The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 40

40 OBSERVER SUNDAY 23 OCTOBER 1988 NEIL UBBERT Mac the bat clever set dumps a stage box of male audience-cum-chorus in full view, free to ogle the passing chorus girls. Unfortunately little that is remotely ogteable passes their way: a chorus of simpering St Trirdan giggkrs in pink tights and a variety of Greek togas prances around amateurishly, while the gods' lurid pink and green get-ups prove a trial to the eye. The prevailing instruction seems for evervnne to Iv a siltv 'Die Fledermaus' 'La Belle Helene' NICHOLAS KENYON story of 'Batman's Revenge' doesn't work at all, though I like the purple boiler-suit. One can't hear a word Gillian Sullivan sings as Ros, which is a pity because she has all the lyrics about Zanussi and The Independent. The best impersonations are Amy Burton's razor-sharp Adele, and Russell Smythe's 'LADIES and gentlemen, I have decided to set Die Fledermaus in Glasgow in This stirring opening to Simon Callow's declaration to his Scottish Opera cast a few months ago must have caused some raised eyebrows.

Was this the man who in his brilliant book 'Being an Actor' denounced the tyranny of the director and criticised the current theatre because it 'seems to claim the right to use existing material to reflect modern life? Indeed it was the same man, but the actor has now become a director in his own right, and there is a clever twist in the tail. 'Fledermaus' is not being updated to yuppie Glasgow in order to make it modern or ethnic ('I'm not remotely interested in a McFledermaus') but in order to provide Strauss's original intentions with an appropriate context: 'a way of releasing the vitality and social satire that I think have somewhat slumbered since the premiere'. Isn't that what all theatrical updating seeks to do? In any case, the result is pretty much the same, with all the same pros and cons. The fun sets by Bruno Santini take us to the Etsenstems' Kelvinside condominium-conversion with regulation piano bar and model sheep, trendy sofas and plenty of plants for intruders to hide behind ('Thank God for the Garden Festival'). Odofsky's party is in his steel-framed warehouse with a Henry Moore lurking discreetly at the back; and the prison is neo-brutal with a non-working drinks "yyftnw and a budgie that whistles the waltz song.

The libretto, which can hardly be described as sacrnsanrt. ha Miranda Richardson, Michael Gambon and EHeeri Atkins in 'Mountain Language': 'A subject of overwhelming importance but peak as possible, and they are. Fortunately Rosemary Ashe's Helen brings a modicum of dignity and conviction to the proceedings, and you can hear what she is singing about. Her duet with Paris (Peter Jeffes) goes well, and John Aykkm's brain-hurting Agamemnon is a model of clanty. On the first night Simon Phipps's brittle conducting did not bring any spark of idiomatic life to the performance, and I was left baffled as to -why such a farrago had got through a whole production period without radical surgery.

Glyndebourne Touring Opera celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year. Apart from a hiccup a few yean back when it was nearly lost to the Arts Council's "Glory of the Garden' restructurings, it has continued to provide a vital part of the national operatic network. It is a partial justification of the parent company's elitism, for it sends out good productions on the road with young casts. This year the new 'Katya Kabanova' is being conducted, by Sian Edwards, and there are revivals of 'La Traviata' and 'Die Ent-fuhrung aus dem Serafl'. The problem has sometimes been that the young casts have been overwhelmed by the touring venues they visit.

But in Oxford last week they coped well with the barn of the Apollo Theatre for Die Entfunrung, though the London Sinfonietta Opera Orchestra, straddled across the auditorium, took a long while to settle down under the over-spiky and insistent conducting of Wojciech Mich-niewski, who was making his British debut. But once everyone had adjusted to the unaccustomed theatre, Michniewski's responsive way with the score worked well: Peter Rose's Osmin filled all the available space splendidly, while Rosa Mannion's sharp-edged and brilliant Constanze also came across strongly. Mar-tyn Hill's fight Belmonte was attractive, and Yvonne Barclay's Blonde a delight. David Edwards's production is a complete and effective reworking of Peter Wood's original (no torture wheels), and William Dudley's sets still look been virtuosicaUy rewritten by rat nesicein-narvey ('Lave is not- a scenario that is nw. friendly'), and is crammed with rererences to uynasty, Malcolm Riftdnd.

answernhoAes. and PINTER'S Mountain Language (NT Lyttelton) is approxi-matelv 983 words long (which is as brief, my lord, as I have known a play), ft may be read pn the commuters Drain between Bank and Waterloo, and it takes between 20 and 25 minutes to perform. There is no shortage of action. An officer (Julian Wadham) and a sergeant (Michael Gambon) abuse women who have waited eight hours in the snow outside the prison to see their men. Inside, in the mockingly named 'blue room', an elderly woman (Eileen Atkins), whose hand has been savaged by a dog, faces her prisoner-son (Tony Haygarth) across a table; the language of their mountain homeland is forbidden them.

'I've got a wife and three the prisoner reminds the guard (George Harris), and to meet this act of insolence the sergeant is called in. Elsewhere in the prison, a young woman (Miranda Richardson) wanders into the wrong corridor and sees her husband collapsed after torture, a bag over his head. She agrees to buy future privileges with sex. Back in the blue room the language restriction is lifted, but the prisoner has been beaten and his mother unable, or unwilling, to speak. Took at says the sergeant.

'You go out of your way to give them a helping hand and they fuck it Blackout. The dem-adatinn nf human Hall's book for the Adam Faith-Anita Dobson musical Budgie (Cambridge) is set in Soho in the late Sixties and tells you everything you already knew about tarts, villains, strippers, pimps, bookies and slags: no cliche is left unturned. Don Black's lyrics often seem about to move in a more interesting direction, but synthesis calls them to heel and they are set to a score of unme-lodic banality by Mort Shuman. Saul Radomisky's grubby, winking Old Compton Street gives pleasure throughout, but the two stars are bland and the overall effect of nearly three machine-tooled formula pap is exhaustion. A new artistic regime at Hampstead comes in with a consistent, original and perverse Hedda Gaoler directed by John Dove.

Almost everybody is so laid-back that is hard to believe they would be galvanised into the retributive Greek time-scheme of Ibsen's play the moment the Dionysiac Lovborg (Dermot Crowley) hits town. Lindsay Duncan, in a clever and selfless performance, replaces the pounding tigress of tradition with an acidulous ice-kitten watching the action distastefully from the side. It is only at the very end, when the bleak misery of entrapment sweeps across the composure of her face like winter sleet, that we are allowed to see any anguish beneath Hedda's ingenuous detachment. Tasmanian sparkling wine. Many of the targets are generalised Thatcherite rather than specifically regional (or perhaps that just shows how mainstream-prosperous Glasgow has become).

Eisenstein is off to large spaces between and behind the roundabouts were to some muted, busy purpose but they are not. The tumultuous life of the crowd at the fair goes dead the moment a foreground scene gets under way, and only in the final knees-up does the large company take possession of the great arena stage for the first time. It springs to life. Most of the performances pass in and out of focus, but David Bamber is deliriously earnest as the Pooterish Littlewit and Anthony O'Donnell wonderfully funny and resourceful as the furious Humphrey Wasp. John Dexter directs the most enjoyable production of Julius Caesar (Leicester Haymarket) I have ever seen, in repertory with Stephen Spender's Creon until 5 November (thereafter Belfast Festival, and a British Council tour of India in January and February, the Council's largest performance-project next year).

There is so much to enjoy: clarity, intelligence, verse-speaking (voice-work, Barbara Ber-kery), lighting (Andy Phillips) and design (Jocelyn Herbert). It is a classic account of a play often obscured by false poetics and ranting, and returns Dexter the front rank of British iWEemr' 'Mountain Language', 'Bartholomew Fair MICHAEL RATCLIFFE directors after some faltering judgments in recent years. Confidence meets the eye the moment you take your seat. Herbert and Phillips, for lighting and design are indivisible here sets both plays within spare, architectural scaffolding and across pale, speckled steps and floors washed with pools of light. The austere beauty is sharpened by stabs of paintbox colour intermittently throughout: backlit scarlet banners slide slowly down the scaffolding in the bloody Capitol scene; the brilliant saffron plumes in Antony's helmet flare like' a feathered torch over Philippj.

In 'Creon' Theseus stares into Hades after the departing Oedipus, his face literally painted with red light These effects, oriental in their precision and tightness, dramatise the action whenever they are used. The bracing visual aesthetic or.Biecht and Caspar Neher is alive and well and living in Leicester. More, it provides a setting in which actors look at ease and give their best. Stephen Boxer's Cassius uses a harsh, clear voice well and shapes the long sentences without strain; Joseph Marcell is a Brutus of great authority and gentleness, proud and principled, vocally subtle, bemused by trivia but a man for whom curiosity never rests. Robert Fle-myng plays a rasping old Caesar of great presence.

The play is simple, moving, clear as day. Spender's Creon (Marcell) sententious, chauvinist, honey-tongued is the antithesis of Forsterian placing his country above his friends. Antigone (Tamsin Olivier) is the idealist who sets the world of the living below that of the dead and stakes her life on her brother's honourable burial. The battle is watched by a craven chorus of five who display prurient curiosity and offer specious advice. 'Creon', which is new and springs from an earlier version of the Theban plays, can look dry on the page, but the actors make light of its problems and Spender's political keenness responds to Dexter 's laconic style.

Keith Waterhouse and Willis Amy Burton: A razor-sharp Adele. suavely, sadly gay Johnny Falk. Omar Ebrahun is a jeans-dad Orlbfsky presiding over a 'glas-nost do' full of local eccentrics. Fortunately the show is well sung especially by Justin Lavender as Alfie Crass and is conducted by Jacek Kasprzyk with a keen animation that borders on the over-active. The Act Three monologue by Foz (Graham de Banzie) effectively deconstructs the proceedings in heavy dialect.

You feel convinced, perhaps irrationally, that with a few weeks on the road 'Fledermaus' could turn into a rip-roaring success. Conversely, the reaction to the New Sadler's Wells Opera production of Offenbach's La Belle Helene must be that nothing can save this feeble parody-production of a marvellous parody-original. Tim Luscombe's staging puts the piece in a Paris theatre during its initial ran, todj Uhz's prison because of a spot of insider dealing; Rosalind edits a fashionable magazine; Adele is an American student troino tn get into the Scottish Academy of ujuw rxoiiK is an enlishtened orison onvprnnr from the fjords. And so on. ine whole thing is earned off with immense vitalitv.

and dm beam to work. But some nf th singers are happier than others win ine iaea ot oeing in a Glaswegian soap-opera. Robin Leg- gate's well sung, coke-sniffing Eisenstein has not quite found his pacing in the dialogue: his lives by those with thehatdware of terror at their command is a subject of overwhelming impor tance as our grim century approaches its final decade, but it is solemnly over-presented Bolt of lightning acre, nncer mrects me actors to Discover Johnu.the angry youth, the musician, the radical, the husband, the father; the lover; the idealist-through his own words and personal collection of film and music. play each scene at an identical andante so that much of the ten sion goes siacK. ine result is theatrically less incisive than time New York.

Six years after the war the House on Carroll Street is beinc used hv lnral Howard Barker's collection of compacted 'Possibilities' which earlier this year covered similar 'Yeelen', 'House on Carroll Street, 'Fruit Machine' PHILIP FRENCH IN THE wake of the remarkable Lapp epic 'Pathfinder' comes an equally extraordinary, and not wholly dissimilar picture from Mali: Souleymane Cisse's quest fable, Yeelen (Lumiere, PG). One of the finest movies yet made on the African continent, this bolt of lightning from the heart of darkness translates as 'Brightness' or 'The Light. In a world before the Golden Bough gave way to the golden handshake, a young priest sets off on a journey of flight, discovery and reconciliation. His shaman father has refused to hand on his secrets and is out to kill him; the son must prepare for the final showdown. In a series of stunning images he crosses mountains and plains, traverses dry river beds, immerses himself in numinous waterfalls, stops in villages of straw huts, townships of sculpted clay and cliff-dwellings as majestic as the abandoned Indian pueblos of New Mexico.

Along the way he learns to develop and control his powers. Captured by his tribe's traditional enemies, he literally petrifies his guards, then helps his host-king by turning back ah army of invaders he conjures up a swarm of killer-bees and sets the savannah alight. There are echoes in the young man's story of Greek myth, the Grail legend add our Bible, but Cisse locates him in a real African world of ritual magic and traditional tasks, an endless cycle of fetish and carry. He engages us at an intuitive rather than an intellectual level. We understand how Mali feels rather than what Mali pense, and his picture is a rich, mystical, sometimes mystifying experience.

The most interesting, thoughtful and enjoyable thriller of the year, Peter Yates's The House on Carroll Street (Cannon, Haymarket, PG), is set in ground, and politically less erful than Pinter's own 'One for the Road' four years ago. Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (NT, Olivier) is a cheerful but impossible assignment, stuffed full of wonderful jokes and London life, but theatrically inert. Deciding correctly to direct it on the Olivier stage, Richard Eyre then shoots himself in the foot by allowing William Dudley, his marvellous collaborator on 'The Changeling', to fill it with three roundabouts and a fairground organ. (The period is late Victorian.) There is no room for the actors except at the front of the stage. This would not matter if the The beguiling duo flee for their lives after witnessing a gangland hitman murder a transvestite club-owner (Robbie Coltrane).

Like Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, the pair head south in a sleek Bentley provided by a louche homosexual opera star (Robert Stephens), Clarke's local version of Joe E. Brown, and in Brighton they seek to liberate a captive dolphin with whom the doomed Eddie identifies. This oddball tragj-comedy breaks new while evoking familiar precedents it's a curious mixture of a gay 'Some Like It Hot', a teenage 'Turtle Diary' and 'The Water Babies' of Thatcher's Britain. Adapted from a Jennifer Johnston novel and directed by TV hand Robert Knights, The Dawning (Odeon, Haymarket, PG) looks like Michael Winner's idea of how to film Chekhov. Greta Scacchi-lookalike Rebecca Pidgeon plays an 18-year-old girl on the brink of adulthood in 1920s Ireland, living in a middle-class Protestant household, under the influence of a Catholic cook, and protecting a charismatic Republican gunman.

(Anthony Hopkins) who's taken refuge in her beach-hut. Thunderous music crushes the lyrical impact of the handsomely photographed coastal scenery; subtle nuances of perception and behaviour are flattened by dull, repetitious dialogue. Earlier this year the same events in an identical ambience were given a definitive treatment in Christopher Morahan's TV version of J. G. Farrell's novel 'Troubles'.

I A I agents of the American government to protect fugitive Nazis. The crucial line of the movie is delivered by the resilient Emily, with a tender, comic sadness, to her FBI lover: 'Why couldn't we have met in World War II when we were on the same There is much virtuosity in the Czech animator Jan Svank-majer's Alice (ICA, PG). The White Rabbit eats wood-shavings and has to blow sawdust off the watch he constantly pulls out of his innards; the Mad Hatter is a self-operating marionette; an old sock picks up a set of false teeth and a pair of glass eyes to become the Caterpillar. This disturbing, humourless Mittel-Eu-ropean nightmare is not an English summer daydream of Wonderland. It's sub-Kafka, nouvelle Prague Lewis Carroll on Hus Street.

The Fruit Machine (Cannon, Haymarket, 15) is Liverpool screenwriter Frank Clarke's ghs-nost version of his 'Letter to Brezhnev': it might well have been called 'A French Letter to Gorbachov'. The director, Philip Saville, made 'Boys From the Black Stuff, and the central characters are two Merseyside gays, the wide-eyed romantic black Eddie (Emile Charles) and the charming, street-wise rent-boy Michael (Tony Forsyth). mUt I5 1951 New York at the height of McCarthyism. Its liberal heroine, Emily (Kelly McGillis), loses her job as a picture editor on Life magazine after refusing to name names when called before a Senate committee investigating a civil rights group she belongs to. Subsequently Emily stumbles across a clandestine organisation run by the committee's vile chief counsel Ray Salwen (Mandy Patinkin) to 'launder fugitive Nazi scientists on behalf of the US Government.

She enlists a sympathetic FBI agent tracking her (sweet-natured Jeff Daniels) to assist her investigation. The movie convincingly recreates the mood of the time cold-war paranoia underlying the blandly optimistic surface of a country on the verge of electing Ike, the Great Golfer, as President. The pace is brisk, there are twists and surprises, some wry humour, and several well staged chases, most notably in Grand Central Station and that Mecca of second-hand book buyers, the Strand Book Store. What gives 'Carroll Street' its WMNER BROS. Presents a DAVID WOLPER production An ANDREW StXJm "IMAGINE: JOHN LENNON" iMstty JOHN IJEMNsmtatHKM BUD FRtEOGETi ac cpm SAM EGAN wwtaby SAM EGANaid ANDREWS Directed by ANDREW SOLT WARNU BROS OKI ahakm i MUSIC FROM THE MOTION PICTURE ON BB RECORDS, CASSETTES CDs' British Gas TREASURES OUR NATIONAL HERITAGE IN THE WEST END AND AT SELECTED CINEMAS ACROSS THE COUNTRY FROM FRIDAY OCTOBER 28 SEE LOCAL PA ESS FOR DETAILS particular resonance, however, is the canny wav Robert Ronnn its co-producer and deviser, has This is just one of the items on show at a major new exhibition Treasures far the Notion', being held at the British Museum from October 27.

and sponsored by British Gas. The Exhibition, representing the important work of the National Heritage Memorial hind, has an extraordinarily wide range of displays exemplifying our national heritage -from art to engineering, from furniture to jewellery, from the military to the horticultural -all of which have been saved from export; damage or decay The COTnTnOTI factor the tfprv rhnrnrrar assemoiea nis production team and cast. The screenplay, for instance, is bv Walter Rmntain a one-time blacklisted writer and autnpr ot the first Hollywood movie to ueai explicitly with McCarthyism and the media. 'The Front'. Mandv Pa lmoersonated the of Britain and the importance of these objects to it.

The sponsorship of this wide-ranging exhibition by British Gas demonstrates our commitment to and involvement with the life of the community -and its heritage. Julius Rosenbera in fh serious film on the era, 'Daniel'; nere ne piays quite brilliantly a character closely based on the reptilian Rov Cohn. ju 'A Summer Story is the nearest we're going to get to a British -Jean de Florette'. (HIGHEST RATING) FILM REVIEW A Summer Story, thy aide who dedicated himself to sending toe Rosenbergs to the electric chair. Kelly McGillis.

This sMtunt'uuj iisrti on Cuprum Coolc'j ihirj ti.vn tht pjcifii im-1780) spirited heroine, is a warm. humanised version of Hollywood ice-queen of the cold war, Grace Kellv. In 'Carmii Street' McGillis oartiallv re-en acts a celebrated Grace K11 role in the Hitrhrwb edgily reflected the tensions of me mcuiruiy period, 'Rear Window'. Hitch's 0c Jessica Tandy appears in the Rear window' hnma aA wi pw, wm there are Several nthm- nramn. nc ENTERTAINMENT GROUP A SUMMER STORY STUBBS JAMES WILBY KENCOLLEY SOPHIE WARD-B0j5SjfeKEE DELERUE JENNY BEAVAN "BSS LEO AUSTIN RALPH SHELDON KENNETH MACMILLAN JOHN GALSWORTHY PENELOPE MORTIMER DANTON RISSNER PIERS HAGGARD oosEiiHS- aj TREASURES FOR THE NATION 10,000 wnnh ill gold smwwijjns to lie wn mi the British Gas Heritage Trail' curiijietition! Details at umr British Gas sliowiwni 0 to the Master's work, mduding a crucial plot of 'Notorious'.

The title 'The House on Carroll Street' comnletM a MAm CONSERVING OUR HERITAGE At the British Museum October 27. 1988 February 26, 1989 Open 10.00am to 5.00pm Monday to Saturday. 2.30pm to 6.00pm Sunday, (closed November 16. December 23-26 1 allusions to post-war Hollywood films, echoing a classic, now-it-can-be-told semi-docu-mentarv thriller nf iqja ir. xt, British Gas! unujdnujiy ioj Admission tree IN THE WEST END AND AT SELECTED CINEMAS ACROSS THE COUNTRY FROM FRIDAY OCTOBER 28 SEE LOCAL PRESS FOR DETAILS 113 House on 92nd Street', the FBI were observing the nefarious activities of Nazi spies in war.