The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 59

OBSERVER SUNDAY 2 FEBRUARY 1992 i The basking temptress Frances Barber stages her next seduction in Tennessee Williams at the National. Kate Kellaway catches the rising star. FRANCES BARBER embodies Virginia WoolFs description of a woman's beauty: 'It is like the light on the sea, never constant to a single wave now she is dull and thick as bacon, now transparent as a hanging As an actress, too, Frances is a chameleon it's her changing quality that makes her such a pleasure to watch. She can be delicate and crude, cheeky and vulnerable in the same performance. As Viola, in Kenneth Bran- agh's production of Twelfth Night, she made a fine figure of a man (with too fine a figure for a man).

In Stephen Frears's film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, the camera loved her face (even if the critics hated the film). She can also go convincingly into eclipse to play dowdy characters such as Brenda wife of a serial killer and manager of a desolate in Terry Johnson's Imagine Drowning. But Frances Barber is at her best as a seductress. Next week, she opens at the National in Tennessee Williams's Night of the Iguana, directed by Richard Eyre. She plays Maxine, 'sensual, rapacious and guileless'.

Maxine is the manager of a run-down Mexican hotel. She relies not on the kindness of strangers but on rum-cocos and two male Mexican concubines. She's a sort of love caterer: efficiently making provision for her appetites. The role was orginally played by Bette Davis, later by Ava Gardner who took the demands of the part seriously, acquiring two handsome concubines for offstage use. Frances Barber lives in a pretty street in Kentish Town.

On the day we met, she arrived late, a little breathless. She had been walking her dog Neil, a bounding' black animal with paint on his fur. She ran up the stairs, looking alarmingly magnificent she must have caused quite a stir in the park. Her hair (dyed black) was combed sideways and fastened in a gleaming ponytail. She women are more deadly because they know each other better and are 'more open' than men.

'Men think they can see your Achilles heel but they don't see beyond their own Maxine generates power. Does Frances perceive herself as powerful? I do feel very powerful as a woman. I think women must develop their sexuality and joy in their sexuality. Men have forced us to become somehow ashamed of our sexuality, as if it equalled empty-headedness. What I'm trying to invest in Maxine is fearlessness: she's all women, she has a fearsome sexual presence.

She's a She quotes Tennessee Williams describing Maxine's 'faint smile which is suggestive of those cool, impersonal, all-comprehending smiles on the carved heads of Egyptian or Oriental deities'. Night of the Iguana is full of fantastic stage directions of this sort, the product of an imagination unconstrained by theatrical exigencies. Could she act out just one of Williams's directions to Maxine? How about this one? 'Her eyes said no in blue capital Not fair Frances's brown eyes are more adept at saying yes. How about this one? 'Maxine reappears at the corner of the verandah with the ceremonial rapidity of a cuckoo bursting from a clock to announce the hour'. Frances explained that Bob Crowley's abstract design makes much of the ceremony (but she could not convey the cuckoo without Crowley's help).

One more try: 'Maxine always laughs with a single harsh, loud bark opening her mouth like a seal expecting a fish to be thrown into Frances hesitated: 'The other day, coming back from Camden Town tube, a tramp asked me for money. Usually I give 50p, but when I told him I did not have any change, he took a great exhalation and then let out a loud laugh. That's it, I thought, Maxine's Frances threw back her head and demonstrated. who will say in print that she doesn't like the part or that she is uneasy about the play. The above jaded remark is of precisely the type to which Frances would object.

She deplores the English predisposition towards cynicism, dampness, rudeness and failed joy. She says it has become clear to her after travelling around the world that we are a frightful and uncivil lot. 'I'm getting more intolerant about fWhat Fm trying to invest in Maxine is fearlessness: she has a fearsome sexual presence. 3 the decline in But she would like to be more tolerant, to say with Tennessee Williams: 'Nothing human disgusts me, unless it is unkind, If she were to write a job reference for herself, hinting at her bad points, what would she say? She replies unhesitatingly: 'I need a syringe full of patience jabbed into my bottom She takes out stress on hapless bureaucrats. 'I was up last night composing a letter of complaint about my bank She talks of men, too, as if they were little better than tiresome clerks.

Her tone is of casual damnation, amused loftiness. Women are to be taken more seriously. 'Hysteria is the big female says one of the characters in Night of the Iguana. Frances thinks that a scalding row with a girlfriend is far more upsetting ('to lose my best girlfriend would destroy me') than a lover's quarrel ('par for the course'). She thinks 'Sensual, rapacious and guileless': Frances Barber as Maxine in 'Night of the Iguana', Photograph by Richard MUdenhaU.

Nicholas Kenyon asks Johannes Schaaf about the which will entertain the Queen in person and her people He says he knows what Mozart meant was wearing a gorgeous, fun-furry coat. Her clothes are telltale. Frances explained that she not only gets taken over by parts ('the way I sleep, the way I eat, the way I feel emotionally about myself everything is affected') but finds the women she plays creep into her wardrobe and call the shots. Maxine dictates long scarlet fingernails, an impossibly tight dress, glossy tights and shoes. Frances was having a day eyes starry, hooped gold earrings gleaming.

She has a habit of throwing back her head as if to bask in the sun (an inappropriate mannerism for a Kentish Town girl). She was born in Wolverhampton, the fourth of six children, daughter of a bookie in a 'house with no books'. Her mother, who died last year, was a school cook. She went to Bangor and Cardiff universities to read English and Drama, acted on the fringe for six years, then got a job with the RSC in Camille. This is her first job at the National.

(She is to play Eliza in Pygmalion later this year.) At 33, she said, she has never been happier. Happiness puts a shine on everything she says, but makes her uncritically enthusiastic about the play. Night of the Iguana is an interesting, odd, late work, driven by hectic jokes which fail to blur indeed help to confirm the sense of a depressed piece of writing, wrung out of misery, formed by low expectations. All the characters are at the end of their tethers (the iguana stuck on the end of a lead is a dismal symbolic mascot for them). Frances is 'in love' with the play and 'loves' the part but then find me an actress a strong effect on me Ijust vomited.

seduce someone? In Mozart's music-in "La ci darem" you are given exactly how long it takes and every detail of what happens is in the music. It is rather simple to follow Mozart's instructions if only you have ears to hear! The whole problem of theatre is times-cale, and in opera the composer solves Schaafs unerring respect for the composer is perhaps unusual among advanced opera directors today. He is not interested in just translating operas into the present day, though there are often contemporary elements, notoriously the nuclear clean-up in his Idomeneo. Don Giovanni, boldly designed by Peter Pabst (who has previously designed costumes for Schaaf), will have a completely eighteenth-century feel. A passing idea to stage the last scene in modern dress was abandoned as unnecessary.

'It's absolutely unimportant what period an opera is staged in. So people complaining about Peter Sel-lars's Mozart just because it is contemporary are stupid. The danger of these modern settings is that you just get a boring old opera production except for the modern costumes not Sellars, he is much too intelligent to do that but it happens all the time. A modern setting only means anything if it refers to our possibility of touching the opera. It is our ability to perceive what Mozart meant that is the only important And does Schaaf know he COVENT GARDEN, a few days into rehearsals for the Royal Opera's new Don Giovanni: Donna Anna has 'flu, Masetto is at a funeral, and now Donna Elvira is off sick too.

So it's just Leporello (Claudio Desderi), head to head with director Johannes Schaaf, surrounded by a bevy of assistants, musical and dramatic. Across a table, Desderi, small but fierce and very knowledgeable, faces Schaaf, massively imposing like some Eastern potentate, who is completing his staging of the trilogy of Mozart operas with librettos by Da Ponte. They argue it out. Is Leporello's catalogue aria elegant, its second half a refined minuet, or sardonic, twisting the knife into Elvira's pain? Desderi wonders what on television Schaaf is often touchingly personal in rehearsal, drawing on his own worldwide travels, illuminating Giovanni's glimpsing of Elvira's mute servant (who plays an unusually extended role in this staging) to his own glimpsing of a silent nun behind a grille in a distant convent. That sense of personal conviction in his stagings extends to music too, with Schaaf studying metronome marks for Don Giovanni and insisting to conductor Bernard Haitink that the champagne aria ('Why do they call it that, it is must be so fast as to be totally obsessive.

Haitink, who worked with Schaaf on the Royal Opera's Figaro but is not known tor his adventurousness in dramatic matters, takes it all in good part. 'Johannes's ideas are marvellous. Sometimes over the top, and it takes a long time for them to come right, but I trust A singer says that Schaafs way of working is 'to get certain fixed points in place, and then let anything happen around them'. So whatever happens, Her Majesty the Queen, who celebrates the fortieth anniversary of her accession by gracing the Royal Opera House with her presence at the second performance of Don Giovanni on 10 February, should be in for a stimulating evening. BBC2 will televise 'Don Giovanni' live from the Royal Opera House on 10 February, 6.50 10.45pm.

antuir by bertolt fl II II brecht lUl in a new translation by ranjit bolt Antony Sher: "A dazzling display of theatrical pyrotechnics" lime Out "Blazing portrait of a monster" Daily "A character he was born to play" InrJepunrJenl ijn Sunday OLIVIER THEATRE Tomorrow Tue at 7.15, Wed at 2.00 7.15, Thur at 7.15 (ends) 071447 1 'Photograph by Sue Adler. knows what Mozart meant? 'Yes, I feel today my way is the only possible way, otherwise I could not go on and do it. There must be logical and emotional reasons from my own experience and my sense of how it should Indeed, new Don Giovanni Schaaf: 'When I was young Japan later this year by the Royal Opera, have been criticised for their bleak view of the world: Schaaf shrugs this off incredulously, as if anyone who cannot see that Mozart has his bleak moments needs his ears washing out. But they have also been admired for cSo much has changed since the days of lazy singing. A generation has come who try to do something with the drama.3 their fantastic command of detail, the seriousness with which they treat every twist of the recitative as well responding to the subtleties of the scores.

Yet Schaaf in rehearsal is far from having everything planned to the last movement: ideas and whole scenes change radically from moment to moment, challenging and infuriating singers (not to mention the assistants). Schaaf defends this: 'Of course it changes. If not, why rehearse? My way is I plan situations exactly. But I cannot tell the actors how to feel that, they must reach their way of doing it. So much has changed now in opera since the days of just lazy, stupid, singing people.

A generation has come together, like this cast, who try to do something with the drama. 'This change was the result really happens in Act Two between Leporello and Elvira: 'Does he have her? Why doesn't she know it's not Schaaf: 'Passion destroys reason; that's an old eighteenth-century topos. Giovanni destroys his victims. None of them Anna, Elvira can ever enjoy a normal life again. And then he comes home, even when everyone is looking for him, to seek death Desderi: 'Is Leporello really powerless, always wanting to escape Giovanni, but realising that he Schaaf: 'At the end Leporello will still go on writing in his book: he is a watcher, he sees everything Will they rehearse the Catalogue Aria without Elvira? Schaaf offers to play her.

Desderi demurs. Schaaf is truculent: 'You don't want me as Elvira? OK, we go Later, Schaaf develops his ideas on one of the most heavily interpreted operas of all time. 'Don Giovanni is a huge work of mourning for the end of the old regime; he is the last great individual hero. Afterwards, we can see what will happen and it is awful: Ottavio will become a middle-class author, Zerlina will become a petite bourgeoise, Masetto will make a lot of money as an entrepreneur, and it will all be nice and cosy in the nineteenth century. They are the new people.

'But Giovanni stands over them like a huge rock we see the sharpness of the edges, the beauty, the immensity of the height. He may have been a criminal, but whatever he was this opera is not about conventional morality he towers over us and makes us see ourselves as mediocre human beings. This is a farewell to an For Schaaf, Don Giovanni contrasts strongly with the other two operas of the Da Ponte trilogy, though Figaro is also very precisely of its time: 'It's a rather political satire about the way times and relationships are changing, the uprising of the new class. But Cost is almost without any social aspect; it is just about what a human soul is able to endure and Mozart tells us it is far more than anyone can Schaafs Mozart productions, seen in London and Vienna, and to be taken to the resistible, rise of THE OBSERVER BOOK OF PROFILES I saw Tristan' and it had such of directors like Jean-Pierre Ponnelle who are very much underestimated today. And there was this whole new wave of producers in Frankfurt, working with the conductor Michael Gielen.

From that moment opera really started for Schaaf previously worked in theatre and film. 'I had no training, maybe that's my problem. After training in medicine I just started making films, one about the post-war generation in Germany who were not responsible for their actions and blamed all then-troubles on their parents. Actually, I did one little opera, Mozart's Bastien und Bas-tienne. Then I thought I should work in a form which is more what society needs, and went to film.

But I came back to Did music provide an added theatrical dimension missing in the other media? 'No, that's too simple. Music was always in my life from my early days, not just opera but concert music and the piano which I played. When I was young I saw Tristan with my mother well, maybe I should not have seen it with her and it had such a strong effect on me I just vomited. That was the power of it, a logic totally different to the text alone. I directed Eugene Onegin, a text I knew and loved, but Tchaikovsky told you different things about it in his music.

'I got tired of explaining things in the straight theatre: how many pauses do you put in, how long does it take to collection of Profiles dates from 1942. the year of the first Profile, to 1990. It takes in politicians, statesmen, royals, divines, writers, artists, soldiers, sports stars and showbusiness celebrities, plus a few other characters more difficult to pigeon-hole. They are accompanied by some of the illustrations that have proved an equally strong element in the Profiles -photographs by Jane Bown, and drawings by Trog. Marc and Nicholas Garland.

Robert Low. editor this collection of Profiles, is Associate Editor (Features) of The Observer. CUT TIM Obsornr Book ol PrefUos' payable to The Ooserver Ltd Edited by Robert Low The Observer introduced the Profile to British journalism nearly 50 years ago. Since then, it has been one of The Observer's most attractive and popular features, imitated many but bettered by none. From Hitler io Oorbachov.

from the Goons to Lenny Henry, the Observer Profile has attempted to convey the essence ot its subject in an intelligent informed and entertaining manner. Authors have usually been anonymous, but have included many distinguished writers and journalists. This 100 PLEASE copies Pleas sno me lei iptt copyl ind I fidost cessw cfteque postal Offlet. value I isfi to pay by Access Visa i CaiO No Sifirjt.iie P.a$ 'fx! tc I "TM Obwmr Book Proa' P0 Bo 73. Mftctem.

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