The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 37

OBSERVER SUNDAY 1 4 AUGUST 1 988 37 RICHARD MILDENHALL Far from Moscow fiGBg Three Sisters', diary forget. Mr Conway leads an excellent cast down a tightrope of passion and taste with simplicity and power. Alix Strachey, we read in the programme of Mrs Klein at the Cottesloe Theatre, sometimes found the analyst Melanie Klein 'tiresome and faintly absurd: she never stopped talking and dressed up to, the nines, "terrifically decollete, and covered in bangles and rouge" Nicholas Wright takes much the same line in his amusing if somewhat discursive play, removing, however, all affection from Strachey's Bloomsbury assessment and placing Klein as manipulative Jewish mother and fierce professional rival at the centre of the stage. She is a monster. Comfortably exiled in London and profoundly disturbed by the mysterious death of her son in 1934, Melanie (Gillian Barge) fights a violent and apparently conclusive battle with her daughter Melitta (Francesca Annis) which ends with Melitta's replacement as daughter, patient and colleague by the enigmatic Paula from Berlin (Zoe Wana-maker).

All three performances are energetic and impeccable under Peter Gill's direction; what the play is actually saying, however, is not at all clear, save that when everything can be explained professionally nothing is fully understood. 'Mrs Klein' lacks the buoyancy of Stoppard on similar ground and the breadth of Mr Wright's splendid plays for the RSC 'The Custom of the Country' and 'Desert Air'. The time taken to realise that Edward Fox is not, after all, going to deliver King Edward's Abdication Speech from the stage is getting shorter with each appearance he makes. In The Admirable Crichton (Theatre Royal, Haymarket) it takes less than two minutes to remember that he has grown into a subtle, powerful, tender and idiosyncratic performer. As the butler who knows his place both in Belgravia and after a tropical shipwreck he is surprising and superb.

Directed by Frith Banbury as, the last night of the ancien regime at this address for some time Citizen Hall takes over next month Barrie's bold but compromised play moves serenely at the speed of its two stars: andante espressivo for Fox, adagietto for Rex Harrison, who endows Lord Loam with the appearance of a civilised and genial tortoise and the remote, but perfectly pitched, sound of a melodious old Strad. JOHN BARTON'S production of Three Sisters for the RSC (Barbican) begins well, with the chipper march of the visiting garrison played by musicians from a gallery at the top of a lichen-crusted forest silver and green against grey and petrol blue designed by Timothy O'Brien. The house has wooden sides, ceiling and floor, but backs directly on to the forest throughout. Chekhov's characters move easily between the constrictions of domestic life and the natural world with which so many of them would replace it. Enter Olga (Deborah Findlay) puzzling over a ledger, Masha (Harriet Walter) reading a book, and Irina (Stella Gonet) with a bunch of wild flowers.

Perfect. A clock strikes darkly at noon; reveille trumpets outside in the town. Something is going to happen. We sit up. We emerge more than three hours later, however, in great measure disappointed that Barton has failed to create a Chek-hoyian ensemble from the existing Barbican company or to suggest the full complexity of this masterly but elusive play.

The evening suffers from emotional malnutrition. At the height of the town fire in the angry, despairing third act, when Miss Gonet remarks that she is already 23 and Miss Find-lay that she has aged 10 years that night, they do so with a flatness that briefly lets the play slip from their control and allows the worldly ones who feel superior to 'Three Sisters' the to titter unfeelingly at their anguish. Miss Gonet's facial radiance is unmatched by intensity of feeling, while Miss Findlay's lugubrious composure never cracks. Act three briskly concluded, Chebutykin, the old army doctor and family friend (Joseph O'Conor) does a dancing reprise of 'Tararaboomdeay' during the scene-change to confirm and reassure us that nothing irreversible or untoward has occurred. Reassurance is the effect, at least; the intention, presumably, is to be as diabolically destructive as the Norwegian actor Espen Sjonberg was in the Royal Exchange production three years ago, but diabolism is not in Mr O'Conor's gift so all sense of danger evaporates in mere mischief.

There are many such diminishing miscalculations of detail, and the grasp of comedy is as unsure as the command of feeling. Barton's 'Three Sisters' presents a world of disintegrating human communication in which the performances, as well as the characters, fail to interconnect. Bruce Alexander's hysterical Andrey and David desiccated Kulygin perform in vacuums of their own devising; even Cox's Vershinin is excessively self-effacing within a show as cool and diffuse as this. The best performances- at present are Walter's Masha 'Keeping Tom Nice' MICHAEL RATCLIFFE she has played the role once before and Nicholas Farrell's Baron Tusenbach. The mocking Masha, with her pale, iconic face and burning dark eyes, presses her body as though every bone aches with waste; its posture tenses sharply at VereWnin's first touch but lightens with visible suppleness as the affair reaches its peak.

Farrell is a heavy actor by instinct and build: here shrunk into an ugly three-piece suit and speaking with urgent calm, he reveals new gifts. His Baron is gentle, tedious, grubby, noble and absurd. The awkward farewell to his adored but unloving fiancee Irina before the fatal duel provides the most moving scene of the night. The RSC strikes surer form in the second play of their Almeida season, Lucy Gannon's Keeping Tom Nice, 90 minutes long and directed by Bill Buffery without a break. Tom (Linus Roache) is incontinent, spastic, epileptic, a child at 25 with the handsome face and (so his sister tells us) the sexuality of a healthy young man.

Good as Roache is in sustaining the symptoms of Tom's disease hands like crab claws, mouth endlessly wailing the single word the subject of the play is not Tom but the corrosion of living grief in those who care for him. A strong Catholic undertow tugs at the grim sense of duty and guilt expressed by Tom's parents Winnie (Shirley King) and Doug (Richard Conway). 'He is our article of says Doug, dismissing Stephen the social worker (Mike Dowling), and Stephen himself, a young father who believes in Tom's intelligence, imagines the lifting and bathing of his angular body like the Deposition of Christ. There is some piteous lucidity in the boy's own head: he throws off his sister's advances and weeps choking, helpless tears to watch his father die. Doug kills himself because the social services have violated the understood privacy of father and son and because he fears he will be provoked into killing Tom out of despair.

Miss Gannon launches from time to time into a distractingly High Poetic style, but the play is for the most part painful, witty and uncompromising, not easy to ONE STRIKING achievement of this year's Prom concerts has been to find a theme for the. programjning which both creates a sense" 'of purpose for the whole season and yet does not disrupt the coherence of individual programmes. The idea of literary inspiration for music is, to be sure, a suitably vague one, but during the past week it has thrown up a stimulating juxtaposition of four pieces all inspired by the same literary model. Maeterlinck's drama Pelleas et Melisande inspired Debussy's opera, Schoenberg's orchestral tone-poem, and suites of incidental music (drawn from performances of the spoken play) by Faure and Sibelius. There is nothing so similar about these four composers' responses to the play that they become boring heard four nights in succession.

Skilful Prom programming ensured that each was heard in an appropriate context, and that any one of the concerts could have been enjoyable on its own terms: Monday's con-, cert placed Faure's suite in an all-French context; Tuesday's placed Schoenberg's massive piece after Beethoven's Fifth (typically for the Proms ensuring a large and enthusiastic house), while Wednesday's rather less convincingly let Harriet Walter as Masha of 'iconic face and burning dark eyes. with Brian Cox as Vershinin. A FEW weeks ago, in the early hours of the morning, Olivier's 1944 film of 'Henry was secretly projected from the front of the National Film Theatre by Waterloo Bridge onto the flytower of the National Theatre an event fiercely denied by some at the BFI and reluctantly admitted by others. The Metropolitan Police were not amused, as passers-by, even at that unearthly hour, stopped to stare, clogging up the bridge. The pre-dawn screen-test had a purpose.

After IS September, when MOMI (The Museum of the Moving Image) opens to the public, the Denham-filmed picture will be projected, in the form of 800 slide images, at pavement level onto the NT's scenery deck, as a suitably filmic come-on. And the less conspicuous makeshift screen will mean that traffic accidents should be avoided. TWENTY years ago Leslie Hardcastle, now controller of the NFT, and David Francis dreamt of MOMI, which, Hardcastle insists, 'will be the most ambitious and best cinema museum in the world'. It's been four years in the planning; 'a dream that has become a nightmare'. It will employ as security guards 20 'resting' actors who are currently being schooled in specialisations: a Hollywood set, a camera crane, pre-cinema optics, Chaplin Street, sound development, Mickey Mouse, Eisenstein, Odeon 1930s art deco, and much else.

These 'experts' will preside for no longer than six months on one set in case they become bored. Unlike the solemn Theatre Museum in Covent Garden, Hardcastle's dream should thrill rather than dully instruct. IT IS frequently remarked that Terry Hands, RSC supremo, like Masha in 'The Seagull', always wears black. It is less often noted that Masha in 'The Three Sisters' (no relation, other than by authorship) also wears black as she does in Harriet Walter's deliciously dizzy portrayal of General Prozorov's second daughter in John Barton's new production at the Barbican! The suprise was that at last weeks's Press night as well as the previous evening at the Pit, where Barry Kyle's effervescent Bloomsbury production of James Shirley's 'Hyde Park' arrived form Stratford the traditionally dour Hands was to be observed laughing, and dressed entirely in white. On the assumption that this wasn't a uniform of surrender, things must be looking up for the RSC.

(Previous boss Trevor Nunn was at the Chekhov wearing black, but let's not make too much of this.) Hands White mischief. THE British rights in 'Foucault's Pendulum', Umberto Eco's first novel since 'The Name of the Rose', have been acquired by Seeker Warburg, once again our most stimulating publishing house. William Weaver's translation will be published in autumn 1989. Seekers sold 35,000 copies of 'The Name of theJtose'; publisher David Godwin plans to print a cool 100,000 of the new one. Their authors include many (most?) of the truly twentieth-century greats, but, having recently become Studies in love Larry Up the wall.

part of the Octopus conglomerate, they are an endangered species, and morale is low. Their autumn list is a prospectus to the future of literature rather than merely to accountants and shareholders. In Peter Dyer, who commissions the book jackets, they possess arguably the first art director of genius in the British book trade. It may not amuse Seeker's authors, but the discriminating are' fighting to buy their books because their unlimited editions are, with Dyer's jackets, likely to become more collectable (because rarer) than, say, Hackney's prints. RICHARD Jones's sparkling production of Ostrovsky's 'Too Clever by Half closed last night at the Old Vic having, during its seven-and-a-half week run, played to 75 per cent capacity.

It might have played to 100 per cent had theatre-goers realised in advance that the play was 'Diary of a Scoundrel'. A Jennings Double dealer. The eponymous rascal was played by Alex Jennings, who received ecstatic reviews. Yet had you gone to see the production in its last two weeks, you wouldn't have found Jennings there. He'd "'reassumed his role in 'Hyde Park' at the Pit, which he first played at Stratford last year.

Sleight of hand by Jonathan Miller's Old Vic company? Not really. The play was originally scheduled for only five, weeks. THE MINISTER for the Arts has announced that funding for Public Lending Right will, from 1988-1989, be increasing the maximum limit of 0.75m to 3.5m. He is now proposing that, on the whole, rich authors should breathe a headier air by increasing the maximum limit of 5,000 per author to 6,000. AMERICAN publishers Viking now Viking Penguin have, since their foundation in 1925, consistently published more of the best British writers than any other US house.

The roll call includes Graham Greene, Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, William Trevor and now Salman Rushdie. This is mainly due to the tenacity, loyalty and discrimination of their British scout and editor, Gwenda David, who has been their advocate here for 50 years. On Wednesday, in the company of her husband, translator Eric Mosbacher, she will give a party for Viking's British authors in her Hampstead cottage. In truth, Gwenda David's authors will be honouring her commitment to them and, more significantly, to literature. Some authors are faring so indifferently that they've taken to advertising not for publishers but for literary agents.

The current 'London Review of Books' carries an ad from a not unknown poet: 'Enterprising agent wanted to represent Fiona Pitt-Kethley for future She's had two discreet inquiries. GILES GORDON i imn 1 9 (a scene Debussy omitted altogether) or her encounter with Pelleas at the fountain. Sibelius's suite preface Thea Musgrave's Horn Concerto, splendidly played by Barry Tuckwell. The sequence was preceded by Debussy's opera, given in a semi-staged version of the much-praised Lyons Opera production which has already been seen in Edinburgh. It was somewhat ironic that John Eliot Gardiner, who conducted and had made the now famous cleaned-up edition of the score, quoted Debussy's words 'fa my Pel-leas et Melisande must be performed as it is written.

People can then take it or leave in defence of his alterations to the score, since in context that statement was actually an objection to concert performances of the opera: 'If this work has any merit, it is above all in the connection between its scenic and musical The perverse Lyons semi-staging forever contradicted the gestural and indeed the factual basis of the story: Melisande has short hair, the setting consists of three chairs, no caves, plus the odd incongru- WRINKLES Thanks for a new discovery in the U.S.A. many people are now looking younger and feeling better. Those tell tale lines and crows feet can be quickly and easily smoothed out with a non surgical treatment now generally available through a leading British Clinic. Further details may be obtained by completing the coupon on page 39 most passionate and involving manner: Itwas always1 the' most clear orchestral playing, ibiit the cogency with which it matched Schoenberg's intensely expres-sionistic response to Maeterlinck (more extrovertly mannered than Debussy, but equally dramatic in its different way), was magisterial. Bamert complemented this performance with a strong and convincing Beethoven Five, and a delightful Mozart major Flute Concerto from Philippa Davies.

In. the Beethoven I especially admired Bamert's forward-moving style, even though the attack of the tuttis was somewhat soft-edged. If Sibelius's suite seemed by far the most pallid of these responses to that was no fault of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's account under Jerzy Maksy-miuk: this orchestra is now sounding very characterful and accomplished. But somehow Sibelius is content to transfer the French connection of the drama into the sounds with which he was familiar. The result is more like a northern saga: wistful cor anglais solos, a warm Pastorale, and, a deliriously pictorial 'Melisande at the Spinning-Wheel'.

Melisande's death, too, seems more familiar as a Scandinavian lament than as anything which approaches the special character of Maeterlinck. One final note: to complement this invigorating planning, Radio 3 has this year taken a more positive attitude to the Proms than I can previously recall: Maeterlinck's play was broadcast on Sunday, with new incidental music by Colin Matthews. There were related interval features, and even, before the performance of the Schoenberg, a mid-concert interview with the evening's conductor. It is reassuring to know that Radio 3 does not harbour Schoenbergian feelings towards its listeners. "Spectacularly beautiful UNMISSABLE" Independent Variations on a theme at last week's "Proms NICHOLAS KENYON ous spotlight on the Albert Hall flowers.

Still, even such an odd dramatic approach to the opera did have the result in the Albert Hall of revealing the sharp etched colours ana high dramatic voltage of an opera which has sometimes seemed both monochrome and dull. John Eliot Gardiner's conducting of his Lyons Opera Orchestra seemed to me perhaps over-incisive and too rhythmic, drawing out many unsuspected things from the score but not really allowing it to unfold with that trance-like sense of stasis-in-movement it really needs. There was some outstanding singing from Diana Montague as Melisande (fragile yet firm), Francois le Roux as Pelleas (I prefer a tenor in the role, and le Roux was strained at the top, but his response elsewhere was ardently intense) as well as Jose van Dam as Golaud. Faure is the porte-musique of a band of snobs and fools who will never see anything, in or dp anything for, the other Pelleas. Thus wrote Debussy, more than a little piqued, when the task he had declined writing music for Patrick Campbell's English production of the play was successfully undertaken by Faure.

One can see his point: besides Debussy's powerful and precise characterisation of the concepts behind Maeterlinck drama, Faure's is a pretty evocation of its pictorial aspects; Melisande's spinning unclouded by doubt. The Lyons Opera Orchestra, giving Monday's concert on the Albert Hall stage, did not characterise Faure's gentle visions with as much skill as they brought to the punchy small-scale version of Bizet's music for 'L'Arlesienne' or to Ravel's Piano Concerto for the left hand, which was given a scintillating, sparkling performance by Francois-Rene Duchable with Gardiner conducting; the orchestra's style, though not especially French to my ears, is certainly very lively. Schoenberg's tone-poem is the largest of all these Maeterlinck-inspired pieces. Peter Vergo's fascinating Prom interval talk on Tuesday quoted the composer as saying he admired Maeterlinck's 'self-imposed limitations': any such limitations are conspicuously absent in this score, which gathers Schoenberg's largest orchestra outside 'Gur-relieder' and develops a long and violent musical argument of the greatest contrapuntal density. It is typical of the composer's self-conviction that, though he recognised faults in the piece, when Zem-linsky suggested cutting it for performance he objected violently in a letter which elicited, in response to the idea of 'consideration for the listener', the statement that 'I have exactly as little of this as he has for me.

All I know is that he exists, and in so far as he isn't indispensable for acoustic reasons, he's only a nuisance'. Schoenberg might possibly have- modified his opinion in view of the atmosphere generated by Matthias Bamert's Prom performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which swept all before it in the John Killick has been writing and publishing poetry for over eight and a half years. His work is profound and many themes powerfully come to symbolise the human obsessions with beauty, perfection arid escapism. He also runs Littlewood Press of which the following comment was the most interesting and important of our new small IRON MAGAZINE '33t33S3EJ EPITAPH FOR A LEPIDOPTERIST He became substance of what he admired: who sought fritillcries in order to catch the fluttering beauties in mid-flight and pin them down in their perfection. He tried painting them, but soon tired, convinced of the intransigence of canvass and the slowing emotion of his hand.

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