The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 68

CRITICS 1 1 SUNDAY 7 AUGUST 1994 flKh -trail orth revellin gm A maelstrom of promiscuity and wenching and a rare Dream diverts Michael Coveney in Stratford-upon-Avon iHiam 1 1111 if "Jj Dream pair: Desmond Barrit and Stella Gonet Photograph by Richard Mildenhall her own young 16-year-old cousin, Fanny (Claire Carrie), at the hands of the insatiable Wilding (Give Wood) while manipulating him towards a liaison with her friend Mrs Sightly (Katharine Rogers). The plots converge in a profusion of revenges and adjustments, and the Friendalls' marriage survives uneasily, a genuinely disturbing denouement Lesley Manville dominates the evening. Her tart and spindly performance of comic twitchiness flutters like her eyelids and puckers like her moues. At one sore point, Mr Wood's hibricious seducer inspects his overstretched private parts with a sigh of sordid resignation. Less voluptuously, Desmond Barrit as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream glances in the same direction when he recalls his donkey serenade is more usually addressed to the ear and wig department).

Adrian Noble's humid, nagging revival on the main stage, set in a spartan square room wth significant doors and a forest of pendant, naked lightbulbs, is full of fresh insight and mtewgentplaying. It just lacks ecstasy. Noble's first impulse is both to evoke and subvert the white gymnasium of Peter Brook's landmark 1970 revival. A solitary swing hangs low in a red room (the forest, where the mechanicals are discovered in corduroys and braces, is a thunderstruck, livid blue). Recent Stratford revivals have toyed with Victorian clutter and offered a buoyant post-Modernist look at ways of doing the DTeam.

Noble seems to be saying, after the Robert Lepage Jungian mud-bath, which skimped on the mechanicals, 'Let's strip this thing down in Brookian fashion and start again. The result is a scrupulous, notably well-spoken Dream, full of visual delights and nightmares. Alex Jennings, smitten with anger in the Indian Boy dispute and sonorously thoughtful, lends Oberon an insouciant air of creative sorcery. Stella Gonet, bubbling and effervescent in pink satin and furs, is a Titania Hippolyta spinning off the marital leash in the OberonTheseus household. Barry Lynch's saturnine, unlovable Puck, and his First Fairy (Ann Hasson), descend on green umbrellas; Ken Stott (recently a tremendous Willy Loman in Leeds) as the seductive doctor, is partial, fleshy compensation for weak, untethered acting on the distaff side.

A lone cellist scrapes away, and a glassy partition splits the bare stage. The Card(i973)is an enjoyable summer musical, spiffingly directed by Ian Talbot The music of Tony Hatch, and the lyrics of Jackie Trent and Anthony Drewe, are pleasant and unpretentious. Ditto the libretto by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall from Arnold Bennett's novel about a rising entrepreneur in the Potteries. Peter Duncan is outstanding in the Jim Dale role of Denry Machin, and there is an excellent design of yet more doors by Tim Gdodchild. The Almeida should be shy of importing such sloppy and conspicuously over-financed work as Rod Williams's second play, Southerne's The Wives' 1 1 Excuse in the Swan certainly conforms to the RSC's too frequently abandoned charter of recovering the lost repertoire between the Elizabethans and the Hanoverians.

Southerne 1660-1746), a friend of Dryden and Aphra Behn, is best known for adapting two of the latter's novels, one of which, Oroonoko (1696), a tragedy about slavery and marriage in colonial Surinam, was given a revelatory revival at the Glasgow Citizens' in V-1983. TheWiues' Excuse, Or Cuckolds MakeThemselucs, with Betterton and Mrs Bracegirdle in the cast, failed in 1691 and has lain unperformed for .300 years. The play, despite the novelty (then) of presenting a virtuous wife as a character in a Restoration maelstrom of promiscuity, has been critically reviled, chiefly on moral and classical grounds. Thus John Wendell Dodds in his 1932 Yale -Studies book on Southerne: 'A drearier round of cuckolding and wenching would be hard to find in any writer approaching Southerne in talent? But there remains something modern and appealing in the play's hectic filthiness, energy and uneasy resolutions. Max Stafford-Clark, directing for the RSC, relishes the text's indecency -though few aphorisms fly and celebrates the intricate structure in the briskly controlled set-pieces of music-meetings, park walks, and dice-rolling sessions.

The production gathers an irresistible momentum in the climactic masquerade, where the participants become pigs, devils and witches, and Friendall and the bawd Wittwoud, the two chief plotters, are mistakenly compromised with their pants around their ankles. The designer of these fetid charades, Julian McGowan, supplies superb Regency costumes, with frock coats and tall hats for the men, Second Empire gowns and piled-high hair for the women. The impression is one of the Restoration comedy rolling out of the cesspit of Wycherley towards the more linear, public comedy of Farquhar and Fielding. You can certainly see what agitated Jeremy Collier in his 1697 attack on the immorality and profaneness of the English stage. Guy Woolfenden has unearthed Purcell's marvellous, plangent songs (composed a year before The Indian Queen), which create an ironic framing device on an inner stage of painted trees and a fountain.

Friendall (Robert Bowman), a stupid, name-dropping coxcomb, with snobbish pretensions in wine and music, treats his three-month-long marriage as a pretext for licentious assignations, while his new wife (Olivia Williams) virtuously resists the importunate rake Lovemore (Anthony Cochrane). The meddling Mrs Wittwoud (Lesley Manville) arranges the debauch of The Life of the World to Come. The cryogenic suspension racket in the Bahamas is a great idea for an Ortonesque farce but is buried in a welter of incompetent plotting and loose ends. Mindful of the fate of Thomas Southerne's complex comedy, I hope to see the promising Mr Williams's next play before the bodies in this one are unfrozen. The Wives' Excuse and A Midsummer Night's Dream, in repertoire at Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire (0789 295623) Broken Glass Lyttelton, Royal National Theatre, London SE1 (071-928 2252) The Card Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, London NW1 (071-4862431) The Life of the World to Come Almeida Theatre, London Nl (071-3594404) msm out lovers, providing crucial props the third-act quarrel scene, as well as an idea, endemic to the comedy, of coming and going, of intrusion and stealth.

There's even one great new gag, when Snug (Kenn Sabberton), as the Lion in the 'Pyramus and Thisbe' interlude, has to remove his paw in order to gain a purchase on the knob as he exits. Haydn Gwynne, tall, anxious and willowy, and Emma Fielding, small, pert and feisty, are near-perfect as Helena and Hermia, and Toby Stephens ambles authoritatively through Lysander, with Kevin Doyle's Demetrius letting no one down. These lovers are colour-coded in orange, mauve, green and blue. Barrit Bottom is an irrepressible amateur dramatics enthusiast (as indeed was Barrit himself at one time), transformed from a biker in leathers, goggles and crash helmet to a Bernie Winters comic ass by his pointed ears and Ken Dodd gnashers. A notable, and noble, Noble revival.

The sycophantic lauding and promotion of Arthur Miller's bin-ends in London is a complete mystery to me. Broken Glass is the work of a great playwright reduced to prophetic, finger-wagging abstractions. As in his last two plays, The Ride Doum Mt Morgan and The Last Yankee, Miller relates a trite fantasy of national malaise to feebly imagined histories of physical and mental disintegration. Awoman in 1938 Brooklyn is mysteriously paralysed as the Nazis smash windows in Berlin. Revulsion at racist extremism is tendentiously linked to personal and sexual disappointments.

David Thacker's reverential production is struck with the ponderous attenuation that afflicts both the new Mamet in London and the new Albee in New York. Henry Goodman is busy and compelling as the helpless husband; Mil 'mm mm AIM! Titania's bower is an upturned pink brolly, a brilliant scenic invention by designer Anthony Ward. Ward and Noble create overlaps in a way that eluded even Brook and his designer, Sally Jacobs. Philip Voss's delightfully pedantic Peter Quince, for instance, is shadowed by his own cooperative, superannuated Mustardseed. Another RSC Dream, directed by Sheila Hancock, once referred the comedy to Lewis's Namia books, with strange manifestations in a cupboard.

The doors here are a fascinating development, shutting.