The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 41

TSSBsT OBSERVER SUNDAY 20 NOVEMBER 1988 41 NEIL UBBERT Unfurled umbrella LIIL- I I CZ3 Larrieu, whose new piece will be premiered during LCDT's forthcoming season at Sadler's Wells (22 November to 3 December). Rambert Dance Company is the only major British company to have absorbed Umbrella's ideas and influences, directly (by inviting guest choreographers to make pieces) and indirectly. Members of the company attend performances as consistently as they can one of the problems for professional dancers, especially touring ones, being the lack of opportunity to watch other companies. It is probably healthy that the present crop of young choreographers and performers show no signs of imitating impressive Umbrella guests such as Meredith Monk, Stephen Petronio or Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. A slightly earlier generation, who were affected by American experiments with improvisation, have set up their own collaborative network, mostly with performers in the States and Holland (Laurie Booth, Kirstie Simson, Julyen Hamilton).

That generation's preference for loosely structured, work-in-progress performances largely disappeared from the Umbrella. Presentation now tends to be Dolished and profes THt high points of Dance Umbrella's tenth anniversary season (which ends today) were undoubtedly the performances by DV8 and Siobhan Davies's company. It is an indication that Dance Umbrella has come of age that both groups are British and that both attracted packed houses. Davies has a long-standing reputation for her work with mainstream companies but she has also benefited from Dance Umbrella's support for her more experimental pieces. Her new company has attracted excellent dancers; and her freshly inventive choreography was enhanced by David Buckland's designs and Peter Mumford's lighting.

DV8 was established by Lloyd Newson in order to disrupt received ideas about dance and choreography. His previous forays into sexual politics and gender stereotypes were arresting but crude, battering home familiar ideas. In his latest piece, 'Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men', he and his three collaborators found a physical language beyond words to convey a nightmarish desolation. It was a tough-minded piece that spared neither audience nor performers. If Newson had not limited the performances the cast were prepared to do, DV8 could have accepted offers from abroad and from arts centres all over the country.

This appetite for demanding work is something Dance Umbrella has helped create, just as it has raised expectations of what experimental dance can offer. Post-modern performers from the United States, Japan, Holland, France, Belgium and Germany have shown many different possibilities, drawing from national theatrical traditions as well as international dance techniques. While audiences have obviously been educated by 10 years of Umbrella festivals, it is much harder to assess what effect the Umbrella has had on the way dance has developed in this country. True, choreographers whose work was first shown in an Umbrella festival have been asked to make or mount pieces for British companies: David Happy tenth anniversary of Dance Umbrella JANN PARRY Gordon and Michael Clark for Extemporary Dance Theatre, Rosalind Newman for London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Trisha Brown for Rambert. But once those works are dropped from the repertoires, not a trace is likely to remain.

Ashley Page and Jonathan Burrows, both Rambert: Under the influence. Royal Ballet members, have been greatly influenced by Umbrella choreographers but although they have both made works for the Royal Ballet, they have not radically affected the course of either company. There is far less cross-over into British ballet of experimental choreographers than, for example, in America or France. Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, David Gordon, Karole Armitage and Mark Morris have all made pieces for classical ballet companies but not in this country. Even London Contemporary Dance Theatre has resisted the bolder innovators, prefering to stick to tried and tested choreographers: exceptions, however, include Daniel "0 Theatre de Complicity's 'The Visit': 'A remarkable production a communal nightmare of citizens who wince in silent Revenger's comedy 'The Visit', 'The Bacchae' and 'Promised Land' MICHAEL RATCLIFFE Fasten seat Complicate, whose three-month residency at the Almeida is now well under way, are riding high.

Their range is extending all the time and their grant is being doubled next year. With Cheek by Jowl, about whom I wrote last week, they currently lead the small-scale touring field, one of the great joys of British theatre in the last 15 years. ('The Visit' tours in the New Year.) Both groups were founded in the early Eighties and remain in the artistic control of those who founded them. The test comes when the founders move on. It is much too soon to define a clear new identity for Shared Experience under Nancy Meckler, who succeeded Mike Alfreds this year, but there is one more week left to catch The Bacchae at the Lyric Studio, a show much simplified and sharpened since opening at the Edinburgh Festival in August.

Simon Tyrrell, plays Dionysus as a jealous young god of today, baleful, teasing and abstemious, so laid-back he even manages to yawn during the pre-performance warm-up; Peter Hamilton Dyer's Pentheus treats his divine prisoner like a schoolmaster with an imperfect grip on his class, eyes shining in a mixture of prurience, excitement and contempt. Male piques rule. Arts Council pressures on touring companies often affect repertory and, increasingly, allow less money-time for experiment and the risk of failure. Joint Stock and Foco Novo, like Shared Experience founded in the Seventies, were both switched to project-funding in September which means that companies apply for funding one project at a time. Foco Novo had no resources to bridge the financial gap and folded overnight.

The historically distinguished Joint Stock, whose Promised Land runs at the Drill Hall until Saturday (Leeds and York, beginning of December) has no certain future beyond the demands of justice and the rule of law, the citizens talk themselves round. The vicar sends up a pious hope at the end: 'Let us pray to God to help us in these hustling, bustling, prosperous times! Protect our peace! Protect our The grins harden. A play written from the cockpit of Switzerland 10 years after Hitler's death, arrives, on schedule, in the sententious and convenient world of Margaret Thatcher and George Bush. Theatre de Complicite's remarkable production offers all of Durrenmatt inside a mimic communal nightmare of citizens who wince in silent greed, transcontinental expresses which never stop, sweet and. sour waltzes, baroque brass, shutter-snapping cameras and ringing tills.

The structed Hunter) stalks the town on ermine-trimmed Louis Quinze crutches and goes to her eighth wedding in a 25-foot train like the wings of an over-endowed bug. Miss Hunter cleverly plays an extravagant part as though she meant every word of it. Simon McBurney, the company's co-founder and most incisive mime, plays Alfred with a suburban fatuousness that shades into dry-throat terror and shrugging resignation; he has pathos without sentimentality. There are still several moments in the first half when a frenzied cartoon style seems to be worrying the text out of shape, but the second half is very powerful indeed. Annabel Arden's production embellishes the playwright's stark vision of Europe with a dangerous playfulness and amplifies the power of his voice.

sional, with high standards of music and design. The rougher-edged stuff, where ideas are more important than execution, is tried out at Chisenhale Dance Space or The Place's spring-loaded season. Dance Umbrella has gone up market. That has happened partly because other promoters (such as John Ashford at The Place) have picked up the Umbrella ball and run with it. They have helped build audiences, which have been notably bigger this year than in previous festivals.

The Umbrella management is now encouraging regional organisa tions, in particular in Leicester and Newcastle, to develop their own dance festivals. Joint tnitia tives are under way with the Place and the South Bank to bring over a number of French companies between April and November next year, to celebrate the bicentenary of the French Revolution. Tucker and 'Stand and Deliver PHILIP FRENCH computer scientist to teach maths at a run-down school in the East Los Angeles Hispanic ghetto threatened with loss of academic accreditation. A teacher of genius who believes that 'students will rise to the level of expectation', Escalante has nurtured class after class of gifted mathematicians. Jeff Bridges as Tucker His first generation of pupils performed so brilliantly in a 1982 calculus exam designed to select high-school seniors for university scholarships, that cheating was suspected.

This crisis provides the dramatic climax of a lovely movie. Olmos balding, paunchy, slouching is a splendid low-key hero and the director makes the atmosphere of a classroom and an examination hall as tense as a gang fight. 27 NOVEMBER if V' film end of the current financial year. The proposed subject of their-next project is England as the 51st state of America; England certainly needs them and England is where they should stay. Karim Alrawi's polemically pro-Palestinian comedy 'Promised Land' the first show researched by Joint Stock abroad is not only too long and too anecdotal but theatrically impertinent to the crisis in Gaza and the West Bank when compared to the Palestinian critique of Israel offered by the El-Hakawati group, let alone the mordant self-examination in Israeli theatre itself.

Much the most ambitious of current touring shows, in co-production with Derby Playhouse and Plymouth Theatre Royal, is William Gaminara's three-hour adaptation of Zola's Germinal for Paines Plough (The Place, tomorrow for two weeks). Pip Broughton directs a company of 14 on a substantial setting by Simon Vicenzi: a huge, swollen belly of earth hangs above a large metal platform that serves for dining table, town square, coalface, shop counter and pub bar. A tremendous story unfolds imagination's triumph over adversity and revolution as the sublimation of love. The ensemble is efficient rather than exceptional, but Zola holds the course. The Bush is back on form with Heart-Throb, a smashing, funny, well written and painfully sad play by Caroline Hutchison, Anna Mottram and Jeremy Sea-brook.

Nosey, psychic, pretentious and Welsh Atlanta (Emma Williams) descends on her old mate Francine (Anna Mottram), a dim, canny, near-agoraphobic Brummie in her grotty flat. Francine's only interest in life is her correspondence with Scotland (Kevin McMonagle), a prisoner who writes with the voluptuous precision of the man inside. Francine shares the correspondence with Atlanta, and Scotland, about to come out, must choose between them. The end is not quite right, but the command and integration of three different languages, like the performances and Richard Wilson's direction, are superb. GDYNIA GRAND RAPIDS HELSINKI HOUSTON IOWA CITY ISTANBUL JACKSONVILLE KANSAS CITY LIMA LODZ LOUISVILLE MADISON MADRID MEXICO MIAMI BEACH MILWAUKEE MUNICH NASHVILLE NEW HAVEN NEW ORLEANS ORLANDO PARIS PHILADELPHIA PITTSBURGH PROVIDENCE ROCHESTER SANTIAGO SAO PAULO ST.

LOUIS ST. PAUL ST. PETERSBURG SAN FRANCISCO SCHENECTADY SEATTLE STOCKHOLM SYRACUSE TORONTO WARSAW they tell her, but, of course, she knows that. One of the many extraordinary and durable things about Friedrich Durrenmatt's revenge-comedy of 1956 is that you do believe that this evil woman never ceases to lqve the craven boy who married into the safety of the grocer's shop. Another is that Alfred foresees the inevitability of his end long before anyone else, growing in dignity and introspection as the sacrifice demanded by Clara's auto da fe draws near.

Unable to resist the pressure of economic crisis combined with the moral ecstasy of doing the right thing according to the more conventional kind, an Italian-American (newcomer Steven Seagal) trained as a black-belt martial artist in Japan where the 'ah so' elite of Tokyo prepare him to take on the asshole degenerates of Chicago. It transpires, however, that Nico's real enemies are the CIA, who finance their clandestine operations (and line their pockets) by selling Asian heroin and Latin American cocaine. Their targets in Chicago are a left-wing' priest from Costa Rica and a liberal senator, and they will stop at nothing. Fortunately for democracy, nothing can stop Nico, who looks like Sylvester Stallone poured into the mould that produced Robert Valentino. Directed by David Stevens (who made the bracing Australian comedy 'The Clinic'), Kansas (Cannon, Panton Street, 15) is a cross between 'Picnic' and 'Bonnie and Clyde', starring Matt Dillon as a glib psychopath who involves innocent, middle-class itinerant Andrew McCarthy in robbing a small-town bank in the Mid-West.

It is a long, unlikely tale and the Kansas police must be as stupid as they appear to be in the film to have assisted in its making. SOLD OUT IN BOSTON BUDAPEST HAIFA JERUSALEM LONDON LOS ANGELES NAGOYA NEW YORK OSAKA OSLO REYKJAVIK SYDNEY SZEGED TAMPA TEL AVIV TOKYO VIENNA WASHINGTON D.C. EN PREPARATION AMSTERDAM ANKARA ATLANTA BUENOS AIRES CHICAGO CINCINNATI CLEVELAND COLUMBUS COPENHAGEN DALLAS DENVER DETROIT DES MOINES EAST BERLIN EAST LANSING FRANKFURT THE news of the death of the American Dream, like that of Mark Twain who both mocked and embodied it, has been greatly exaggerated. And here to proclaim its continuing inspiration are two lovingly shaped true-life stories of characters as unforgettable as any a Readers' Digest editor ever met. At the end of both we are invited to get up and cheer and we do.

Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream (Odeon, Haymarket, PG) is about an innovative automobile manufacturer who took on the Big Three of Detroit and lost. Tucker's Torpedo 'The Car of Tomorrow, Today' came a decade before the publication of Ralph Nader's 'Unsafe at Any Speed'. Its aerodynamic body, seat belts, shatter-proof windows, swivel lights, disc brakes, fuel injection and rear engine have since become standard design components. In 1947 they were considered as dangerous as international communism. The subject of Coppola's ironic two-part masterpiece 'The Godfather' is the perversion of the American success story in the lives of Italian immigrants driven into crime.

'Tucker' begins in that same bright dawn of 1945, but its hero is a middle-western WASP, Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges), incapable of a dishonest act or deed. He's an innovative genius in the tradition of Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers, destroyed by a conspiracy of capitalists, bureaucrats and politicians the sort of people Marlon Brando's Godfather buys. According to this movie, only that brilliant maverick Howard Hughes recognises Tucker's genius, and in a key scene the edgy, introverted billionaire Hughes (superbly impersonated by Dean Stockwell) gives the cheerful, extrovert Tucker an audience in the hangar of his own cherished folly, the Spruce Goose aeroplane. Where 'The Godfather' is brooding, Italianate, tinged with tragedy, operatic in the manner of Verdi and cinematic in the style of Visconti. 'Tucker' is brightly lit, golden beams stream into its rooms; its central characters are shot from low angles to emphasise their heroic status.

The visual style (cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, production designed by Dean Tavoularis, costumes by Milena Canonero) draws on Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers and the crisp monochrome editorial lay-outs and coloured advertising glow of Life; the dramatic form and idealogy come from Hollywood's greatest Italian-American director Frank Capra at his most optimistic. The score of 'The Godfather' (by Nino Rota and the director's father) is soothingly elegiac; that of 'Tucker' is loud, bouncy 1940s big-band music, a cheerful, mindless sound far removed from the angry, high-decibel rock of the past 20 years. 'Tucker' begins, as does 'Citizen Kane', with a semi-parodic film-within-a-film version of its subject's life, and like Kane the hero has a dedicated Jewish adviser (Martin Landau), a sceptical right-hand man (Frederic Forrest) and a tough, banker opponent (Dean Goodman). But in Welles's movie the pastiche of 'March of Time' ends and a reporter is despatched to uncover the identity of Rosebud. In Coppola's film there is no such change of tone and no more to this happy, well adjusted dreamer than appears on the surface.

The director loves this man without reserve and identifies with him. As the all-American family man Jeff Bridges has a smile as wide as Joe E. Brown's and the least devious face since Capra's heroes, Gary Cooper and James Stewart. His father, Lloyd Bridges, a specialist in weakness and peevish treachery (he was Gary Cooper's deputy in 'High Noon') plays the corrupt Michigan senator in the pay of the motor companies. He has a great scene with his son when Tucker comes to Washington for assistance from the man he naively believes to be his disinterested elected representative.

Stand and Deliver takes an honourable place alongside 'The Paper Chase' and 'Une Semaine de Vacances' as one of the few movies that deal seriously with teaching and make the process of education exciting. A countervailing force to the despairing 'Colors', it celebrates the Bolivian-born Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) who gave up a well paid job as a 'PUT HIM in the cries Clara Zachanassian with tragic resolution from beneath her veils at the end of The Visit (Almeida). 'We are going to Capri. Mr Mayor, the Clara's triumph is to have returned to her birthplace one of the richest women on earth and commanded the death of her old sweetheart for abandoning her 40 years before. She has married eight husbands, and over the years bought up all the industrial interests in the area, forcing the town to its knees by the corruption of endless credit and the blackmail of debt.

She promises 1 billion on the single condition that the citizens murder gentle, ordinary, guilty Alfred Schill. They refuse. He is their friend and fellow citizen, the mayor-elect. Money is not everything, belts Juzo Itami's A Taxing Woman (Renoir, 18) reunites the hero (Tsutomu Yamazaki) and heroine (Nobuko Miyamoto) of his 'Death Japanese Style' and 'Tampopo', and pits a female tax inspector against a sophisticated tax dodger. It might well have been called 'The Thomas Crown Affair Tokyo-Style', though it is much more sophisticated and his heroine is freckled and bespectacled and his hero a crippled intellectual.

Itami is a sharp satirist who plays very cleverly on the conflict between our anarchic, antisocial impulses and our sense of civic responsibility, as he probes the same moral minefield Paul Haitian dealt with in his brilliant TV series on the work of Customs and Excise officers. Like the earlier ttami pictures, 'A Taxing Woman' moves briskly and has the ability to take us by surprise. The final scene gives an unusual twist to the old Inland Revenue image of squeezing blood out of a stone. Alexei Gherman's My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Metro, 15) takes an affectionate look at life in provincial Russia in the 1930s when things were tough but bearable and the Stalinist nightmare was still a distant metropolitan threat. The eponymous Lapshin is a handsome, accident-prone police inspector, a charming komsomol Clouseau living in an overcrowded apartment and rather luckier at smashing a local criminal gang than at winning the heart of a visiting actress.

The movie throws a most interesting light on pre-war Russia, and astonishingly it languished on the censor's shelf from 1981 to 1986. The violent thriller Nico (Warner, 18) is about a cop of a '88 video 3 DECEMBER SEND SAE MARKED "EXPO" Sweeping the world! VANESSA FORD PRODUCTIONS in association with ALDERSGATE PRODUCTIONS. THEATRE ROYAL PRESENTATIONS and WESTMINSTER PRODUCTIONS present TWO NARNIAN PLAYS FROM THE BOOKS BY jfi THE NEPHEV 1 NOV 29 JAN 7 THE FIRST NATIONAL FESTIVAL OF STUDENT FILM AND VIDEO SCREENINGS SEMINARS DEBATES LECTURES WORKSHOPS C.S. Lewis ADAPTED BY Glyn Robbins AND FEB 4 work from forty-seven colleges across Britain and from schools in USA, USSR, Belgium, West Germany, Cuba, Hungary, Denmark, Eire, Australia riverside studios CRISP ROAD HAMMERSMITH W6 9RL 01-741 2251 JAN 11 GOOD SEATS AVAILABLE FOR FUTURE PERFORMANCES AT THE PALACE THEATRE NEW BOOKING PERIOD UNTIL OCTOBER 1989 NOW OPEN TELEPHONE TODAY 01 379 4444, 01 240 7200 (bkg fee) BOX OFFICE 01 434 0909 FOR FURTHER DETAILS PLEASE.