The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 43

OBSERVER SUNDAY 9 OCTOBER 1988 43 Passion in public NEIL UBBERT connection with his work: it does, however, bear out the ancient principle that successful jazz is written not for instruments but for players. The three-part suite by the West Indian composer Herman Wilson did not work on Wednesday night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall because it had clearly not been conceived with this band in mind: they were so busy concentrating on being orchestral musicians that they had no time to be themselves. On the other hand, the two pieces written by Harry Beckett, who plays trumpet in the band, came off beautifully. The best moment of the night came in his piece 'Something Like That', with Orphey Robinson's vibraphone solo. The rhythm suddenly perked up in response to his flowing lines, and for a few minutes the whole performance became airborne.

In their present form, the Jazz Warriors are much improved. Even their biggest fan would not describe them as masters of ensemble accuracy, but they have a spirit and mutual understanding that is far more important than the odd dropped stitch. The' Jazz Warriors' tour continues around England and Wales until 23 October. by the occasions when the playwright puts it on hold and listens to the pretty patterns he makes which place sound before sense. 'Why is the sun 'In a way, we all McGuinness can do better than that.

He does so elsewhere in the Dublin Theatre Festival, in a marvellously good version of 'Peer Gynt' at the Gate (to which I shall return next week) and he does so in 'Carthaginians' with a plain litany of the dead 13, their ages, and the banally named streets from which they came (Garden Place, Westway, Central Drive) and with at least two of the watchers for the dead: Paul, a ferocious ex-teacher building a pyramid out of garbage (Des McAker) and Maela, a bereaved mother (Rosaleen Linehan). 'Am I mad? Paul asks Maela brightly. 'You're definitely not well aU the replies Miss iiwrmn gravely, with the dark voice of a droll sybil and the grim-jawed sanity of Breughel's spectre striding the religious wars, Dulle Griet. Miss Linehan is a one-off, and I can't wait to see her again. Kathy Strachan designs Jon Pope's studio production of Richard lH (Citizens', Glasgow) so that we are seated under the crossing of a great English medieval church, with a gothk clerestory round the four walls of the stage tower above and beyond the lighting-rig a gilded angel hovering in the air.

In the clerestory stand draped stone figures in various states of ruin and disrepair. Among these figures, invisible to a quarter of the audience, Richard (Ciaran Hinds) poses mockingry for his planned acceptance of die crown. The clothes are familiar the new Shakespearean heraldry of mud-spattered greatcoats and double-breasted suits for die men: the women trapped in tailored formal suitings of 30 to 40 years ago. Hinds looks what he is, a Citizens actor in short pigtail and gleaming slicked hair, a handsome cross between a Sicilian bandit and a Byzantine Christ, the axe-face pierced with fanatic, fundamentalist eyes. He sustains a lightweight, clever performance on a harsh voice of narrow range, but, except for Stephen MacDonald's smiling Buckingham, the rest of the acting in the small company of nine tends to the monotonous and coarse.

DAVID HARE's painful, witty and moving new play The Secret Rapture (NT, Lyttelton) is a morality of modern behaviour in which the people who have all the answers face, buy out and destroy the people who thought there were no questions to ask. The elements are traditional but neglected: a representative of earthly government, an artist, an artisan, a man of God, a witch. Hare also brings off a portrait of absolute goodness on stage, while a conflict between sisters transforms a fatal attraction into a crime passiomtel, rare in any English play. Marion (Penelope Wilton), Junior Minister for the Environment, and her fatuous evangelist husband Tom (Paul Shelley) meet Marion's sister Isobel (Jill Baker) at the deathbed of their father. Robert was a country bookseller of such liberal other-workUiness that he took a brittle alcoholic drop-out half his age to be his second wife.

When Kath-erine (Clare Higgins) maliciously announces after the funeral that she is joining Isobel's small studio, Marion, the Tory advocate of individual initiative, forces the gentle Isobel to accept by declaring that resistance would be selfish. Arguments are stood on their head throughout and Isobel, too good for this world, is marked out for destruction. She loves Irwin (Mick Ford), an artist in the studio, and Irwin adores her. When Tom and Marion beef up her small business with much-needed capital, turning it into a company with a board, they first buy Irwin's acceptance, an act of betrayal Isobel never forgives. Both sisters give themselves away in transparent disingenu-ousness.

'It isn't a question of says Isobel when taking Katherine on, 'I'd just like to be sure we do the right Exactly. 'I've nothing on my says Marion as Irwin drifts into despair, 'I feel But she does, and her aggressive public composure breaks down into the anger of exasperation and then the rage of grief as her tantalising, sensual and mysterious sister remains ever beyond her reach. When read (Faber, 3.95), the play's resonance seems political and its tensions absolutely.sharp. In Howard Davies's production they are more elusive; John Gunter's handsome designs oak panelling, office walls, bare Paul Alder and James Dun-ell in 'Lorca's surrealist experiment in homoerotic theatre'. JOHN PEEL at the Mean Fiddler FOR OVER a year now I have had to endure the horrid taunts of acquaintances who did not, as I did, miss the final tour of Steve Albini's former band, Big Black.

'Rewed-up youths on a thrill they said. Since then Albini's reputation has grown so much that I can only suppose that the modest crowd at the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden on Thursday to see his new band can, in part at least, be explained by the American's miserable choice of name for the trio: Rapeman. Albini approaches his work with a liveliness that would send Carl Lewis into torments of circumlocution; he also seems to have a lively sense of humour. 'We're the Sweet Smellin' he announced. 'And here's a track from our LP, 'Two Nuns and A With that he lashed the band into 45 minutes of the most exciting music I have heard.

With a drummer and a bassist drafted from the Texan band Scratch Acid giving him thunderous support, Albini's performance words flung at the microphone as his head hurtles past it, guitar playing fired by bis apparent determination to make the machinery reproduce the noises in his head even if it can't is so intense that to greet it with mere applause seems faintly insulting. With songs announced as 'Trouser Minnow' and 'Coition Ignition Mission' (named after what one hopes is an imaginary plan for astronauts to breed in space), Albini's lyric invention seldom strays far from the safety of his underpants. It is impossible to decide whether he has some ambition to remind us of the desecrations and despoliations that boil within us all, or whether he just likes rude words the musical equivalent of Viz Comics' splendid Rude Kid. Whichever it is, I hope the oafish name will not discourage readers from seeing this extraordinary band. Rapeman was supported by New York's Band of Susans, fronted by a male, Robert Poss, and with but one of three original Susans remaining.

I suspect the Band of Susans would agree that they did not really hit their stride until two or three songs from the end of their set. With three guitars establishing an unrelenting, even oppressive backdrop for largely inaudible vocals, the Susans were poorly served by sound engineers who should have cranked up the volume and put some of the bite they later found for Steve Albini into the guitar noise. At the same venue the previous night, I saw Boston's The Pixies. They provided a third strand of contemporary American music: articulate, frustrated and complex, and much more to do with the real world than the apparently endless strain of sentimental drivel about a mythic past that seems to bedevil an America determined to avoid coming to terms with the present The Pixies were unhappy with their performance, but I was hugely impressed. bellowed a Scot standing in front of me.

'Outstanding' is not an easy word to bellow, but he was right. DAVE GELLY on the Jazz Warriors BLACK British jazz musicians take a keen interest in their predecessors. It was this which prompted the Jazz Warriors, the 19-piece band founded by saxophonist Courtney Pine, to dedicate their current tour, on the Arts Council's Contemporary. Musk Network, to the memory of the late Joe Harriott. Harriott came to Britain from Jamaica in the 1950s and soon became one of this country's most admired jazz figures.

The Warriors' tribute, consisting of some specially written pieces, has little musical among others, they find a chatty and delightful Juliet who is not interested in discussing theories of love or the theatre at all, but simply wants to be in love. When the director returns to his office he meets his match in a sinister, humming magician (Roddy Maude-Roxby) and the play draws to an incisive, icy, close. Worth catching. There's a far perkier queen in Frank McGuinness's new play Carthaginians (Peacock, Dublin) provoking the soldiers of Derry in pink suit, blue boots or in full drag as a mini-skirted French tart. The gaudy Dido (David Herlihy) supplies food; drink and cigarettes on commission to six Catholic survivors of Bloody Sunday camped out in one of the cemeteries awaiting the resurrection of the town's dead.

Blessed are the gender-benders, we seem to be hearing, for they dwell cheerfully and high above the extension of the virile, imperative into civil war. How Lorca would have approved. The play is flawed by its unfocused comic interludes and daUtJ I Hare, McGuinness, Lorca, Shakespeare MICHAEL RATCLIFFE Lorca obscures the worship of Pan with a cool and argumentative mteUectualism worthy of Pirandello, posing questions and paradoxes about the' nature of theatre and identity in a hermetic manner that gives no answers and requires none. "The Public' is not really about physical passion or pleasure at all. Only once in the entire 95 minutes is love between men shown to be positive, uncomplicated, spontaneous and full of joy.

Not much promotion going on here. Stratford's bold and courageous production moves briskly and elegantly from one episode to the next as the nardsstic director (Gerard Murphy) takes his former lovers and craven public beneath the mask of illusion into what he calls 'The theatre beneath the sand' where, floor and great tree provide a stark, reductive setting for these English lives rather than the clutter they sometimes suggest: the performances within them are very precisely balanced, led by Baker, all resignation, simplicity and stillness as the woman whose feelings are defined for her by others, and by Wilton as the Thatcherite sister who knows she is better briefed than her opponents and therefore always, but always, in the right. It is the irony of this disturbing and passionate play that where her own sister is concerned Marion has never been properly briefed from the start. Ultz's production, of The Public at the Theatre Royal, 'Stratford East, opens with an explosive drumbeat and ends with the onset of a new. ice age.

It confirms the impression made by Lorca's surrealist experiment in homoerotic theatre in its Paris production, on which I reported earlier in the year: It is a pagan piece, celebrating the pre-Christian universality of all love and the coexistence of the earthly and the sublime. A guilty occupation mm Revoir Les Enfants' and wiwffi tj esrwisaiwrwp jl i nfsnasxamM is rw -Havre jw? ifvn imatatmw.i: j-it JON SAVAGE KEITH RICHARDS: 'Talk Is Cheap' (Virgin 2554) RICHARDS' first solo album Is a success: eleven songs In various roots styles reggae, rock given coherence by the relaxed swing of the band.The pleasure Is in the playing, but suspicions of slightness are confirmed by the strength of his kiss-off to' Mick Jagger, 'You Don't Move Me'. THIS week's freeble Is for those who puzzle over music In TV commercials: 10 CDs and 10 records of "The Classic Experience', a double album of themes of famillar'ads such as Hamlet (Bach's 'Air on a string'), go to the first 20 readers to answer Which set of concerts end with the 'Pomp and Circumstance March No. Postcards to 'The Classic Experience', do Marketing The Observer, Chelsea Bridge House, Qiiee'nstowh Road, London SW84NN. Last weak we-gavaawayDve copies of the opara 'Nixon In China' tc-those who knew Mao Tsa-Tung was leader when Nixon visited Chlna 'At least Petam faows how to get along with the one says; 'Better Krauts than Jews or says another.

The occupying power apparently represents little threat to the schoolboys. A young German soldier asks one of the teachers to hear his confession. Lost in the forest on a boy-scout expedition, Jean and Julien are brought safely home by a German patrol. When a pair of vicious, Semitic French militiamen demand to see identity cards in a smart restaurant (one of the most brilliantly orchestrated sequences in the film), a drunken German officer orders them to leave, largely to impress the middle-class French diners. Eventually, of course, the Gestapo come, tipped off by an informer.

But even here the most violent act by their leader is to snatch offensive allied flags from a. war-map on the classroom wall, and he gives the assembled boys a lecture on German discipline. The ending is quiet, understated and shattering. Denying us the easy comfort of tears, Malle makes us share a memory that has haunted him for over 40 years, a memory that must have become intensified over the years, as Julien increasingly understands the back- LP MC A 2JH MidnhfMi' TO APPRECIATE the immense emotional gulf between the Brit ish and the Continental expert- ence of World War II you only nave to compare two recent autobiographical films by direct tors now in then: mid-50s John Boorman's 'Hope and Glory' and Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants (Curzon-Mayfair, PG). Boorman looks back truthfully and with guiltless affection to a time when British communities were united by the Blitz and shared hardship, when no one got up to anything more wicked than a little dabbling in the black market and adultery with glamorous allied servicemen, and when children willed friendly bombs to fall on their schools.

There is much that is universally human in Boorman's nostalgic film, but there is also a general absence of 'Le Chagrin et la Pitie'. He did not have, to ponder exemplary careers ranging from the craven collaboration of Pierre Laval to the courageous resistance of Jean Moulin, that Europeans and Scandinavians must confront when reviewing the war years. Malle's subtly detailed movie takes place in occupied France during January 1944, less than six months before D-Day, at a school for the sons of wealthy Catholics outside Fontainebleau. The crowded dormitories, poor food, freezing classrooms and stern discipline suggest the world of Dickens. The central TAKE Tucyj HjWE -STUPIO AUDIENCE oS BLfltggrVBLK Li ground from which Jean came, the destination to which he was being sent, and the historical cir-curasnmces that made vSucha- 'Au Revoir Les Enfants' but only the best movie on the subject of the Occupation since Malle's own 'Lacombe Lucien': it is also one of the best pictures ever made about childhood, and the finest French film for several years.

The performances that Malle has drawn from Gaspard Manesse and Raphael Fejto as Julien and Jean are not to be faulted. You can get too much of a good thing, and at 126 minutes Martin Brest's highly entertaining comedy-thriller Midnight Ron (Empire, IS) is about 20 minutes too long. This combination of the Odd Couple film, the buddy movie, and the prisoner-and-escort picture, brings together two gifted comic performers Charles Grodin, a dead-pan, put-on artist behind whose fleshy, placid exterior there lurks a cheerful insincerity, and the Method actor Robert De Niro, whose bony, tortured, endlessly expressive face covers a desperate sincerity. Grodin is noted for his disdainful sneer, De Niro for his disarming smile. De Niro plays an ex-cop driven off the Chicago police force by a mobster who had corrupted all his colleagues.

Now a bounty hunter, he pursues an idealistic accountant, played by uroain, wno nas stolen $1S million from this same hoodlum, given most of it to the poor, jumped bail in Los Angeles and gone into hiding in New York. Thirty-one stuntmen worked on this picture and they earned their credits. But what makes the film really enjoyable is the interaction of De Niro and Grodin: the open, unkempt, chainsmoking street-wise cop who won't accept a dubious penny from anyone, and the sly, fastidious, health-conscious accountants who has stolen $15 million. George Gallo's inventive script and the performances fend off, without ever defeating, the forces of sentimentality. What we never feel in 'Midnight Run', however, is a sense of mortal danger.

The crooks in the same director's (admittedly inferior) 'Beverly Hills Cop' meant business, they killed without compunction. The heavies here are a joky, Runyonesque collection. 355 reWtTonsrup, however, contains hints of Alain Fournier's 'Le Grand Meaulnes'. When a new boy called Jean Bonnet is introduced into a class of 12-year-olds, he is made the object of practical jokes and bullying despite a special request from the priests that he be treated with kindness. Initially the brightest lad in the class, Julien Quentin, joins in, to ingratiate himself with his fellows and because he recognises in the clever, scholarly Jean an academic rival.

But gradually the two become friends, sharing atf interest in music (in a lovely scene the pair play a boogie-woogie piano duet) and literature. And Julien discovers that this anxious outsider, posing as a protestant, is in fact Jean Kippelstein, one of three Jewish boys being hidden by the fathers though precisely what a Jew is he cannot understand. For much of the way; Malle appears merely to be creating a vivid portrait of an enclosed community, its essential austerity simply intensified by war conditions. The occupation is resented, certainly, and this is expressed through a superior distaste for the Boche. Yet schoolboys can unthinkingly echo their parents' prejudices Photo: FPosscll 1 1 thammwhvn 1 (iff gets you 33 off National Express and Scottish Gtylink standard fares) Bernstein Conducts his West Side Story Why sit around getting bored when with a Student Coach Card you can afford to get about a bit? If you're a student in full-time education (or a sixth former aged 16 or over) you can get a StudentCoach Card for only 3.90.

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