but although good fun it could, and should, have been more ambititous.

Mr Reeves apart, the singing is eager rather than stylish or even accurate, and there is a great deal of generalised English 'American' behav- ntt lYMLl ottinvr 41 JUX TT ILIA 311111 V-LI lUL ItllllK. popcorn and gum nnct inHnctriai an close, and it is not in the least reasssuring. I was initially disappointed by Daniel Barenboim's conducting: 'Rheingold' was veiled and one-dimensional; but as the distinctive sound of the Bayreuth pit became more normal, 'Walkiire' was full of vivid moments, though with long patches of directionless playing, and 'Siegfried' was splendidly alive until the third act rushed away in a desire to get it all over with. 'Gotterdammerung' sounded underpowered and drifting in its jong act, but then galvanised itself. Barenboim accompanies superbly, and the singers responded; but the larger, forward-moving dynamic of the score is missing at present.

If Kupfer has provided a post-Chereau production, Barenboim is certainly not aiming at a post-Boulez sound: warm sonorities and endless legato lines were the ideal here. There is endless scope for positive development and refinement in both music and production: Bayreuth booed, but Bayreuth may live to regret it. IUUVII IMI VAW for our time Eyes peeled wide in alarm, skull cropped close between ears and tight curls above, voice held down to staunch a weeping grief, Antony Sher plays Johnnie Smit in the revival of Athol Fugard's Hello and Goodbye (RSC, Almeida) like a cross between a cunning schoolboy and a bewildered rat. Johnnie is a servile, poor-white joker ('I don't love, I don't hate, I play it safe') who has nursed a bitter, ailing father for 15 years. His favourite word is dynamite, but he would never light a fuse.

When bullying sister Hester (Estelle Kohler) turns up to claim her share of the compensation awarded father for the loss of a leg at work, Johnnie defies her from terror, not courage, and pretends the dead man is still dying in the room next door. When she leaves to resume a life of prostitution in Johannesburg at the end of the play their search for the money has filled the room with a debris of family boxes, shoes, clothes, photographs, seed-packets and newspapers on to which Johnnie settles like a scavenger on its nest. 'Let's face it', he concludes with a sly wit as he takes up his father's old crutches in search of a new public life, 'a man on his own two legs is a shaky proposition'. We witness the making of a Port Elizabeth bum; he will relish the hour of dusk on the waterfront and return home every evening to wait, like Hamlet, for his father's ghost. The texture of this 1965 two-hander first staged by the RSC in 1973, with Ben Kingsley and Janet Suzman as 'The second-hand Smits of Valley Road' is one of anecdote and evasion, aggression and defence.

Suzman was angular and witty, Kingsley canny and slow; Hester was definitely boss. No more: Kohler is more plausible, but less sharp. For all the heat engendered Bayreuth's latest DOES the world ever end? Or does it lurch from crisis to catastrophe, rebuilding itself painfully from the debris left behind from the previous catharsis? The premise of Harry Kupfer's theatrically powerful, often perverse, but grippingly original production of Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth (conducted by Daniel Barenboim) seems to be that what we experience in these many-layered operas is not just the beginning and the end of a myth, not the creation and destruction of a civilization, for that would be too clear-cut. What is stressed here is a desperate attempt at survival against the odds; continuity, albeit strained and tenuous, with both the past and future. If Patrice Chereau provided for Bayreuth an industrial 'Ring', full of issues about capitalism and consumption from Wagner's time which were relevant to our own, what Kupfer has attempted to create is a post-industrial 'Ring', where the issues are related to our future existence.

Crucially, this production not only ends with a cataclysm, but, I guess, is preceded by one. At the very end there is an audacious tableau, but at the very start of 'Das Rheingold' we see, in another added tableau, the ordinary people who live on but their midst, ready to manipulate, determined to win through, lies Alberich. I he source of all power remains with the Rhinemaidens, and this is brilliantly conjured up by green lasers froitf the corners of the stage massing to form a perspective of infinite depth if the click of each beam goes against Wagner's gradually unfolding arpeggios, the final swirling mass of light perfectly complements the music. The survivors in the brave new world are Wotan and his self-deludingly merry band of wandering gods. Their giant labourers seem to have inherited at least some metal-working skills, and their monument is a WAGNER? Overture; Siegfried Idyll; Tristan und Isolde Prelude and Llebestod.

Jessye Norman (soprano), Vienna Philharmonic OrchestraHerbert von Karalan. OQ 423 613-2 Seven sumptuous minutes of Vienna Wagner. Under Karajan's direction, the 'Siegfried Idyll' is meditative, while Jessye Norman in the 'Tristan' Llebestod gives an ecstatic account of that voluptuous operatic climax. The other highlight is the 'Tannhauser' Overture, which unfolds CHARLES in NICHOLAS KENYON of of in Janice Honeyman's authoritative production, there is a demonstrational coolness to both performances that matches a circumspection in the play itself: it absorbs but does not move us. A collaboration between the RSC and the Almeida this is the first of a series should be essentially experimental in character, otherwise we might as well be watching the repertory at The Pit.

This one is classy all right, but safe. Three young Surrealists with impeccable middle-class minds watch in brimming elation as a beautiful blind girl pours afternoon tea, milk and sugar for them in 1922 without spilling a drop. They treat the occasion as both a victory over misfortune and a triumph of performance-art. Tom Stoppard's Artist Descending a Staircase, directed by Tim Lus-combe at The King's Head, is a funny and touching radio play of 1972 being staged for the first time. It is Stoppard fresh from the exhilarations of 'Jumpers' and about to take the marvellous 'Travesties' on board.

The play begins in 1972 when all three Surrealists have grown quarrelsome and old, and one, Dormer (Frank Mid-dlemass), has perhaps been pushed downstairs by one of the other two: Beauchamp (Peter Copley) or Martello (William Lucas). The 11 scenes move backwards to 1914, when the innocents pit their ambitions for art against the opening barrage of the First World War, and fast-forward again, as in a rewind, to 1972. The death of Dormer 'Ring' cycle explores gleaming elevator to the stars, of which any post-modern American hotel would be proud. Underground, a screaming yellow gantry houses the furiously repressed activity of the Niebelungs. The gods dance around dressed in garlands and trench coats which will be standard wear in the cycle.

They carry see-through glass suitcases. They are naive in their confidence that they can reach the stars, and it is no surprise that as they ascend amid the neon colours of the rainbow-bridge, Lose Stands bv hlnwina his nnw in time with the orchestral trills while glitter falls from the lift-cum-rocket. This beginning of the cycle is deceptive, for what we see are the sophisticated products of the new regime. In 'Walkiire', Hunding's house is similarly a nouveau-riche creation, but as Siegmund and Sieglinde come together, the solar-power roof falls away to reveal the bleak grey desert on which the relationships of the new world must be forged. At this distant perspective, pock-marked with ley lines, or landing places for the chariots of the gods, we stare for much of 'Walkiire', and only when the earth opens up at Wotan's command do we see the human-like fossils' which are crushed underneath (echoing those revealed when Erda appeared in 'Rheingold').

In the third instalment of the cycle we finally confront the decaying remains of the old regime: for 'Siegfried' act one, Mime has made his forge in a huge piece of discarded tubing thrown into the forest; in act two, we are in some structure of reinforced concrete which has been violently rent asunder, full exposed wires and crushed tubes, with only a glimpse of the -'frische Wald' beyond. dragon is, of course, a creation tentacled tubing. In such grim ecological conditions a free woodbird seems improbable, so this one is produced by Wotan from his pocket and controlled by his spear which rather over-estimates his grip on the proceedings, but Kupfer is anxious to keep him involved long beyond Wagner was. So when we reach 'Gotterda-merung' the spectacle of more industrial waste a half-destroyed metal construction colonised by the Rhinemaidens is no surprise, nor is the skewed, skeletal skyscraper of the Gibichungs' hall. But Hans DANCE Piece expensive below.

Anything, presumably, to liven up the boring pictures. WHICH of the main subsidised theatres commissions most nlavs? Kate Harwood. the Rnval Court's literary manager, told me tnat in the gilt-edged, boom time of Carvl Churchill's "Serious we could afford to commission more tnan now, when we're luckv if we-can put on four new productions a year tne mam house, four in the Theatre Our leading theatre for new writing is the opposite oi profligate. Schavernoch's designs, veering wildly from the cramped and ugly to the vast and open, could not work had not Kupfer peopled them with such passionate creations. This is an astonishingly physical, violent, energetic 'Ring': Kupfer pushes and pulls and throws his characters around the stage with vigorous passion.

There are close sensual relationships where one would expect them Siegmund and Sieglinde, rushing upstage to consummate their love, Siegfried and Brunnhilde jumping impetuously on top of each other a generation later. But no less intense is the extraordinarily powerful scene between Wotan and Brunnhilde, which ends with them both flat on the ground, arms out-Stretched as if the whole weight of the world is upon them. It is an image that recurs when Gunther first speaks of Siegfried's death. As well as sensuality accepted, there is emotion rejected, notably between Siegfried and Mime the latter's slaughter looks like the former's sexually uptight reponse to over-affectionate provocation and between Waltraute and Brunnhilde the former recoils from the latter's overwhelmingly physical expression. Whatever the musical drawbacks of the Magnificently sonorous and noble: August 9 August 20 upon, and among the new voices I heard, Nadine Secunde's Sieglinde was outstandingly warm and focused.

Deborah Polaski's plucky Brunnhilde was controversial, for she simply did not have the top range to make the climaxes of the part ring true: the third act of 'Siegfried' was musically embarrassing, and the Immolation Scene did not succeed. But one could see why Bayreuth took the risk, for she has a commanding stage presence with her flamp-rprl hair anrt much of the voice lower down is impressive and full. With Eva-Maria Bundschuh's well-sung Guntrune we aproach the sensationalism of Kupfer's 'Gotterdammerung', for she is an empty-headed floozy until Siegfried dies, and then suddenly becomes a tragic figure. Bodo Brinkmann's Gunther is. of the bourgeoisie, and views the spear (the central image of power in the nroductinn with alarm anrl distaste.

Philip Kang's Hagen, wields the weapon with conviction right up until his final lunge for the ring like Wotan, he over-reaches himself and perishes. (It is Alberich who conserves himself and who survives.) It is arguable that Kupfer finds it hard to respond to the central warmth and directly affirmative power of Wagner's score, and takes refuge in overactivity; but his insight at some central points is telling. After Siegfried's death, there is no funeral march. Gunther and his cronies rush off, terrified; Siegfried lies utterly alone until the earth which Wotan had opened up in 'Walkiire' once again gapes to receive the body. Wotan himself returns, and throws away his spear; Brunnhilde stands silently.

With the sound of the march pounding around us, this is a profoundly convincing moment. Elsewhere there are ineptitudes: Brunnhilde trying to get her coat on before the Immolation; the Valkyrie trooping down their metal staircase and having to pass down their shields and spears because it is too narrow; the bunker-like constriction of act one of 'Gotterdammerung'. 1 Most puzzling and annoying to the Bayreuth audience was Kupfer's final scene: as the masses burn (more lasers here) and the skyscraper buckles, well-heeled cocktail-drinkers gather round television sets. A young boy finds a young girl, and they set off tentatively by torch-light towards the exit while Alberich watches knowingly. There will always be, it seems to say, survivors.

There will be those who, Siegfried-like, go on to create the new ideals of a new world, and there will also be those who are ready to exploit them. It reflects the darkness of Wagner's flat THE ARTIST cast, and they are considerable, they all act with impassioned commitment, and that sustains this 'Ring' through some of its more difficult moments. Unfortunately, doubtless due to the pressures of preparing the whole cycle at once, two principal roles are split. John Tomlin-son is a magnificently sonorous and noble Wotan (an enduring image will be his dances of power, gyrating and leaping with his spear far into the distance); but Franz Mazura, who takes over in 'Siegfried' is far greyer and more monochrome of voice. Similarly the Siegfried of Siegfried Jerusalem is a thrillingly fresh creation, a young innocent in blue jeans, physically active and vocally exciting (if not always precise); but his replacement in the final opera is unaccountably, following his debacle in the Peter Hall Bayreuth 'Ring' Reiner Goldberg, vulgar and unsubtle of voice.

Hopefully Tomlinson and Jerusalem will add the extra operas on revival. Unqualified successes among the men include Graham Clark's manically active Mime, clambering around the forge and his superbly superior Loge, and Giinter von Kannen's dark and bleak Alberich. Linda Finnie's Fricka is dignified and put- John Tomlinson as Wotan rAV rnvco NAME: ADDRESS: cwan Lake THE WORLD PREMIERE NEW PRODUCTION I The first ever Anglo-Soviet joint production combining tbe magnificence of Russian ballet tbe brilliance of British design ji 1 a I) i i ''A August 9, 10, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20 at 7.45pm August 13, 14, 20 at 2.30pm TWO DIVERTISSEMENT PROGRAMMES including RAYMONDA Act 3 ADAM and EVE from CREATION OF THE WORLD ADAGIO from SPARTACUS August 11 and 12 at 7.45pm Box Office: BUSINESS DESIGN CENTRE, Islington, Ni, THE THEATRE MUSEUM, Russell St, Covent Garden, TICKETS FROM 6.50 FIRST CALL 24HR CREDIT CARD SERVICE 01-836 2428 01-836 1226 01-836 3464 HIDDEN CITY. HOLDS ONE SPELLBOUND" Alexander Walker, The STANDARD ARMADA STAMPS SIGNED BY GRAHAM EVERNDEN ARMADA FIRST SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION SIGNED AND NUMBERED BY THE ARTIST. LIMITED TO ONLY 850 COPIES.

15-00 EACH. IF YOU WOULD LIKE A COPY.PLEASE COMPLETE THE PAYABLE TO: GRAHAM EVERNDEN. P.O. BOX 175 WADHURST. E.SUSSEX TN5 6QY B2L.