The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 44

44 OBSERVER SUNDAY 4 JUNE 1 989 NEIL UBBERT Dustin come to judgment Hare and the tortoise 'Paris by Night', 'Hard Times' and a horror crop PHILIP FRENCH 1930s photographic reportage, and acted in a stylised fashion reminiscent of silent cinema, drawing directly on Dickens for the extensive voice-over narration and minimal dia TO COME straight to the point, Dustin Hoffman takes to the London stage in The Merchant of Venice (Phoenix) with a Shylock of striking physicality, unsentimental pride and sardonic power. He is the brittle outsider in a city the rest of whose male inhabitants are more than usually bland: a slight figure in priestly black generating the electricity of indignation and injustice from a small body, gleaming eyes and large expressive hands. The hands are remarkable. They are his advocates and his defenders, sweeping aside compromise, shaping an argument, clawing a threat of revenge out of thin at one point they (unconsciously?) stab out a parody of Christian blessing as he seeks the protection of Christian law. The voice is guttural and dark, the intonation American; he puts his case directly to the audience and moves us with the loss of Leah's jewel.

He breaks up the verse with idiosyncratic confidence; it is not what we're used to, but the meaning is always clear. The brilliant smile is concealingly humorous and, once, even benign. Shy-lock's orthodox piety may be offended by the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife, but he lets Lancelot Gobbo go with an indulgent grin. The boy ate too much: perfectly understandable, but let someone else pay for the food. Hoffman's unselfish performance justifies the Peter Hall Company's decision not to promote him as a star outside the ensemble.

If only the ensemble were worthy of him. The three women, led by Geraldine James's sturdy and increasingly troubled Portia, should become so now that the rushed ordeal of a glitzy first wretched Antonio's ships have come in after all. Life after Lotte Lenya for the theatre songs of Kurt Weill has been vigorous and ever diversifying, from Milva, Dagmar Krause and Teresa Stratas to Julie Wilson, Eartha Kitt and Sting. Something about the timing of Ute Lemper, however, (Almeida Festival, 16 to 18 June) has attracted exceptional media and public attention here, and promises to take the songs to large, new audiences across the board. Bath Theatre Royal was sold out test Monday for her first British appearance, in a demanding and generous programme of 24 German, French and American songs.

She is young, beautiful, serious and sexy; a star who comes on stage so, quietly she precludes the possibility of applause; a missionary committed to alerting the innocent to the political and musical meaning of Weill's work. What sets her apart from most of her predecessors and contemporaries is an-exceptional lyrical gift, which spins melodies of longing on pianissimi of silk' thread and keens into lost worlds of injustice irredeemably gone. To this she adds, when appropriate, the brass of the Broadway Forties and the raffish snap of a Berlin cabaret brat. Whether the songs are best heard end-on-end for more than two hours will always be questioned, but the chance to hear so much marvellous and often unfamiliar music such as 'Die Rote Rose', a chromatic valse oubliee in memory of Rosa Luxembourg, and 'Youkali', a seductive tango habanera about an island that never was should on no account be missed. logue, the movie is a remarkable achievement that manages Hall's 'Merchant of Venice' and Ute Lemper's Weill MICHAEL RATCLIFFE night is over; but if Hall had set out to demonstrate essential differences between British and American male classical acting he could not have done so more clearly.

Or more unfairly, for this is British acting by the book American acting at its most scrupulous and unpredictable. The ponderous comedy of Lancelot defeats Peter-Hugo Daly as it has defeated other. good actors before him. Antonio (Leigh Lawson), Bassanio (Nathaniel Parker) and Gratiano (Michael Siberry) are all affected, actorish, and flat. Handsomely set by Chris.

Dyer in a double colonnaded marble courtyard, it is, however, a Merchant without context, in no way to be compared with the fierce and uncompromising version directed three years ago by Bill Alexander for the RSC. It is presented as though the play gave no problems." to late twentieth-century audiences. True, there is some hearty spitting at the Jew, but only Lorenzo (Richard Garnett) and Jessica (Francesca Buller) show more than a passing concern at the viciousness of Shylock's fate. The trial leaves no stain on the play: as soon as it is over we are not only asked to take a sympathetic interest in trivial love games as though it had not taken place, but also to rejoice, without irony, that three of the to encompass the book pnn cipal themes, its satirical bite and much of its plot, while movmg at a stately pace. Hare's new Tories cannot compare in interest, political insight and current relevance with the obsessed utilitarian Grandgrind, devoted to vocational education of the most philistine sort, or the boastful self-made businessman, Boun-derby, with his fake past and his disavowal of his mother (reminding us that our own Prime Minister omits her mother's name from Who's Who).

And they inhabit a world very like pur own of. Green light of guilt Morrish's Helena resembles, to use Hernia's phrase, 'a painted maypole'. She is a fine athlete and chases Demetrius to comic effect. But her speech is the equivalent of a stamped foot. Hermia, too (Vicky Licorish), is over-boisterous.

The players boast an affable Bottom (Christopher Benjamin), an exceptionally funny Thisbe (Robert Styles) and a lion so charming (Jason Hart) that the assembled company can't resist tickling him. Sixties nostalgia makes for a friendly evening, although it converts magic into a familiar joke. Dropping out is more fun than coming out. In Beth Henley's new play The Debutante Ball (Hampstead) Teddy (Jane Horrocks), a hysteric forced into virgin white, slices with a blade into her flesh. She is not fit for the ball.

Nor is anyone else. The ball happens between the acts. We are detained in a green-and-caramel marbled suite with ONE DAY, a girl flirts with a signalman, he misses a signal, a train crashes. Odon von Hor-vath's Judgement Day shows how innocence may go simply. It is hard to believe that this fascinating, subtle play (translated by Martin and Renata Esslin) hasn't been performed here before.

At its British premiere at the Old Red Lion, you are close enough to study the perjured faces of Hudetz, the signalman (Stephen Boxer), and Anna (Matilda Zeigler). Behind them, Claudia Mayer has designed a wall of teapots, icons, old dresses and antlers which stands like accumulated, arbitrary evidence. This suits Horvath's theme. He shows how guilt gathers up every detail of a life and how it may bring a man and woman together. Anna and Hudetz meet in secret and their passion for each other is a kind of mutual confession.

Stephen Daldry's stunning production is characterised by a dark wit: Hudetz's neighbours, believing him innocent, throw a party in which they impersonate a train and come chugging towards him, each carrying a lit candle like his conscience on the move. Mrs Leimgruber (Merelina Kendall) also entertains; she relishes her own words, as if gossip were edible. But we are never in doubt that talk damages and that, as she herself says, 'the truth is different'. A Midsummer Night's Dream (The Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park) might perhaps be renamed a Midsummer Night's Dream-In. In Guy Slater's production, set in the Sixties, lovers drop out, fairies drop in, and Puck (Trevor Laird), tall, black and in crushed velvet, deals in drugs and whips out a flash-knife smile.

Titania (Sally Dexter) is powered by flowers and Tricia DAVID HARE's first film, Wetherby, was a tortoise-like affair about the moral and emotional torpidity engendered in liberals by the ethos of Thatcher's Britain. His new one, Paris by Night (Curzon, West End, 15), lives up more to his name, and in the early scenes the hand-held camera has to move frantically to keep pace with Hare's heroine, Clara Paige, a ruthless, dynamic Tory Euro-MP, played by the British cinema's sleekest femme fatale, Charlotte Rampling. The key ingredients in Hare's latest stage play, The Secret Rapture, recur a female Thatcherite politician with a weak husband, financial chicanery visited upon the innocent by unscrupulous entrepreneurs, a woman shot five times at point-blank range by a desperate man, a wimpish young hero speaking on behalf of decency, in a voice that would register dead on a heart-monitoring machine. But whereas the play is enacted wholly in the domestic arena, the movie (like Hare's Plenty) moves uneasily on to the public scene and takes the form of a film noir thriller. The name Clara Paige has the ring of 'Mildred Pierce' and, like Joan Crawford in a Warner Brothers melodrama, she has a past tainted by cheating a business partner and driving him into bankruptcy and a corrupt present symbolised by the alcoholic MP husband (Michael Gambon) and the neglected eight-year-old son she has sacrificed to her career.

An anonymous phone-caller issues disturbing threats, the Ibsenesque ex-business associate makes veiled blackmail demands, an agreeably menacing mood is established. Then Clara is sent to represent HMG at some rather vague trade negotiations in Paris (the knowing tone fails to conceal Hare's ignorance of, and indifference towards, political processes), where she meets a tedious young prig who opens her eyes to a supposedly richer life (honest, warm, familial, Jewish). Wandering in a romantic daze back to her hotel through the Parisian night, she sees the English blackmailer alone on a bridge, an encounter so unlikely that one initially supposes it to be an hallucination. But it's for real, and in a split-second she's tipped the hapless fellow into the river, hoping, presumably that at worst she'll "cop a plea of 'guilty but in Seine'. This being a movie, we want her to get away with it, just as we identify with Fred McMur-ray and Barbara Stanwyck doing far worse things in Double Indemnity.

It is indeed Hare's point that Tories preach morality while being allowed to get away with anything from adultery to murder. Paris by Night is entertaining enough, and designer Anthony Pratt and cinematographer Roger Pratt have given it a glorious sheen. But there is a general lack of conviction in the plotting, the social obser- vation, the characterisation, and (for all the verbal dexterity) the diction. We learn little new about our society from this film, unlike, say, The Ploughman's Lunch, a movie making similar points' with greater trenchancy. Far more pertinent is Joao Bothelo's Hard Times (Cam-, den Plaza, PG), in which Charles Dickens's great novel of industrial society speaks to us with undiminished power across 135 years through a version transposed to present-day Portugal.

Shot in carefully composed, deep-focus monochrome images that recall both the Japanese master Ozu and 'Painted maypole': Tricia Morrish. bathroom, in a southern State. The effect is bewildering and stifling, the writing vulgar, hilarious and poetic by turns. Images are offered as flashily as the gold fixtures that decorate the bathroom. The effect is of being waylaid by a lunatic who sounds knowing but is quite vacant.

KATE KELLAWAY Hoffman's Shylock: 'Small body, dark voice, large expressive THE first Klee that Heinz Berggruen bought was Perspectiv-Spuk. lt shows whatl rake to be a well-aDDointed of quick arrows quiver deepening divisions between rich and poor, weak unions, fear of unemployment, and a growing contempt for the idea of community. In giving us the hard centre of our greatest novelist, Bothelo avoids the celebration of English eccentricity and the indulgence in period colour that mars most TV Dickens adaptations. The only genre thriving today is the horror movie, and there's a coven of them this week. In Steve Miner's Warlock (general release, 15) a New England witch-finder; (Richard E.

Grant) pursues an: evil witch (Julian Sands) through a time warp from 1691 Boston to 1989 Los Angeles, in a lively, amusing yarn full of diabolic lore that might have been subtitled 'Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Hex'. The Blob (Cannon, Hay-market, 18) is an expensive hi-tech remake of the 1958 SF cult flick in which the 28-year-old Steve McQueen played a teenager battling against a deadly ball of extraterrestrial glue. The twist in the remake is that the monster isn't from outer space, it's an accidental produce of a US germ laboratory. The new scene that would most shock a 1958 audience involves a high-school kid buying a packet of condoms in a drugstore. Paperhouse (Chelsea Cinema, 18), the first movie by British video director Bernard Rose, is an indifferently acted, rather intriguing fantasy film about a disturbed London schoolgirl whose anxiety dreams are based on her drawings of an imaginary house.

It's rather like a training film for the Tavistock Institute that has got out of hand. The best of this horror crop, Tom Holland's Child's Play (Odeon West End, 18), is also about a lonely, fatherless infant no one will believe: in this case, a six-year-old Chicago lad with a life-size talking doll possessed by the malevolent spirit of a dead gangster shot in a toy-shop. The doll is as frightening as the ventriloquist's dummy in Dead Of Night, and as lethal as the worst creature in Gremlins. Paul Mazursky's lethargic comedy Moon Over Parador (Cannon, Fulham Road, 15) extracts few laughs from the predicament of a New York actor Richard Dreyfuss forced to spend a year impersonating a dead Latin-American dictator. It should be labelled 'Return to Zenda'.

Bauhaus studio uTskeletal form. 9D1BS And that's probably Klee himself, his face marked 'X', laid nut nn a Hrawinc board or Daint- Klee at the Tate and Clemente at the d'Offay ing trolley ready to be whizzed into the next room where, just out of sight, the vanishing point awaits him. pewter pum'-types, balancing on eggs, modelled in South India, and paintings and drawings done in the artist's New York studio. Clemente assimilates' 'cultures like nobody's business. Story of My Country, for instance, is a set of gouache studies on silk ghosted for him by an un-named hand.

The history isn't Clem-ente's. He has provided specifications, a narrative involving gods, men, elephants and fish. Tradition supplied the details. When Clemente paints Meaning of Sacrifice (ducks' heads in abundance), Croon (of crayon-ned thorns) and Earth (man tethered underground to wild tubers), he gives us to understand that myth, particularly creativity myth, is an eminently exploitable global asset. In a nrevious version of more extraordinary.

Here is no sign of life. A green slither moon presides over a speckled wilderness more gauzy than Tunisian. Carefully, meticulously, with the tip of a fine brush, Klee has done away with form and structure in the conventional sense, and has reinstated, layer on layer, a pure visual memory: dots in suspension. At no fewer than three Anthony d'Offay addresses (9, 23 and now 21 Dering Street Wl, to 21 June) Francesco Clemente displays signs of his activities world-wide. There are tapestries woven to his designs from Mexico, 11 identical Phantom Perspective (acquired by Berggruen many years later) an arrow appears, coming straight in the master's trivia.

He and his fellow 'Klee-mates', as they describe themselves, must love the more cuckoo-clockish drawings for the way they reveal Klee's lighter side: the nursery-rhyme situation of Where the Eggs and the Good Roast Come Prom, for example, in which a chicken prepares to lay and the pig marked 'Good Roast' awaits its destiny. But Klee switches mood with dexterity. The cock crows and from the vanisning point, its head bent to point out that the left-hand side of the studio can be read as human features. It's the artist again, watching over his id. 'Mv compositions are but the scenes of my Klee once said.

The Rereeruen Klee Collec Perspectiv-Spuk The Berggruen frames vary from self-important to institutional but the works themselves all look wonderfully quick-witted. In Tunisia in 1914 Klee treated palms and minarets as excuses for interrupting patchworks of water colour. He developed a diarist's variety of Cubism, making colour notes and diffuse patternings. Later, in Munich, the notes deepened and the patches, of colour were worked up into reverberations, Xs buzzing and contrasts modulating as he cultivated them. Grouped together they look like variety turns.

The signature jumps from bottom to top. Roofs flip open and wheels flower. A cat changes places with a greater spotted mouse. Sometimes Klee's determination to charm or bemuse becomes altogether too dainty. One suspects that he cocked his little finger as he pencilled in the sampler brickwork and the pinking shears' teeth.

Arrows give wind directions or pendulum swing; they even, occasionally, indicate explicit sex. Arrows overhead mean friendly aeroplanes. Arrows in Pierrot's Persecution Mania and Stricken City denote despair. Heinz Berggruen bought what he could with a devotee's delight tion eventually amounted to more than 100 paintings and Hrawines. most of which Bere- gruen gave to the Metropolitan Museum in 1984.

inese ana trie 17 that went to the Musee Nationale d'Art Moderne are temporarily reunited at the Tate (to 13 August): Klee composing his thoughts in dozens of different ways, rarely resorting to the peepshow constraints of perspective. He was such a neat thinker. economical in terms of scale and far below an arrow plunges on to tiny Anselmus, the aspiring poet. Words chorus, skiffs form regattas on quiet lakes, and under the surface giant microbes bring consternation. The fly-fishing techniques Klee developed involve superficial attractions with hooks so cleverly concealed you don't notice the catch.

Sentimentality plays its part. The blotched lines and heart-shaped mouth of the Mourning Child are obvious attributes, but the fuming pink ground and the crazy eyebrows of a vamp-turned-tragic give her a keening quality. Klees are songs, and all depends on the setting. This collection brings out Klee's repetitive habits, his way of not only repeating a design that he liked but of making every effort to recapture the initial thought, the moment when things fell into place. In the late works heavy black lines and button eyes are easily too easily interpreted as Klee's reactions to events in Germany and his own illness.

Obviously this is at least partly true; but the qualities are also to do with speed of output. In the last 18 months of his life he produced more than 1,600 underlined, dated, numbered and signed Klees. Among them are the blithe simplifications of Blue-Bird-Pumpkin (anticipating Picasso at the Vallauris pottery); and the Hallowe'en spookiness of Angel Applicant, a toothy, black-eyed creature that sees off Cecil Collins's soppy divinities in the adjacent exhibition space. Klee the pedagogue, demonstrating the shortcomings of set perspectives, and Klee the con-jurer-perfonriing-tricky-bits are upstaged in the end by Klee the-thinker-on-paper whose every line brought surprises. Comedian's Handbill, 1938, painted on a sheet of newspaper, is a medley of disembodied high kicks and rehearsed tumbles, a marvellous exercise of the rights of the sophisticated artist to be as primitive as can be.

Clarification, painted in oil on canvas six years earlier, is even systematic in presentation. Drawings were mounted on card, underlined, dated and numbered: e.g. '1920174 Late, lined Klee: 'Girl in Mourning' 1 SUMMER SEASON You'll be spoilt for choice at Olympia, With International Guest Stats: EKATERINA MAXIMOVA, ANDRISLIEPA (from the Bobliol) VALEHTINA KOZLOVA (from New York City Ballet) with PETER SCHAUFUSS, LYNN SEYMOUR and many more. Clocks, Scientific Instruments. Silver and Metalware.

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