The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 44

44 OBSERVER SUNDAY 4 DECEMBER 1988 RICHARD MILDENHALL HHLU68ERT Old name rekindled OF ALL the ambitious concert themes which have been thrust at us in this exceptionally crowded autumn, the most Shostakovich series timely is the Shostakovich series, unattractively titled Music from from the Flames' the Flames. It may not be as NICHOLAS KENYON artistic; ones: that was when the exhaustively planned or as historically significant as the Schoenberg series, as elegantly devised as 'The Classical Romantics', or reveal so many by-ways as 'Beethoven Plus'. But a combination of events cnmnoser made the cover of Time magazine, and Toscanini took the work up so that it became hueelv popular in Amer ica during the war though what Shostakovich thought of Toscanini's interpretation was according to Rostropovich, unrepeatable. Perhaps in order to avoid Toscanini-like brutalism, Rostropovich gave us a much more leisurely view ot tne sympnony: strident at its climaxes, but relaxing rather too much in between so that tension was not Derek Jacobi's Richard II: 'Enormous intelligence and diversity, arrogance and scorn'; Simon Callow and Alan Bennett in 'A Question of Attribution': 'English comedy of the highest sustained through the two long central movements. The vulgar tune of the first movement (which Bartok parodied in the Concerto for Orchestra, a parody Leading questions now much better known than its original) was screwed to a high point of ferocity, and the LSO brass were unleashed at full streneth.

This symphony is cur rently regaining something of its old popularity I notice that three recordings have appeared this year, from Jansons, Jiirvi, and Rozhdestvensky but this account did not persuade me that it was anywhere near ahos takovich's greatest achievements in the form. As a conductor, Rostropovich is an enthuser rather than a technician. With second-rate orchestras this can be a draw back, but last week the LSO sounded like a potential first made worthwhile. Barry Kyle directs. The main difference between A Question of Geography (RSC, The Pit) and 'The Churchill Play' is between Russian spiritual resilience and godless English despair.

John Berger and Nella Bielski's play, transferred from The Other Place at Stratford, takes place in a settlement on the edge of the Gulag, among teachers, doctors and civil servants technically no longer prisoners but forced to remain in the settlement doing important jobs. All of them have known despair and passed beyond its reach. This is an extraordinary, optimistic and moving play, loosely constructed and too long, but marvellously directed by John Caird and superbly acted by Harriet Walter, Cfive Russell, Jimmy Gardner and Linus Roach, to name only the four leading players. In a less interesting and varied week, there would be more space warmly to recommend Derek Jacobi's Richard II (Phoenix), a performance of enormous intelligence and diversity, arrogance and scorn, taking us through the long speeches of discovery and introspection with an emotional spontaneity that never loses the intellectual argument of the overall line. This is the best performance of the role I have seen since McKellen's 20 years ago.

True, Carl Toms designs with the vague and tasteful pictorialism of 'Richard of Bordeaux' 35 years before that, but Clifford Williams's production is well spoken and clear. More of all these things, I hope, when 'Richard 111' joins 'Richard IT in repertory next month. Meanwhile, see Jacobi. WHEN the swimming pool she is due to open springs a leak over the weekend Her Majesty (Prunella Scales) acquires an unscheduled free afternoon and wanders the corridors of Buckingham Palace to find Sir Anthony Blunt (Alan Bennett) about to remove a studio Titian for restoration, replacing it with a blistered Annunciation of the Sienese School. The brilliantly sharp and funny scene that follows in Bennett's A Question of Attribution (NT, Lyttelton), is based on the fact that HMQ has no wish to be taken for granted and would, without prompting, have noticed the disappearance of such a familiar friend from the walls.

It is also a sequence of wonderful jokes, each one of which amuses us while failing to make the recipient on stage laugh at all, thus extracting a second joke from the fastidious rejection of the first. Bennett's Sir Anthony mortifies his distaste for royal attempts to lighten the atmosphere by assuming an expression of mirthless roguishness and tucking his chin into his chest. She reacts to his own mandarin shots at playfulness as though they had not been fired. The effect is of a pea-shooter pinging off the sides of a battleship. But the battleship smiles, charms, questions and smiles again.

The questions plummet like hawks. 'Has art always had a she asks, still smiling. 'It's all thing now, isn't Wanning to the subjects of provenance and pedigree, forgery and fake, she finds her Keeper resisting the direction of her line, and persists: 'K spmeto not what it is rater, responding splendidly to Rostropovich's flamboyantly expressed demands. There is now a clutch of young wind work, however, it addresses areas of the national psyche ignored by most playwrights and reminds us of what might be done by a theatre of prophecy on a large stage. The subject is the disappearance of individual freedom and the 'vast conspiracy of silence' with which most Englishmen and women have been letting it go.

Set in a special training centre towards the end of this century, 'The Churchill Play' is a robust and aggressive lament for the identity for a Britain hijacked by the mythology and requirements of a militarised ruling class. The trainees prisoners, in effect decide to put on a play about "The greatest, biggest, bloodymost monumental Englishmen of them all' to entertain the parliamentary committee visiting the centre. In anger and revenge they turn on the visitors, but the rebellion dies because, so the argument goes, it is half a century too late. This is a deeply pessimistic play. Inconsistencies and carelessness abound.

Who has written the Churchill Play? What is it really for? How 'bad' is it supposed to be? Most of the characters are underwritten and only a handful escape from stock. A dramatic manifesto aimed less obliquely and less clumsily at the counter-revolution now deciding the future of our lives would have been more useful, but if 'The Churchill Play' inspires a younger, to write one its revival will have been Blunt's sweaty hands flutter behind his back and press a red silk handkerchief discreetly. 'An he ventures, with just the hint of a question mark to cover his tracks. Simon Callow directs the scene with a delicacy and strength that lift it well clear of revue and confirm it as English comedy of the highest kind. Bennett and Scales pitch it to perfection.

Blunt is also being questioned by Chubb, a cultural self-improver from MIS (Callow) who takes him through endless projected snapshots of beauti-. ful young men, looking for names to shop. A third line of enquiry compares Titian's 'Allegory of Prudence' with the studio painting, which turns out, after cleaning, to show not two men but three and, on further X-ray investigation, four and even five. Who is the fifth man? Blunt grows philosophical and feigns weariness of the game. Bennett's written portrait is sympathetic only in allowing Blunt to recognise the occupational hazards of barren pedantry and obsession, and his performance-dry, vain, patronising, flirtatious and almost totally uncamp (witness his impeccable delivery of a classic trap-line like 'Colin, can you move the is on the Guinness level and one of the best things he has ever done.

'A Question of Attribution' is preceded by the stage; raemiere of An Englishman Abroad, the play based principals and a guest leader. 'A Question of Attribution' 'A Question of Geography' MICHAEL RATCLIFFE on Coral Browne's meeting with Guy Burgess in Moscow and memorably filmed by John Schlesinger with Miss Browne and Alan Bates. At the Lyttelton, Callow's Burgess is generous and innocent where Bates was disarming but damned; Scales plays Browne as cleverly as one actress may dare this side of lese-majeste, and Bennett directs, retaining only the small role of the West End tailor to whom Coral takes Guy's measurements on her return to London. ('Your he inquires. 'There's no need for discretion here, The play is one of Bennett's funniest and most affectionate, but the witty encounter with Blunt is darker and hazards more.

The RSC's inflationary marketing prose the word 'major' should be banned from use at Stratford and the Barbican until further notice needs urgent attention. The Churchill Play (Barbican), rewritten and revived for the first time since 1978, is not 'one of the great plays of our time' by the stretch of anyone's imagination, much though we may wish it were. Like much of Howard Brenton's Alexander Barantsckik, of gives it pungent immediacy. There is the change of climate in the musical world, by which we once again seem interested in those great twentieth-century composers who stood outside the developing modernist tradition and continued to cultivate the old forms of symphony and string quartet. And there is the change of climate in Russia, by which the harassment of artistic freedom from which Shostakovich suffered all his life is being, if not completely lifted, then certainly modified.

With the appearance of 'Testimony', the supposed memoirs of Shostakovich, and the film by Tony Palmer based on that book, Shostakovich's time has come. It is an open secret that 'Music from the Flames', which is a collaboration between the South Bank and the Barbican Centre, arose originally not from an altruistic desire of those two halls to work together lively competition is a more likely mode of existence but from two separate artistic ideas which would have come into collision. Both the Royal Philharmonic with Ashkenazy and the London Symphony with Rostropovich wanted to do Shostakovich symphonies: the resulting complete cycle has been put together by way of a compromise. Artistic compromise rarely works. In this case, however, the result has brought a strong focus into the series.

The Barbican has been more prominent in conceiving background events films, seminars and discussions while the South Bank with its range of halls has been able to mount a string quartet series. The second leg of the festival continued on Thursday with Rostropovich and the LSO at the Barbican (there are further concerts on Thursday, and next week). It was a bizarre programme, juxtaposing Shostakovich at his most unbuttoned and jovial with Shostakovich at his most seriously grim. The LSO played the Second Suite for Jazz Orchestra or Dance "Bandjv with its four blaring saxophones, accordion and guitar, as if to the manner born (which I suppose they are). The music is tripe, and not very well planned tripe at that three waltzes in succession! but Rostropovich lifted it along with such panache that it worked.

Nice to see a London orchestra with a smile on its collective face, too. If these Jazz Suites can be seen as fairly cynical pieces of writing-to-order, the 'Leningrad' Symphony could also be seen as a cynical exploitation of Russia's war-time mood. The revelation in 'Testimony' that the composer was trying to portray not foreign attack but Stalinist oppression from within Russia puts another light on the matter. It doesn't make the music better, though. One suspects that the huge initial success of this symphony was due more to political reasons than to exceptional quality.

Last Sunday the LSO showed itself on its greatest form when its former music director Claudio Abbado returned for a concert which included Ravel's 'Daphnis and Chloe a thrilling pertor mance, swirling with elemental gut feeling, but also considerably refined (if not quite perfect enough for this perfect music), In the same concert Rostropovich returned to his cello for a no-holds-barred account of Pro kofiev's Sinfonia Concertante, rambling and incoherent work tout fulfcoi intejest.fk; It was fascinating to compare the LSO's'Russlan! sound with the. real thing in another of the week's Barbican concerts: the Bunny boy's tale Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, which on Monday completed an extensive tour of the country. One thing that is immediately noticeable is their 100-per-cent discipline and commitment: the violinists' bows 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' PHILIP FRENCH move in perfect unison, witn every inch of the hair used (not a notable feature most Lon LAST Monday 'Roger Rabbit was, fittingly, the main winner of the first British Animation Awards. The film received The Observer sponsored Major Achievement In Animation award from our film critic Philip French. The Observer was sponsor for five other categories, Including Best Model Animation Film for Children, best script and sound-track.

Other maor winners Included Richard Purdum Productions for its animated commercial for the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, and student animator Karen Watson for her remarkable cartoon about child abuse. The awards are the brainchild of the Cardiff-based Welsh Fourth Channel (S4C). RICHARD BROOKS don orchestras). The conductor, Vladimir Fedoseyev, needs to do little to get this orchestral machine whirring a few broad NO BETTER way could have been found to mark the fiftieth anniversary of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' than Walt Disney's old studio getting together with his richest admirer, Steven Spielberg, and his most gifted disciple, the London-based Canadian Richard Williams, to create another milestone in the history of animation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Odeon, Leceister Square, PG). So breathtaking is the technical virtuosity of the drawings by Williams and his battalion of British artist-draughtsmen and the integration of cartoon figures with human performers, that the viewer does not immediately gestures in Tchaikovsky 'Sleeping Beauty', and the tex tare is deep and well balanced The LSO do not match that.

But an electric charge is missing from the Moscow playing, and I'm prepared to give up a lot in absolute precision to experience guy and mensch for all seasons; he stands by his client. They are pursued by the vindictive Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), who plans to exterminate the Toons with a solvent dip of turps. Sometimes handcuffed to Roger and at one point driving with him in Benny the Talking Cab, Eddie speeds down the mean streets of LA in search of justice. The femme fatale Jessica makes advances to him in his. office ('I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way' she purrs); in a night-club run by Toons, for humans he meets a monochrome Betty Boop reduced to waiting at table now that colour is universal.

Venturing into the violent, metamorphic, hyperactive world of Toontown, as dangerous as Chandler's Bay City, Eddie encounters Mickey Mouse, Tweetie Pie and Bugs Bunny, who assume he is as indestructible as themselves. Never before has there been such a combination of technical polish in the special effects and total conviction in the response of the actors (especially the wonderfully endearing Hoskins) to the cartoon figures. Because of this 'Roger Rabbit' calls into question the difference, once recorded on celluloid, between that. 'I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that said Jessica. recognise how witty, imaginative, original and intelligent the film is.

Scripted by Jeffrey Price swindle to exploit the city. The movie's central conceit is that in the golden age of Hollywood, the celebrated cartoon characters were as real as the other actors under contract to the big studios. When the flesh-and-blood stars went home to their Mansions in Beverly Hills, the Toons retreated to their Technicolor haven in Toontown. The greatest Toon not under contract to Disney is the dizzy, loveable Roger Rabbit, a big-hearted trouper with an on-set professional dedication and offstage personal problems of Buster Keaton. Roger is going through something of a rough briar-patch because he suspects his slinky wife Jessica of two-timing him with a top producer.

And when the head of the studio calls Eddie Valiant in to investigate, a murder soon follows for which Roger becomes the prime suspect. Like other gumshoes before him, Eddie is both fall rf I v.1 1 1 1 r.i jij and Peter Seaman, and directed ran by Spieilberg right-hand man Robert Zemeckis, 'Roger Rabbit' is a brilliant pastiche of film noir thrillers, the graphic artists' version of 'Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid'. Set in 1947, in Los Angeles, Bob Hoskins stars as i I ll HIIHIII iimaaiuiHii i -i .1 i i ri the hard-drinking, down-at-heel private eye Eddie Valiant, and the plot is a conflation of 'The Maltese Falcon' and 'Chinatown', he is the dupe of conspir 'f 1 V. Fa! VI I Tmi ators operating a real-estate vBIhheiHe) elsewhere. A dedicated teacher arrives.

His first pupil learns to write the name of the provincial hero, General Belgrano, and through reading a Spanish version of a comic book featuring the adventures of some Horn-blower-like English naval hero, Veronico becomes obsessed with the romance of the sea. News of the 1976 military coup comes over the radio to be followed by a single army (ruck bearing sadistic soldiers, observed in a surreal zoom-lens shot from across the local salt flats. Their mission is to replace an easy-going mayor with a buf-foonish village policeman. Meanwhile word comes that Veronico's father has been politicised while travelling the country as an exploited worker and has ended up among the country's 'disappeared'. The only professional actor in the cast is Juan Jose Camero as the schoolteacher and he blends in well with the sensitively directed local amateurs.

Thus is a most auspicious feature debut for Pereira, who tells his story and makes his dramatic points almost entirely in visual terms. grief over that tragic conflict. But little has been provided for us to understand feelings on the other side. For this reason the quiet, non-rancorous Veronico Cruz (Camden Plaza, PG) has a similarly therapeutic role to that played nearly 60 years ago by 'All Quiet on the Western Front'. The film is directed by Miguel Pereira, an Argentinian filmmaker resident in London, and after its initial production was financed in the Argentine, he very properly received completion funds from the British Film Institute and Channel 4.

The simple story centres on a young peasant who was one of the sailors drowned on the 'Bel-grano', and his death is a tragic coda to a tale of hope and despair. Veronico was born in 1964 in the remote mountainous north-west of Argentina, an austerely beautiful, barren corner of the world. Cinematographer Gerry Feeny's crisp images make you feel you are actually breathing the thin, clear air of the Andes. When Veronico's mother dies in childbirth, his father leaves him with his grandmother and goes to find work ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS Open Daily 10-6. Burlington House, Piccadilly, London Wl mr-s.

ji.i.ii i ri living actors whose appearances are photographed and non-existent characters who are drawn. So this film becomes an amusing and often moving study in the paradox of fictional identities. It is also and not just because the plot turns on a scheme to destroy Toontown in the interests of progress (the building of a freeway system, which might be a metaphor for computer animation) a gentle comic elegy for the death of classical Hollywood. Largely through television plays and documentaries on the Falklands War we have been discovering focal points for our exquisitely well chosen and magnificently installed retrospective best opportunity yet for re-assessing his entire career" "INSPIRING ENTERTAINMENT." "A SPLENDID MOVIE." AnilrnvSarris.Vll.l.AGKVOICK NKWYOKKIOST "An EXQUISITE TIMELESS TRIBUTE." VAKIKTY THE SUNDAY TIMES 41 CHRISTMAS SPECIAL UNTIL 24 DEC f) AfilmbyPAULCOX Best Seats Only 10 Balcony 5 Wed Mat All Seats 5 CEE50JGE3IIE The Life ami Death of Vincent van Gogh tabuing thm vote of JOHN HURT WIMttflCiAUYtRlllAit 2.40 16 SEPTEMBER II DECEMBER 1988 .40 .00 111 11.I mm I I Mm 1 An Sponsored by Salomon Brothers and The Henry Moore Foundation 3j Krtarti-23522S 9.00 tmiiiwii.WM7n. mat bootabl.