The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 36

36 OBSERVER SUNDAY 27 AUGUST 1989 RICHARD MILOENHAU. Boys from the blacklist Disgust of the blue-eyed monster ONE often puzzles over why a director wanted to make a particular movie other than for money, or to keep his hand in, 'Othello' and 'Boris Godunov' PHILIP FRENCH in Hollywood and the Sherwood Forest romps he pens in England. It is intelligent and accurate on the politics and atmosphere of those tense; suspicious times, and the period detail is always witty and apposite. Asa looks askance at the BBC Potter's Wheel Interlude on his little black-and-white TV set. When he or to help out a friend.

The Edinburgh Festival brochure says that Jon Amiel, gifted director of The Singing Detective, 'took his time searching for the -right subject' for his first feature film, Queen of Hearts. But whatever did Amiel see in Tony Grisoni's whimsical screenplay about an Italian couple fleeing from their native village to raise a familv 6 10 me wove to discuss in Londonrs Little Italy? As RIn Hood scnpt annarentlv recnlleefed in nrtnft- his BBC host confides that he hood, by their son, the movie is a succession of fantasies, vague as to time and place, that never refers to recognisa- TREVOR.NTJNN's enthralling production of Othello (RSC Stratford, The Other Place, transferring to the Young Vic next month) is set around 1900, which means that lago (Tan McKellen) takes the stage like a hellhound from Strindberg and Emilia (Zoe Wanamaker) becomes a troubled Chekhovian sphinx. The motherless Desde-mona (Imogen Stubbs) is a humorous, innocent and impulsive tomboy who literally hurls herself into Othello's arms. The ambivalent pathos of the regimental, cornet disturbs the comfort of the harmonium (music by Guy Wolfenden) and the pla becomes, among many things, a lesson for women in the destructiveness of men. the noble, gentle Othello (Willard White) is the most blindly destructive of all, and fits uneasily even into a Venetian republic run like a Liberal Club.

The point is made explicit by the arrival of Uncle Gratiano (dive Swift) at the end when, between dinner and bedtime, the old boy is suddenly required to prevent the escape of his niece's killer with a cutlass. What all of them fail to notice is the psychotic in their midst. McKellen's invincible, unsleeping lago, so choked with tension he gulps at a narcotic for sweet, explosive relief, has long perfected the techniques of concealment: the affectation of sincerity, the puckered frown of concern. His bedside manner is seductive; his counter-attacks, ingeniously concealed, never fail; his eyes are an irreproachably, deep blue. Iago's -disgust is the engine of the play.

When he warns Othello of the green-eyed is about to defect to the other side going on to reveal that he means the1 newly created ITV where he'll produce 'Robin Hood'. Fellow Traveller is a co-production of the BBC and the BFI and I hope it gets a full release before going on the box. Another film I hope gets, into our cinemas is the 15-rninute Dick, the work of the San Francisco-based British documentarist Jo Menell. The cast of a thousand (smaller' than that of Gone with Wind but all named on the closing credits) are represented merely by their penises, shown serially in repose to the accompaniment of comments by a hundred women (recorded in Meyerhold and Brecht in the lugubrious lobby of the former Leith Town Hall, and Lyubimov's Boris honours all four by keeping the torch of theatrical storytelling so memorably ablaze. His theatrical achievement is to shape Pushkin's repetitive and ill-constructed sequence into a visual and sound narrative whose every line, circle, shadow, frieze ana chord is cut and lit with the sharpness of film.

George Tabori's Mein Kampf, Farce (Traverse, Edinburgh; Watermans, Brentford from 6 September) is much the funniest, most accomplished and dangerous new play I have seen so far in either Festival or Fringe. It belongs to what one might call the historical comedy of hindsight, set in a Viennese dos-shouse before the First World War where a pair of vagrant Jews rewriting the history of the world are joined by the aspiring art student, -prim virgin and commonplace hysteric, Adolf Hitler. A huge success in Europe over the last two years, this rich and disturbing comedy ideally needs' larger resources, but it is a great coup for the tiny Yorick Theatre Company, and Michael Batz's production. should not be missed. There is even a little danger at the Theatre Royal, Haymar-ket, this week, where Jack Lemmon and Michael Gambon play chattering sergeant and murderous colonel in Veterans' Day, Donald Freed's play about the revenge of American military man on all the men's Presidents who have sent.

them. to meticulously numbered deaths since the Civil It follows the current vogue for starry, slimline two-handers-mr-Theme, it is much more original and less soppy than; say, A Walk in the Woods oie reaury. I wondered similarly about a much better picture, David Jones's first work in America, Jacknife, the story of the reunion between two trauma-tised Vietnam veterans, admirably played by Ed Harris and Robert De Niro. It adds nothing to a string of movies on the same theme in which the herpes have identical nightmares of combat in Indo-China. Fortunately I had no such, doubts about the first venture into theatrical film-making by Michael Wearing, producer of some of the best TV drama of MICHAEL RATCLIFFE Stubbs and Wanamaker.

witness, and haplessly assist, the process of destruction with sensuality, intelligence and feeling; and the play, unlike Verdi opera, is restored to its true nature as a painfully private affair. Pushkin's Boris Godunov (1825), on the other hand, a pioneer of Shakespearian political-poetic theatre in the rebellious Decembrist Russia of Tsar Nicholas is a painfully public afiair in which the eye of God sees all-and privacy is a sin. So painful, indeed, with its symbiotic drama of tyranny and the people influenced by Corio-lanus, Julius Caesar and Macbeth, that it could not be published for six years or performed for another. 40, after which Mussorgsky's operatic masterpiece took over and that, as far as the West was concerned, was that. There is no easily accessible literal translation to read, so we were all in the same boat on Tuesday when Yuri Lyubimov brought his tremendous production from the Moscow Taganka Theatre to the Edinburgh Festival in Leith.

Boris was both Lyubimov's ticket to exile from Moscow and the banner under which he made his properly unrepentant return. Lingering doubts over the quality of his subsequent work outside the Soviet Union were banished by its full-throated power, choreographic austerity and spiritual force. Ancestor-worship is a reviving discipline in many European theatre companies, and the Taganka raised portrait banners of Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov, America and Britain) on the matter of size, experience, and the past decade including Boys trim the ninrh Stfr. pjtn, nt whether they'd like one them- Darkness and Blind Justice. His The organs are more film Fellow Traveller, directed by Philip Saville from Michael Eaton's first-class screenplay, grabbed me from the" intfiguing opening moments when it cross-cuts Clifford Byrne (Hart Bochner), a movie star prepar ing to commit suicide in his Beverly Hills pool, and blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter and the players complement one another superbly.

'Noble Othello (Willard White) and 'impulsive' Desdemona (Imogen Stubbs): Blind destruction. he Yokohama Boat The Asa Kaufman (Ron Silver) freezing in a London bed-sit writing a Robin Hood TV script under a pseudonym. Childhood friends, the sons of Jewish immigrants, they have uneasily combined Hollywood success with radical convictions and now find themselves (the year is 1954) the victims of McCarthyism. They also share the same analyst, Dr Jerome Leavy (Daniel Ti atre, which performs oh Pink cherry blossom tne JNakamura Kiver various than the creatures on Noah's ark and the movie is. funny, revealing, wholly unprurient and oddly liberat- ingr In some American trine mas, Dick is accompanying Sex, Lies Videotape.

The first film to be sold out at the Festival Box Office' was the charming Scottish movie Venus Peter, adapted by its young director Ian Sellar and Christopher Rush from Rush's deeply affecting autobiographical novel A Twelvemonth and a Day. The movie was shot in the Orkneys (the Orkney-Islands Council put up some of the money) and is a slightly over-egged view of life during the 1950s in a declining fishing community Fife, as experienced by a sensitive 10-year-old. His grandfather (Ray McAnally) is skipper of the town's last trawler and his father has left for the city. McAnally is marvellous and-the picture is visually pleasing. But the characters are too unj- formly colourful and the picture strives after a poetry that it doesn't always attain.

The: influences, of Fellini and Dylan Thomas are strong upon it and the movie might well have, been- called 'McAmarcord' or 'Under Malt Wood'. Much more abrasive is another Celtic film, Karl Francis's Angry Earth, whose vig KATE KELLAWAY weaves in and out of the Fringe. Hime drags his body around on a cart. It is an extraordinary sight: beside his skeleton mask and unsightly bones Terute places a green branch to signal life. She rests her face on his body as if he were a pillow and upturns her eyes as if in prayer for his life.

Because this is a story of regeneration, her monster, the monster is his own. When, embracing the Moor tightly, lago cries 'I am thy own for it is not the cry. of a servant, still less (pace Olivier) of a man in love with his own master, but the mephistophelean claim of a succubus bound for the abyss. This is a towering performance, one of the finest and most uncompromising of McKellen's career. Willard White, Nunn's Porgy at Glyndebourne, an.

opera singer of theatrical integrity and consistent stage power, is playing Shakespeare for the first time. His speaking voice is rich, powerful and. dark, though not entirely under, his control. As General of Venice, he is magnanimous; and commanding; he conquers Desdemona with a devastating smile As a man of instinctive emotions, his Othello moves lis with a natural power. What it cannot yet do is take us on the kind of dramatic journey undertaken by McKellen.

The narrative breathing techniques demanded by Shakespeare and Wagner are quite unalike: White's voice resonates where it should colour and remains earthbound where it should in- what seems a perversely fireproof set all chill greens and extinguished greys with nnlv an nranse sun at the back prayers are answered and pink j0 suggest heat, and one wist- cneny oiossom ouisis out laou- fuj candle. Some of the read- J. Travanti), a sinister fellow-travelling shrink specialising in left-wing film folk. His role is central to the movie's function as thriller and political fable. Leavy is clearly based on the legendary Dr Philip Cohen.

His patients included Sterling Hay den and John Garfield, whose careers- lie behind the'-" character of as the exiled screenwriter is partly inspired by the life, of the late Carl Forman, whose- name is echoed in Asa Kaufman. The movie has a complex but always lucid structure, and lously against the darkness in Tokyo has come to shore in Edinburgh bringing Oguri Hangan, Terate Hime to the St Bride's Centre as part of the official festi 'A. The company, directed by Takuo Endo have not the means to mount a spectacle of Ninagawan grandeur; but they enchant, us with a theatre of restraint, formality and grace. The story, an old Japanese folk-tale, is about the love between Hangan, God of and Terute Hime, Goddess of Oguri (Akihiko Yamashita) is an alluring figure and his white mask is adorned with curved black eyebrows that advertise his unreliability. His courtship is both erotic and controlled; he can wind a woman about him like a snake, or woo her with a letter on a fan (giving fen letter a new meaning).

Like Oguri, Terute Hime (Michiko Tonomija) is masked their mouths seem impossibly alive beneath the fixity of their faces. The evening begins with a supplication sung by outlaws with such stillness that the music seems breathtakingly to supply the movement notes ascend in an appeal to the gods. The gods don't always listen. Oguri is murdered and Terute not even Gelestina's magic is potent enough to animate this stillborn production. The Kosh's Endangered Species (Theatre Workshop) is an undemanding delight in which familiar music-hall routines are translated into a volatile new concoction of dance, song and a few breathless words.

At the beginning we see a lurching piano, apparently supported by human legs. A woman (Sian Williams) emerges, exotic beautiful and frantic. A man (Emil Wolk) appears quizzical surprised but gratified to find himself on -Together they. dance, marrying grace and disgrace. During a tango, the man can perform all the steps stylishly but can't control his clothing: trousers and braces slide off as the dance glides to a close.

The tantalising subtext is of a relationship that is going wrong and a love which has not got time to speak its name. At the Hill Street Theatre, you could be forgiven for thinking that you'd walked into the Edinburgh Book Festival by mistake. Dylan Thomas stands behind a lectern and talks about his life and work in Bob Kingdom's passionate unpretentious impersonation, seamlessly directed by Anthony Hopkins. Kingdom catches Thomas's plummy voice exactly, looks suitably like 'an excommunicated cherub' and rejoices in a glut of words. The reciting of the poems themselves is impressive and moving.

His orous heroine, Gwen (Sue convincingly re-creates epi- conscience 'pictures Asa wrote 1'lOth birthday to life alarm, their bodies. Truant limbs refuse to behave: they test their reflexes in a concentrated attempt to prove that they are alive. But it they have insufficient sustenance to survive, so do we: the jokes are not varied enough to sustain a play that could be renamed Waiting For Monday. The Nacional Teatro Oasico. from Madrid" started four years ago, is.

entirely funded by the State, and pledged to. reintroducing Spain to writers. of the Golden Age. La Celestina (at the Lyceum in the main festival) is an early sixteeth-cen-tury novel by Fernando de Rojas about an old sorceress, consumed with an appetite for the love she missed earlier in who takes. her pleasure in witnessing the sexual encounters she's conjured up for others.

The lovers are marginal; she is at the centre it is an unusual and promising focus. The problem is that the novel has been uncomfortably compressed for the stage and the dialogue has to work hard to keep up with the plot. The Madrid company is not. well served by the simultaneous translators, mumbling indifferently, nor by a set which manages to be at once simple and obstructive a billowing belt of rock that undulates round the stage and traps the actors on it, so that they are afraid to make use of its centre. Celestina (Amparo Rivelles) is at times commanding.

When she brews her love, potions her. voice surrenders itself as if seduced by its own spells. But celebration. In. a "year in which the fes-' tival has at times seemed a celebration governed by pyro-maniancs, (Els Comediants.

attempting to burn Edinburgh, Archaos setting fire to each other) it is fitting that Alan Bates should, at the Assembly Rooms, present A Muse of Fire, an anthology compiled and directed by John Dove and Gerard Hastings which takes us from the first sparks of creation, through Pepys's account of the Great Fire of London to Evelyn Waugh's letter describing the blowing up of a tree. But Bates seems an unwilling flame-thrower. What he offers here is an overworked, belaboured lecture on fire, read aloud from a blue folder ings are. entertaining out much of the material chosen is so safe as to be' almost dangerous (Blake's 'The Tiger' for example). The ovemhelming defect is that although fire is the theme it is never an argument it isn't clear whether Bates is celebrating fire or cautioning us against it and in this badly-built bonfire of quotations one item does not light up the next.

Jerome Deschamps is a French writer, director and performer. He is back at the official Edinburgh Festival with a new show, C'est Dimanche (Kings), which is rather like Waiting for Godot without words. Sunday is the last day. of the world and three French clowns are on the move with all their worldly goods stuffed into a pram under a grey blotting-paper sky. There is no food left they exist on a diet of wine and salt.

A fat lady (Macha Makeiff) even uses her immense bosom as a portable bar from which she produces a private bottle of red wine. The idea here seems to be that they have lost their wits but are discovering, with rise. Like his exemplary Macbeth some years ago, Nunn's Othello unfolds with perfectly judged speed and chamber clarity in the bare room of The Other Place, dressed and furnished with an intensifying simplicity by Bob Crowley. The text is full four hours, including a short interval if not complete (no Clown). Wales before the weat war.

Twice widowed by mining disasters, raising her family in poverty, assaulted by soldiers sent in by Churchill to break strikes, Gwen fights to establish a union and to found a hospital for local workers. This passionate movie with Welsh and English dialogue- is weakened "only by Francis's pen-" chant for melodrama, and has a particular poignancy-this week. It also has a slyly clever form. The voice-over narration comes from the letters-Gwen sent in 1913 to tie newlyr established socialist Herald in response to an editorial, invitation to describe working-class life. She recently sent copies of them to the Her-aid's successor The Sun.

They reading ot ujo wot uo uenue into that Good Night' rings in the mind long after the show is over and the applause in appreciation of Kingdom or Thomas? has ended. Marvellous: The late Ray McAnally. were rejected. Charlie's trews The locations repeat themselves, more tonal when pho Berlin, has brought out the full nature of what once, more than 30 years ago, Armando's small-scale Art Brut. Now the heavens open and images whipped up with the shaving brush burst upon us.

Heads and conifers, flags and crosses do battle, each on its own. is a diptych on which a dark road scumbles along, the two halves niirroring one another, turning in on themselves. The exhibition is called, more in. fashion than in anger, 'Damnable Beauty or Resonance of the Past'. tographed, more shadowy and, of course, lacking the cursive outlines.

Those Munch cast as Adam and Eve, temptresses and destroyers, appear plain naked, pale against sea or wallpaper. Munch bought his Kodak camera in 1902 and used it often to photograph himself: not. the face in the 'TARTAN is exciting and a caption insists, but the dummies on the catwalk in the lofty Assembly Rooms gloom of the Talbot Rice Gallery aren't persuaded. They stand there sporting elderly tartans, like diehards at a ghostly Caledonian Ball. Tartan (to 9 September) sets out to be textile-cum-social history, casts around excitedly and degenerates into a fun fashion show.

A third-century scrap of black-and-white material the size of a false moustache is the only evidence of the ancient origins of the weave. It's labelled tartan'. A shepherd's plaid covers the missing years between this and the alleged trews of Prince Charles Edward Stuart. From the Disarming Act of 1746 to 1782, when Highland dress was again permitted, tartan was romantically associated mm, wm 3 mm too, became a stickler for post-Sobieski correctitude in tartan, while appreciating the shire-horse aspect of Highlanders in full uniform. After the Black Watch there's a change of dummies.

Bimbo models, white and sleek, gather in finale formation to sing the praises of the Scottish woollen Publicity Council and show off smarter uses o. tartan. Balrnain Schiaparelli show bow important to Paris couture Scottish plaid has been. But the work of British designers isn't overlooked. The tailor who provided Nicholas Fairbairn MP with his Gordon tartan suit a 1970 isn't named, possibly for security reasons.

-Vivienne-Westwood's input includes a frou-frou kilt and, for the emancipated Scot on New Year's Eve, bondage trews. At the City Art Centre 'Bubbles' awaits the susceptible: Millais' in ruffles-and curls, the soppy cynosure of a century ago. Bubbles is a leading figure in 'When We Were Young', a trip down memory lanes through CiUtren and Childhood in Piitish Art, 1880-1989 (to 9 September). The selection tags along from school to school; Newlyn and Glasgow, Bloomsbury and Newlyn again. Philip De Lazlo's portrait of Princess Elizabeth, 1933, a vision of.

posy, Goldilocks and satin bows in the style of Sir Thomas Lawrence sorely Edinburgh's tartan fling WILLIAM FEAVER made Mrs Bott swear at the time that she'd get her Violet Elizabeth done just the same. Not everything is Bott Sauce taste though: see Stanley Spencer's 'Hilda Unity and Dolls', Lucian Freud's 'Evacuee' of 1940 jug ears, bad teeth and TB chest and Peter Blake's 'Children Reading Comics', 1954, in which, behind the pages of The Eagle, the child becomes the teenager. Munch and Photography, also at the City Art Centre (to 16 September, then to be shown in Manchester and Oxford) comes from the Munch Museum in Oslo via the Newcastle Polytechnic Gallery. It amounts to an inspired form of double exposure. Where photographs are enlarged and placed next to paintings to demonstrate the affinities, the exhibition is unnecessarily explicit.

We see the head of Ibsen extra-lionised, and Munch's Aunt Karen and sister Inger translated into Death and the Maiden on one of his lambent sea-shores. Paintings and woodcuts overrule the coarse grey blow-ups. The original prints, however, shown separately as precious Kodak snapshots, have an extraordinary intense Munch quality. with Bonnie Prince Charlie. Then, over and above Jacobite chic, it came to denote Scottishness: a cause in itself.

Glorious in his Huntly tartan, Colonel William Gordon of mirror of normal self-portraiture, but the face askance, the face averted, the self exposed, a fraught blur superimposed many times over on glimpses of fully-realised pictures. In Northern Horizons: New Art from Norway at the 369 Gallery (to 30 September) there's much midwinter brooding and sun-starved etiolation. Hanne Borchgrevink takes after Munch in that she concentrates on the loneliness of buildings, the quiver of atmosphere. She reduces anecdote to deliberately flat statement. 'Winter', 'Childhood', 'Cultivated Landscape' are admirably distant.

Her three fellow exhibitors go more for the sub-Munch-conscious. Bjom-Sigurd Tufta achieves a near-monopoly on black. The Dutch artist Armando, who has worked in Berlin since 1979, has taken to big thoughts expressed in black and white with the occasional stab of red. What he describes as 'doomed attempts to still the ravings of man and nature' fill the Fruit-market Gallery (to 24 September) with heavy spume. Fyvie shows a leg for Pompeo Batoni's splendid portrait of the Scot Abroad and wows the tlnHinrtMUBiD Qlftilhiflfcti Romans.

Tartan was the stuff of Rob Roy costume and of kilts to terrify the French at Waterloo. The Sobieski brothers, who claimed descent from the Young Pretender, brought John McCarthy's done nothing else for the last three years. dubious scholarship to bear on the subject, sorting out (and inventing) tartans for clans. This appealed to Prince Albert. He carpeted Balmoral in the appropriate Roval Dee- If you" re concerned at the fate of the British Hostages, please contact the Friends of John McCarthy, PO Box 80, London WC1X 8XF.

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