The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 41

OBSERVER SUNDAY 11 DECEMBER 1988 41 SUE ADLER Half in love with death 1 'High Spirits' and 'Willow' PHILIP FRENCH JAU ACS' 4 5- cared for by the eponymous Willow, who belongs to the Newlyns, a tribe of dwarfs and the largest community of little people assembled in a film studio since 'The Wizard of Oz The peace-loving Newlyns are menaced by warring factions of Dai-kinis, the nation of full-size humans to which the baby belongs, and are sometimes helped, sometimes hindered by pawky Lilliputians known as Brownies, who speak with comic French accents. Shot in Elstree Studios and on grand, overcast locations in North Wales and New Zealand, 'Willow' is a dispiriting experience, long on violence, special effects and sentimentality, short on narrative coherence, lyricism and wonder. Its chief assets are the opened-faced, 40-inch-tall Warwick Da vies as the intrepid Willow and the gorgeous Joanne Whalley as the martial daughter of the evil Queen Bavmorda; she is a woman worthy of that supreme compliment John Wayne paid to Susan Hayward in 'The Conqueror': 'You are beautiful in your The worst thing that has happened to 'Willow', however, is Sparkling patterns of coloured light created by laser-beams: Claudius Modebe, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, with his hologram of fellow student, Matthew Andrews. SEARCH LIGHTS LAURENCE MARKS looks at an exhibition of holograms by seven young artists LIKE his mentor John Boorman, Neil Jordan has yet to repeat himself. After 'Angel', the stunning revenge thriller set in present-day Ulster with which he made an auspicious debut in 1983, he went on to an imaginative series of variations on the tale of Red Riding Hood in 'Company of Wolves' and a Soho underworld melodrama in 'Mona Lisa', and he has now written and directed the comic fantasy High Spirits (Odeon West End, 15).

All these movies are informed by the same dark romantic sensibility. Love and death are perversely intertwined and the affections of the heroes and heroines are focused upon impossible objects of desire a dead deaf-mute ('Angel'), a possessed dream prince ('Company of Wolves'), an unattainable black madonna-whore ('Mona Lisa'), a pair of eighteenth-century lovers condemned to re-enact nightly for eternity their destructive passion (High Spirits'). To identify a work as singular and characteristic, though, is not necessarily to praise it, and this new film seems to me almost entirely unsuccessful. But it is an honourable failure that indicates an excess of confidence rather than a loss of nerve. In 'High Spirits' Jordan is simultaneously exploiting conventional Celtic material while sending it up, using a story some S3 years old.

Most of its ingredients are to be found in one of the most over-rated classics of the 1930s, The Ghost Goes Wesf a comedy produced by a Hungarian, scripted by an American and directed by a Frenchman about a lovable and impoverished Scottish laird, an ignorant American millionaire transporting a castle brick by brick to America, and a girl falling in love with a ghost. Here an Irish aristocrat, Peter Plunkett (Peter O'Toole), keeps his creditors (notably a vengeful Irish-American plutocrat) at bay by luring transatlantic visitors to his decrepit Limerick castle with the promise that they will meet the family ghosts. When his crude trickery fails, genuine ghosts come to the rescue. Jordan has brought together an attractive trio of American stars (Darryl Hannah, Steve Guttenberg, Beverly D'Angelo) and a superb line-up of Irish character actors (Liam Neeson, Donal McCann, Ray McAnally, Tom Hickey, Tony Rohr), with O'Toole as the link between them. But the people are all stereotypes and Jordan is too preoccupied with technical concerns to make them otherwise.

Moreover, the mechanics of farce and the special effects get in the way of the romantic comedy, which suddenly surfaces towards the end in rather mawkish fashion. The pale, lachrymose O'Toole looks as if he has just been auditioning for the role of Lazarus in "The Last Temptation of Christ', and nobody does anything to challenge the traditional movie notion that at heart all Irishmen are simple, deeply spiritual folk whose mission in life is to bring out the buried humanity in crude American materialists. The warm embrace they offer is a fey worse than death. A couple of years ago it seemed that the hell had tolled, or the Tol had kiened, for the lucrative cycle of sword-and-sor-cery movies that reached its financial apogee with George Lucas's 'Star Wars' trilogy. However, Lucas has revived the tired genre bag and Baggins with his multi-miUion-dollar fantasy Willow (Empire, PG), for which he wrote a scenario that Bob Dolman turned into a script and Ron Howard directed.

Drawing its initial inspiration from both the Old and New Testaments, it centres on the fate of a prophetically chosen baby targeted for destruction by a threatened monarch (Jean Marsh), and then released in a cradle on the waters, to be fished out. and protected. The female Jesus-Moses baby ('she's so cute, can't we keep is THE benevolent ghost of Daguerre haunts the National Centre of Photography in Bath where an exhibition by seen young holographic artists opened yesterday. The images are those of the 1980s, but there is something about their spectral sheen and strange dis-phcement in space that puts you in nind of the great nineteenth-century originator. Holography is a by-product of laser technology.

Like photography, it iscords patterns of light, reflected from the subject, on glass or film coated with anulsion. Unlike photography, it cre-ites a powerful illusion that one is boking at a three-dimensional object. The spot-lit holograms in the show display two striking features. One is an incomparable intensity of colour, beyond anything in nature, which can be extraordinarily beautiful. Perhaps this is the effect hallucinogenic drugs 'produce on their users.

The second is 'an hypnotic depth of perspective. Holo-, graphic artists complain about what they call the 'Wow! Factor' people's amazed reaction to the technological marvels of the medium at the expense of aesthetic analysis. But is pretty much what one feels on first setting eyes on these magical artefacts. Newman. 'Any relatively new medium has to develop a language that describes what the artists are putting into that medium.

Unless we attract aesthetic debate, it won't grow. The danger of holography is that it's seductive, both for artists and exhibition-goers. I hope I haven't been seduced, but I know many people who are. 'Our biggest practical problem is access to the technology. It's an expensive medium.

Some holographers have their own equipment in their studios, but the cost of setting up is high: something between 100,000 and 250,000. I'd say there are about 20 serious holographic artists in this country. There are still very few places where you can do The has held exhibitions. There will be one, organised by Camden Arts, opening at the Shaw Theatre in London just before Christmas. Bruce Snyder of Holomart is starting the first museum of holography (part permanent collection, part commercial gallery) opposite the British Museum next year.

Prices at the Bath exhibition, sponsored by Hford, range from about 400 to 1,200. Buyers are advised to get the artist himself to do the installation. The primary use of holography is industrial for instance, for stress analysis in nuclear power stations. Its secondary use is for advertising display. Shortly after it was developed in the early 1960s, artists began experimenting with it.

The physical manipulation of light was not, of course, new to the fine arts. But holograms make the winking and blinking of kinetic art-objects look comically clumsy. The pioneer in this country was Margaret Benyon, who has a studio in Poole. Three years ago, the Royal College of Art founded a holography unit, where Michael Burridge teaches a two-year MA course. The seven exhibitors at Bath, in their 20s, graduated there last summer.

Their holograms are hard to classify in terms of the styles and content of painting or sculpture, and the artists would deny that they constitute a movement. But their work falls roughly into three categories. First, three-dimensional depictions of figures and objects from the natural floating in a luminous ocean of light as if offering one the opportunity to swim inside a Kandinsky or Miro. Ghostly images solidify and dematerialise again as the viewer moves his head an inch or two to the left or right. Thirdly, and perhaps the most advanced, are Paul Newman's holograms which seem to have abandoned the organic universe entirely (though he disclaims this) and are composed purely of sparkling patterns of coloured light created by laser-beams refracted through irregularly-shaped pieces of glass.

Any movement by the viewer or change in the spot-lighting will transform the colours and shapes. Dennis Gabor, the Hungarian scientist who worked out the theory of holograms in 1947, a decade before the invention of lasers made them possible, would have been enchanted. 'What worries us is that people insist on talking about the mechanics of holography and not the says world, more or less undistorted, but giving one the eerie feeling of being enclosed in the same space they occupy. 'Restraint' by Martin Richardson, who describes his work as Expressionist, shows a despairing figure grasping prison bars which reach out threateningly to embrace the viewer. One finds oneself backing away nervously.

Graham Tunnadine uses naturalism for satirical comment: a small motor drives two portrait heads, continually shifting the perspective so that they appear to be moving their lips in empty chatter. Secondly, there are abstractions. Claudius Modebe, a former Sussex University physicist, and Caius Hawkins favour painted biomorphic squiggles NEIL LIBBERT Rodents in the room Jordan: 'Dark sensibility for it to have opened a few weeks after the appearance of two genuinely legendary epics, 'Pathfinder' from Lapland and 'Yeelen' from Mali. Rooted in local mythology, dispensing with special effects, treating magic as something serious, these have an authenticity that makes a mockery of 'Willow's' mish-mash of synthetic fantasies. No doubt a new Beijing publishing house called Marx and Boon brought out the novelette on which Zhang Nuanxin based her winning little film Sacrificed Youth (ICA, PG).

This is yet another retrospective look at the Cultural Revolution, more rose-coloured than red-guarded as recalled by Li Chun, a Han woman from the north who spent four or five years as a labourer among the life-loving Dai people in the far south near the Vietnamese border. From the lovely local girls she learns how to make the best of her good looks, and develops some dress sense. A handsome fellow exile pays court to her and her landlord's virile hunter son falls hopelessly in love with her, though she keeps both at bay. Give or take the odd finger-nail broken in the paddy fields, Li Chun's experience is more like a tour with the Peace Corps than the horrendous, humiliating time other Chinese intellectuals went through during that period. The film looks ravishing and could well have been called 'Mao, He's Making Eyes at Me' or 1 Wanna Hold Your Han'.

Rocky (Greg Cruttwell) looks as if he has a gobstopper in his mouth' and fails to respond to Melanie-Jane (Saskia Reeves). MIKE LEIGH'S Smelling a Rat (Hampstead) is an unconventional bedroom farce in an almost conventional bedroom. The room (decor by Eve Stewart) is dominated by a- shiny king-size bed resembling a tangerine blancmange upon which lie an unsightly family of soft toys! Believing that Rex (Eric Allan) is abroad, two couples let' themselves into his house and' inspect his bedroom, mocking his exercise bike i and fire extinguisher. Rex's employee in the pest control company and wife are the first couple; Rex's son and firlfriend are the second. But lex is not in Lanzarote, he is in the cupboard.

There are six built-in cupboards which is as well for there is much getting in and coming out of closets although nothing is revealed in the process. Mike Leigh is fascinated not only by ordinary people with something to hide but by characters whose whole personality is in eclipse. Rocky (Grtg Cruttwell) is the only one who never climbs into a cupboard or disappears behind frosted glass into his father's bathroom but he is a sort of closet himself rigid and almost speechless for the whole evening with an expression as ifisucking a massive gobstop-per. His silence is so loud it makes, him the focus of our attention. The comic and the sinister conspire with each other: Mike I ft I 'Smelling a Rat' and 'Candide' KATE KELLAWAY Leigh has a wonderful gift for conversation so rock-bottom-boring that it is hilarious.

But, here, the small talk is also unsettling because there is so much unanswered. Melanie Jane (Saskia Reeves) moves like an animated soft toy and wins the prize for the most pointless comments of the evening, intended to stir Rocky out of his catatonia. Charmaine (Brid Brennan) is also memorably silly with her prudish laughter at her husband Vic's jokes. Vic himself (Timothy Spall) answers his wife's laughter with an awful sound of his own: 'Raaa His talk is a masterpiece of mangled language I could sink a shish') and verbal nervous tics every other sentence contains the words 'in as The effect of the evening is unnerving: where punishment is expected, there are rewards; where revelation is called for there is none. Even the end is not final: the rats have got away.

In Jonathan Miller and John Wells' production of Candide (The Old Vic) Bernstein's musical of Voltaire's novel, three students are being be renamed "The Woman in Off-White'. This is Wilkie Collins in reduced circumstances. The problem is that the elaborate plot of the novel refuses to keep up with the pace set by the play and the result is confusing and unsus-taining. Helena Bonham-Carter's Laura is a puzzle: she subdues her beauty, appears with piquant waxen face and fretful manner; her hands dart out from her white mantle like lizards tongues; she crumples her lines and tosses them away. Her performance is typical of the mood of the evening: it seems in Sue Dunderdale's production that mystery has been mistaken for and overtaken by ill humour.

It is a relief when Count Fosco (Michael Byrne) speaks, if only because he is in high spirits. in seventeenth-century chic (the length of periwigs and the desirable size for calf muscles). The British Actors Company are proud to direct themselves. The result is not, as you might expect, undisciplined. On the contrary it is constrained far too constrained for Vanbrugh.

Vanbrugh described London as an 'uneasy theatre of noise'; the British Actors Company present an uneasy theatre of quiet in a soapstone-coloured courtyard. However, Kate O'Mara's Berinthia, an older woman dressed in girlish pink, has a sleazy charm; She is mistress of lewd insinuation and particularly effective in demonstrating what it means when a woman says 'nay'. Melissa Murray's adaptation of The Woman in White (Greenwich Theatre) ought to instructed in happiness. They are at the top of a happiness hierarchy, living the best possible life, in the best possible house, in the best possible world. And it is hard not to leave the theatre saying 'the best possible evening But Voltaire warns wittily against such excesses, and a superb cast, led by Nickolas Grace, support his views, demonstrating the idiocy of unreasoning optimism and of superlatives.

The overcast sky, from which two vast masks look at us with closed eyes one smiling and one moaning insist that life is inclement and uncertain. Volcanos, storms, and war may be a problem for ingenuous Candide (Mark Beudert) but present no obstacle to the designer, Richard Hudson. When war breaks out, giant military puppets inarch out and in spite of their fearsome height bin each other gently with their swords. War leaves Cunegonde (Rosemary Ashe) collapsed in her blue dress in the centre of the stage, a fallen woman who has yet to fall much further. She has competition from an older fallen woman (Patricia Routledge) who tells a hard luck story of extraordinary proportions culminating in an account of how she lost one buttock.

The tale of what brought her down, brought the house house down last Tuesday. Candide's fortunes are compellingly sung and disillusion seems to attract the lushest tunes. The great pleasure of the evening is in seeing reason beaten up by absurdity but surviving to tell the tale. The Relapse Mermaid) is set in what Vanbrugh describes as 'nimble times' and he wrote with such a nimble wit that you come away from 'The Relapse' with a new set of curses ('Stab me in the vitals') and a strong grounding IMP STaTintTirtra fii I ft Aid li iT! 1 1 1 1 IB 1 1 Ifcl oH Lfil III ii a mm mm The National Youth Muse Theatre in 9 Em A ROMANTIC MUSICAL 'A delight from beginning to end. nol to be missed" TES I ARB "Yet another winner" The Scotsman 4th -28th January Eves 7.30 Mats 11,1 8,25.28 Jan at 2.30pm Tickets from 3.50 10 FOUJSS SADLER WELLS r.i j.i .1 ii.iii i i mm CT.IMaiMHIIitfH.IMIHa National Mwmvf uunrtcc: in Dec 17 to 23 DK 27 to 29 Jin 5 to 1t Era 7.15 Mils 2.W 8.58 to 14 WttUaynnbn maul Rosebery Avenue.

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