The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 44

44 OBSERVER SUNDAY 26 FEBRUARY 1989 TEBsT RICHARD MILDENHALL Take a shine snipper-snappers Victoria and Albert Museum Hacks THERE is advertising no ban on cigarette in the pro- vided the advertisements look good. So the Collett, Dickenson, Pearce Partners ruse of disguising Benson Hedges packets as harmless devices pays off yet again. A whole wall of Photography Now is papered with the recent poster in which 20 Special Filter adorn one fan among many. Not the happiest association, I would have thought, in that fans imply fug or someone fouling the air. With the onset of a management-led presentation can take precedence over content.

And in terms of 'Photography Now' glamorous misconceptions are perfectly valid. Mark Haworth-Booth, organiser of this expansive celebration of photography's 150th anniversary, used to work in the A's old Circulation Department, putting together travelling exhibitions designed to stimulate and educate in summary fashion. Though he is now Curator of Photographs he retains something of that admirable Circulation approach, generally inclined towards the uncataloguable. 'Photography Now' is almost as much to do with pixels on computer screens as with film in camera. Picture desk input, publicity material, Art Photography and video ramifications are thrown together for review.

Now, we are told, is the time to slip into deregulatory mode, to think along with Baudrillard, questioning the status of images, wondering about the reproductive nature of photo-reality. So here we have the peculiarity of Benson Hedges ads countered by the patently unoriginal 'rephotographic' ploy of Richard Prince, who takes details of Big Country Marlboro' posters and reproduces them, with enhanced graininess, so that they look like abrupt freeze-frames. On another parasitic tack, Bruce Weber photographs blond young blades in a way that suggests he imagines he's working for a pre-war naturist magazine. He shows that fashion photography, one step removed from ordinary advertising, can be as revivalist as the clothes or lack of clothes featured. As every Baudrillardian avers, identity isn't something you are born with but a deception imposed.

Thus it is that Cindy Sherman can devote herself to photographing herself in different guises. She started, some complacent 'Mao-Marilyn', 1967. By further manipulating pixels Nancy Burson has also done her bit for global unity, putting representatives of every race through the blender to produce the ultimate photofit. Astrid Klein has a thing about photographic illegibility. Her 'Cerebral Somersault', 1984, is a poultice in black-and-white composed of nuclear warnings and corporeal shadows.

Like those who clutter videotape with polarised flare and scratch edits, or indeed the Starn twins going wild with Sellotape and scissors, she does her utmost to get away from photography's essential stillness and impartiality. Up in the Henry Cole wing, meanwhile, Helen Chadwick's 'Oval Court' holds several ideas in suspension. Five gold spheres, like Benson Hedges cult objects, rest on a platform covered with white-on-blue Xerox images of the creatrix caught up with emblematic lambs, swans and seaweeds. The most memorable exhibits in 'Photography Now' aren't the hybrids or the idolised technicalities. Being there, on cue, is what still counts.

Martin Cleaver of the Press Association was on the look-out only half a mile away when HMS Antelope blew up in San Carlos Bay, in May 1982. That explosion became his scoop. Sebastion Salgado photographed the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil, recording from a distance the scrambling thousands in the laddered abyss, a hellish free-for-all. His prints are dulled in tone to give them the weightiness of a Mantegna, the comprehensiveness of a Bruegel. Mark Haworth-Booth rightly stresses the importance of photography books in making work conveniently available.

He has set up a bibliophile's shrine to show off a facsimile of Fox Talbot's 'The Pencil of Nature' from the 1840s, and a book' browserie. The most enjoyable display of confidence in 'Photography Now' is John Baldessari's "The Fallen Easel', a cluster of framed images, like a thriller unbound, with gun pointed, suspicious briefing session, fish leaping, easel sent sprawling. This delivers a complete treatise on photographic means: the framing, the freezing, the editing, the angling, the montage or narrative; the facility to plot, to stare, to contemplate, and indeed to use one's imagination. as the natural clowns of Soviet society and making a few sharp points along the way about misreading Marx, murderous revolution, and the acceptance of Jews for military service but not in schools. Nothing seems to take place in the last 25 years, though.

The second half is more confident: although the company is at present too large for really incisive ensemble, there are some very good movers on stage and actors one would dearly like to see in mainstream European plays. Wise and abrasive simultaneous translation by Frances Barber and Martin Sherman. Michael Sutton and Anthony Fingleton's Over My Dead Body (Savoy) must be the feeblest show Donald Sinden has ever appeared in: it uses about 20 per cent of his talents, if that. Do not think that the murder of a crass young Cali-fornian by three quaint English thriller-writers (Sinden, June Whitfield, Frank Middlemass) is merely the occasion for anti-American Schadenfreude of the standard Shaftesbury Avenue kind. It is worse, for the authors are American, the play comes from Connecticut, and it obsequiously insists that the naughty threesome are even more adorably English than any English playwright would dare.

The occasion is to be. marked only for Ken Wynne's turn as a geriatric club waiter felled by a well-aimed copy of Punch and tacking into an invisible gale. 'Photography Now' at the years ago, by casting herself in film-still roles. Recently she has featured herself as an abused character lying in artificial vomit. The examples of her work in 'Photography Now' are from an in-between phase.

She's seen modelling beachwear and presenting herself, game as ever, as a jolly good sport and as a torch singer at full throttle. The masquerade category also includes William Wegman and his performing dog Fay Ray, a handsome Labrador made to look foolishly human on occasion. The patient creature is dressed, for instance, in glitzy evening wear as for some important opening a Trustees Fun Night, say betraying canine instincts by snapping at a ball. Being there is what counts: 'Juno and the Paycock', smoking a Popeye pipe; Joxer is almost without viciousness; Juno a simple, fastidious woman with the stretch of a Degas laundress. There is no chifi in the knocks on the door from the men who come to kill Johnny.

Deirdre Clancy's designs reflect the texture and scale of the performance: the smells of carbolic and frying sausage are strong but the claustrophobia and intensity of domestic naturalism are out. The tenement has no windows or doors and stands in a space that leads without interruption to a staircase-landing and a large, sooty etching of Georgian terraces at the back. The play leaks away. It is an amusing, intelligent and explanatory evening, in 5fc DAVID MAMET's characteristically abrasive new stage play 'Speed the Plow' is about the preparation of a crass Hollywood buddy movie. His uncharacteristically soft-centred new film, Things Change (Screen on the Hill, PG), is, by no mere coincidence, a buddy movie, though a gentler, funnier, more subtle one than the picture his stage hacks are concocting, and it contains no four-letter word more offensive than 'plow'.

Mamet's directorial debut, 'House of Games', 'Things Change' has a complexity of plotting nowhere encountered in his stage work, though it lacks the toughness and originality of the earlier film. There are strong echoes of Gogol's 'Government Inspector', Kosin-ski's 'Being There' and Hal Ashby's 'The Last Detail' in this fable of a quiet, elderly Chicago shoeshine boy, Gino (Don Ameche), being bribed to take the rap for a Mafia hit-man and spending a last weekend of freedom in Lake Tahoe, Nevada with his dim, streetwise minder, Jerry (Joe Mantegna). In that favourite haunt of cosa nostra chieftains Gino is mistaken for a crime boss ('the guy-behind the guy behind the guy) his every homely utterance interpreted as cryptic wisdom. Briefly, two losers are treated like winners: they are put up free in the best finest suite; the management and minor hoodlums regard them with awe; girls are attracted by their aura of power. Mamet has called his film a fairy-tale, and because it takes a benevolently Runyonesque view of the Mafia similar to Woody Allen's in 'Broadway Danny Rose', we know Jerry and Gino will eventually land on their feet rather than end up wearing concrete boots at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

But we do believe in the warm relationship between this sad pair; and the picture is beautifully played by Don Ameche and Mamet's rep company. Adapted from Anne Tyler's exquisite novel by Frank Gelati and its director Lawrence Kas-dan (whose best film it is), The Accidental Tourist (Cannon, Shaftesbury Ave, PG) belongs in that everyday world which Mamet's movie eschews. The sympathetic hero of this funny, often painfully moving picture is Macon Leary (William Hurt), a quiet, withdrawn man whose cultivation of domestic order and emotional control is reflected in his job. The wonderful central conceit is that Macon (like most Tyler characters, a native of conservative Baltimore) writes neat pocket travel guides designed to protect fellow provincials from unpleasant encounters with alien ways, in the States or abroad. His cherished equilibrium has been undermined-! by the death-of his 10-year-old son a year before the film begins, and is further challenged by the decision of his wife (Kathleen Turner) to leave him in the opening reel.

A new meaning is given to the term 'a hurt expression' by William Hurt's encyclopaedia of facial gesture and body language, as Macon first tries to adjust to a solitary existence and then must choose between regression to the childhood world still shared by his reclusive brothers and sister, a reunion with his wife, or the possibility of a new life with the vulgar, vital Muriel (Geena 1 1. raa rn TTb AC Al DEMY Rhapsodic young lovers: Helen 'Things Change', 'The Accidental Tourist' PHILIP FRENCH Davis), a working-class divorcee with an ailing six-year-old son who works at the Meow-Bow Animal Hospital. Nobody writes better than Tyler about the problems of everyday middle-class existence, the extraordinariness of ordinary people, the courage, stoicism and good humour that's needed to get by and that makes marriages work. Kasdan has caught the book's spirit in this fine picture. Luc Besson's The Big Blue (Lumiere, 15), an English-speaking French production, is an expensive mystical nonsense about the competition since childhood between the Italian Enzo (Jean Reno) and the Frenchman Jacques (Jean-Marc Barr), who are both obsessed with the unfathomable sea and the tedious sport of free-diving, which involves holding your 'breath underwater at enormous depths.

The widescreen Mediterranean vistas are blown-up picture postcards; the kookie American heroine (Rosanna Arquette) is neither mermaid nor Merman; the ethos is Club Mediterranee machismo; the pace is such that you'd think Besson had learnt his craft directing funerals. If 'The Big Blue' belongs in the chapter of French movie history called 'Coup de Glitz Diva to Diver Jean-Loup Hupert's Le Grand Chemin (Everyman, IS) belongs in an older French tradition (as well as taking its place alongside 'The Go-Between', 'Summer of '42' and the Taiwanese 'That Summer at Grandpa's'). It is a loving and lovely addition to that international genre, the semi-autobiographical movie recalling a sweetly painful childhood summer in the country. The year is 1958, the Algerian War rumbles in the background, and the nine-year-old hero is left by his pregnant Parisian mother to spend three weeks with her closest school friend in a remote Breton Milage. In a succession of hot, dusty days, little Louis discovers a different, provincial life; his childless host and hostess compete for his affections; and he confronts, and more than he can immediately understand about love, death, marriage and sexuality.

The acting is faultless and at the centre are the two best performances by French children since 'Les Interdits'. 1 One of the most stylish and compelling crime pictures of the past decade, Michael Mann's Manhunter (Cannon, Oxford Street, 18) is sophisticated pulp fiction in the maverick 'mode of Charles Willeford and Robert Bloch. William Peterson stars as a disturbed ex-FBI agent with an uncanny ability to solve brutal murders by empathising with his quarry. He's called back from retirement to catch a peculiarly methodical serial killer terrorising the South. As with Mann's previous thrillers, 'Violent Streets' and 'The Keep', the meaning of 'Manhunter' is in.

the images and the throbbing soundtrack that the Dolby system projects into the viewer's own skull, and the movie comes to partake more than a little of the madness it confronts. i ra ran i i itqSilEl I Ft HAITI mi dl XX II II Killing Johnny softly Phantoms In the burgeoning field of Art Photography none are more arty than the 27-year-old Starn twins from New Jersey who, being identical, collaborate to produce dreadful symmetries. They go in for darkroom maltreatments, chemically abusing their prints, then mounting them in screeds. 'The Horses No. 102' is a distressed set of repeats.

Andy Warhol did comparable cow wallpaper in 1966. Access to 'creative computation' has made it possible for Nancy Burson to accomplish what a skilled retoucher could achieve in minutes. In 'Warhead I', 1982, she merges the faces of Brezhnev and Reagan, a blend that it so happens was prefigured by Warhol with his devastatingly Salgado's Serra Pelada. 'Polygraph' and others which Catholic devotions are unusually well defined, but it is 'Juno' without unreason, and 'Juno' tamed. 'The story you are about to says David the pathologist (Robert Lepage) in Lepage and Marie Brassard's extraordinary Polygraph (Almeida, until Saturday), 'is an autopsy on the living which lets the dead rest in 'Polygraph' is the tale of the pathologist, the violent, waiter Francois (Pierre-Philippe Guay) and the delectable young actress Lucie (Brassard) with whom the awkwardly donnish David falls in love.

All three are haunted by the unsolved murder of a girl in Montreal six years before. The tale is told in short scenes like a movie, with titles and holograms projected on to a long brick wall, over which David moves with the dexterity of a cat and Francois with a sexually self-destructive, sado-masochistic force. Did Francois kill the girl? Unlikely, but a guilt remains. Lepage, who also directs and designs, is the Visual theatre-poet of urban Canada whose play about Chinese immigrants in Toronto, 'The Dragon's Trilogy', was one of the most original and touching shows to visit London in recent years; like the painter Hopper, he is an imagist in time whose pictures you do not forget. The new play inhabits a smaller, more nocturnal and disturbing world, alluding to the unfashionable Cocteau, and combining the observed comedy and erotic dangers of city lives.

It is both insolubly mysterious and very precise, staged and performed with beauty and brilliance, and recommended to anyone going to the theatre to receive questions rather than answers. Nothing could be less like 'Polygraph' than The Train to Happiness (Lyric, Hammersmith, until Saturday) which the newly re-formed Moscow Jewish Theatre 'Shalom' brings to Britain fresh, from its Soviet premiere. It appears under the management of Vanessa Redgrave with the Russian Theatre Workers' Union, now able to book and finance foreign tours on its own initiative without the incompetent state agencies of the past. Good. I don't think any Jewish show in the West, still less Israel, could be called 'The Train to Happiness', even in disingenuousness or defiance, but let that pass.

Subtitled 'Scenes from Jewish Life', 'The Train' comprises sketches and songs by Arkady Khyte with music by Efrim Boord. It is a cheerful occasion, celebrating rebirth, offering a Jewish vision of Jews In the photograph accompanying last week's Video Art feature, the video installation pictured was Judith Goddard'a 'Silver Lining'. Charnock and David Aldred. The Opera Factory's double 'Ghost Sonata' DAVID FREEMAN'S production of Strindberg's intimate chamber play is grand, full-blooded, and on a somewhat larger stage than that originally envisaged by the playwright's late style. It is also, unlike Gregory Motton's sardonic and rapturous translation, surprisingly short on the harsh extremities of Strindberg's wit.

That said, the play grips for an hour and three-quarters without a break. Freeman animates David Roger's translucent house of screens with quiet, bizarre, domestic movement, and the great space of the concert platform around the house with the broad and sweeping choreography of characters terrified by the mendacity of their past and the imminent reckoning of death. His actors and acting singers perform with total commitment, particularly Linda Marlowe, as the lady who lives in a cupboard and thinks she is a parrot, and Jerome Willis as her ageing, malevolent ex-lover and stealer of human lives. Above all, Adam Kotz carries off the bewildered, innocent Arkenholz with a simplicity and conviction that survives even the love scene' in the hyacinth garden and the transfiguration of his beloved through a hole in the mountain wall. Give in to it it's the only way.

MICHAEL RATCLIFFE 'THE GHOST Sonata, Aribert Reimann's Strindberg opera, is an incoherent bundle of nerves as David Freeman's fevered, angst-tiddea production reflects. The Opera Factory is adventurously presenting both play and opera in repertory. The force of the opera seems to come from Freeman's staging and an outstanding cast. The convoluted plot perches on a knife-edge between life and death everyone here is either dead or about to be. Arkenholz, a student (David Aldred), has a vision of a milk- -maid whom his master Hummel (Richard Suart) murdered.

Hummel's one-time mistress (now married to a colonel and apparently insane) and his daughter are glimpsed. Hummel sets out to denounce the colonel, and things turn nasty. The mistresswife (Christine Botes) drops her parrot imitations, becomes sane and Hummel is denounced. Arkenholz and the daughter (Helen Charnock) share a rhapsodic scene but she is claimed by death. Reimann's score, though meticulously composed, is mere gesture: noise which articulates the passing moments of the drama.

Although more substantial than his 'Lear', it makes no more musical sense. The extended interludes are baf-flingly empty. The London Sin-fonietta projected forcefully under Paul Daniel's admirable direction, but it made me wonder if, as Ives once put it, my ears were on right. NICHOLAS KENYON FILM REVIEW THE National Theatre's renewal of the basic repertory continues, after 'Hedda' and before 'Hamlet', with a Juno and the Paycock (Lyttelton) notable for lucidity and lightness but consistently ignoring the dark heart of O'Casey or the bitter tragedy of his great play. Peter Gill directs three exceptionally gifted gut-actors Linda Bassett (Juno), Tony Haygarth (Boyle) and Tom Hickey Qoxer) to handle their lines as delicately as possible, for fear of taking them, us and the play over the top.

All three appear constrained. Gill is much kinder to the Irish than O'Casey or the Irish themselves, and the result is not only less black than the recent Dublin production but also the connection between comedy and despair in Ireland being what it is less funny, too. Boyle is a gentle charmer, an A real charmer." Great. I loved it.1 TIME OUT NOW SHOWING CHELSEA-CINEMA 206 KING'S ROAD SW3 3513742 evervman cinema HAMSPTEADNW3 4351525 I SIX LADIES IN A HAIRDRESSING SALON Nfefe I and what do you ri a NEW COMEDY ASiouuossrHEArnc Rosemary Harris Jean Boht smftesburyavenue. Maggie Steed AfcC) Stephanie Cole an in Duvitski -in 014373686 Joely Richardson 1 I GR0UPS: 01240 7941 MAGNOLIAS Jl SSST jiygQBfirJi and 379 4444 741 9999.