The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 84

15 Kate Kellawqy salutes Peter Sellars's dark merchant of Venice, while Michael Ratcliffe wonders if the Barbican is becoming a pit seeing the joke. writes about adolescent insecurity and. about lies told in the hope of winning a sexual competition. His subject is hot peaches but James Macdonald's production is a plum. As the Goodman Theater of Chicago unfolded the longest Merchant of Venice in history (no letters, please) on the main stage at the Barbican, the Georgian Film Actors' Studio of Tbilisi was banished, to the Niebelheim of Europe's ugliest large arts centre to present a brisk, two-hour Midsummer Night's Dream in The Pit, unites Michael Ratdijfe.

Itwasfun, but by standards we have come to expect, both from contemporary produtions of this play and from rare visits by Georgian theatre, it was disappointing. Comparisons are, of course, odorous, and the other companies which visited the 'Everybody's Shakespeare' Festival are all wed thier than this one, but Tbilisi is a metropolis rich in talent, and from the ensemble whose Moliere brought such joy to the Edinburgh Fringe a few years ago; Mikhail Tumanishvili's stolidly dream-themed Dream seemed short of inventiveness and ideas. Both mechanicals and fairies went for little, but the show was redeemed by a splendid and very funny quartet of lovers, around whom its energies revolved. They, alas, must now go home, but the Barbican remains, and the Barbican is becoming more hideous by the week. The lately dismissed Baroness, having won nearly 10 million from the City for much-needed improvements to her unsmiling fief, is leaving the mark of her taste upon it and actually making it worse: glitzy muses simper above a dismally dated new entrance-marquee, and if the girls don't give you a migraine, or an asthma attack from laughing fit to bust, you risk catching tinnitus from the zillions of teeny-tiny metal discs being installed in the neiy ceiling to wink you inside.

Improvements? These things have no dignity, no humanity, and no wit. The message they give is that the Barbican Centre has no confidence either in what it is doingor (worse) in the people it is doing it for. City fathers, atleast put the builders on hold, and wait for the next boss. Three Tall Women, Wyndhams Theatre, London WC2 (071-369 1 736) The Danube, the Gate, London Wll (071-2290706) Peaches, Upstairs, Royal Court Theatre, London SW1 (071-730 2554) Are we are seeing the old woman's dying fancy made It's ia wonderful idea to divide a life in this way, but wasted on this character. Occasionally wicked laughter is passed from one woman to another like a talisman down the years, but on the whole her maturing is a depressingly unsurprising journey from ignorance to cynical experience.

The production is cleanly directed by Anthony Page and the three actresses are superb. Anastasia Hille is wonderfully creepy as the young girl. Her partial innocence seems indefensible. Frances de la Tour is in cracking form as the gruffly cynical middle-aged woman, capable of being more distressed than her other selves about the gay son with whom she has parted so acrimoniously. Perhaps the degree of dislike I felt for Three Tall Women is an inverted compliment: it may be that this play is a furious admonition.

It rubs our noses in mortality and uses the character of the did lady to outrage us into outfacing viciousness, bigotry and a mean spirit. The son comes home to watch his mother die. He's an unspeaking figure on stage but he's had his say in life. The Danube (The Gate), by.Maria Irene Fornes, is a different sort of cautionary tale, set inBudapest, about nuclear pollution. Language has been polluted to the purpose: the dialogue is shaped to sound as if it Were lifted from a Hungarian phrase book.

('On Thursday he likes to cook goulash' etc.) It's just one of the distancing devices in Nancy Meckler's brilliandy awful production for Shared Experience. She makes the gradual decline of her characters more shocking by placing us at several removes from their suffering (even using tiny model figures at one stage to enact their roles). In the most terrible scene, two men meet for a cup of coffee. They are dying, their faces red and spoilt, like stewed rhubarb; they sit with a silver percolator between them. They do not know how to make, their small talk grow.

The characters in Peaches (Theatre Upstaris) have the same problem for a different reason: they are short of things to say. But you have to be skilful to make inart-iculacy as expressive as Nick Grosso succeeds in doing in his deft, funny first play. When Cherry (Holly Aifd) in a Leeds nightclub (the whirling lights look like a storm of cowrie shells) tells Frank (Ben Chaplin) that she fancies him, he can only think of one thing to say: 'You're But by the end he's stopped an astounding production of The Merchant of Venice for Chicago's Goodman Theater, which visited the Barbican all too briefly last week, director Peter Sellars has given himself permission to. do as he pleases. As you watch almost four hours or reckless, intelligent iconoclashij you keep thinking: he can't do that.

Then he does. He's thrown the rule book away and the result is an awesome liberation. The word 'set' does not describe the shadowed stage on-which three coffin-shaped caskets wait and above which televisions hang; 'unset' would be a better word. Much of the play is broadcast: the emotion most amplified is sorrow. This is the tragic Merchant of Venice I have ever seen.

Antonib (Geno Silva) speaks in a beautiful, deep, voice, and Portia's first line, 'Nerissa, by my troth, my" little body is aweary of this great world' is repeated twice into a microphone. Antonio's wretchedness is no mystery. He loves Bassanio (John Ortiz) with a passion un- matched by any other love in the play. Portia (Elaine Tse) is wonderfully fierce, ardent, oriental and tiny (with nifty green sunglasses). She's a fixer, she gives her suitors clues, wearing gold and silver to see off her first visitors and then a low-cut lead-coloured dress.

She's threatening to be a casket-case until Bassanio shows up. But when she tells Shylock that the quality of mercy is not strained, she shifts to a rapt inwardness as if to give herself courage, while a piano spills cool notes like 'the gentle rain from heaven' she describes. Shylock (Paul Butler) is black, big-hearted, and we laugh when he picks up his phone and booms 'What news on the By showing his face in close-up on television, his speeches are given a moving public dimension. And the gentle gravity with which he voices rage is extraordinary, There are many wonderful comic, turns (Launcelot Gobbo's a macho twit at a computer terminal, and Nerissa's a cross between a concubine and a Cheshire cat), but it would not do to be stuck forever with this version of the Merchant. You'd have to rescue Portia.

When she returns in the dark to welcome Antonio and her husband into her house, you can't help but fear that this is the beginning 6f a doomed menage a trots. Three Tall Women (Wyndhams) is Edward Albee's 23rd and most autobiographical play, the winner of the.1994 Eulitzer prize and a portrait of his adoptive mother, whom -he makes no secret of it- he loathed. Writing the play was, he has said, a way of understanding and purging himself of her. But understanding is not the same as forgiveness, nor is purging always redemptive. Three Tail Women is written with possessed intensity, spry stylishness and astringent wit.

But it should-not be a surprise to find a play inspired by hate a hateful thingr unforgiving, odious. For what occasion has the old lady dressed up? For of her past, perhaps. She sits in a bedroom painted in cold, varicose vein blue. She wears tangled chiffon. She has hard triangles of rouge on her cheeks and her mouth is a half-moon, down-turned.

But her face is tilted upwards as if the past were a hanging lamp above her head which might illuminate everything if only she could see it straight. Maggie Smith is outstanding as a senile old woman who has lost her wits but not quite her wit. The old lady's audience, a nurse (Frances de Ja Tour) and a lawyer (Anastasia Hilie) are paid to listen; her larger audience may wonder, throughout the first half, why they have paid to hear her slipknot of a mind loosen. She offers a monologue built on the tragi-comic illogicality of non-sequitur. She emerges as bigoted, awful.

But her distress is distressing. Lethe, the lawyer points out, tartly, has its attractions. 'Lethe? I don't know says the old lady. It's a great line and there are many great lines. ('A good cry lets it all says the nurse.

'What does a bad one the old lady answers, quick as a knife.) The first half ends in a stroke. The second half is moire dramatic and coherent. While the old lady dies in bed, three versions of herself -young, middleraged, old talk. They're like candles on a birthday cake waiting to be blown out. The lawyer has become the old lady's youngest self at 26, the nurse her 52-year-old self and, there is.a third figure, still old but not yet senile, and queenly in grey velvet.

Ronald Corp at the Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer. Photographs by Sue Adler bribe-accepting and lecherous -it is musically captivating. And throughout the opera Smetana writes and scores with characteristic, endearing invention. First operas, Weber told Schubert, should, like unwanted puppies, be drowned; his own first effort has disappeared. But Smetana's first opera merits, if not full-scale production, at least an occasional hearing.

The Chelsea Opera Group provided one last Sunday in the Elizabeth Hall. Vitem Tausky, 84-year-old Czech veteran, conducted the only Smetana opera he had not conducted before with no delicate control of detail and balance, to be sure, but with a strong, sure feeling for how the music should go. The cast was large; the singers unremarkable but acceptable, though two were more than that. Helen Kucharek, the heroine, deployed a reliable soprano with distinction of phrase, and presence, and she sang words. (The opera was given in English.) Jeremy White brought a warm, burly, but focused bass to the genial role of a Village Elder.

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