The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 43

Sincere form of flattery Kirby as Harry's prissy confidant Jess, both longing to be married. On a very funny double date, Harry intends to pair off Jess with Sally while Sally thinks Marie the perfect mate The gods look down on Shen Te Fiona Shaw and an army of permanent poor in Deborah Warner's production of Brecht's 'The Good Person of Sichuan', Photograph by Neil Libberl. Sex, drugs and Chinese gods in raincoats Phillip French on a film which owes much to Woody Allen. WOODY ALLEN has spent the past decade paying homage to Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. Now he has himself been highly flattered by a near-perfect imitation of his early comedies, When Sally Met Harry (Odeon, Haymarket, 15), directed by the gifted parodist and pasticheur Rob Reiner from a witty, articulate original screenplay by Nora Ephron, author of Heartburn.

I use the word 'original' in the technical sense of there being no acknowledged source. But there is hardly anything in this picture thematically or stylistically that is not to be found in Annie Hall or Manhattan, starting with the plain white-on-black opening credits and ending, as all Allen pictures do, within a crisply edited 95 minutes. Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) meets Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) in the summer of 1977 when she gives him a lift to New York after they've graduated from the University of Chicago. He's self-confident, cynical, uncouth, emotional. She's controlled, practical, conventionally romantic.

And after bickering every mile of the way they part in Washington Square heartily disliking each other. Five years later, meeting by chance at an airport, they initially fail to recognise each other. She's now a magazine writer living with a lawyer; he's a political consultant and about to marry a lawyer. Once more she rebuffs him and they don't meet again for a further five years when Sally has just split up with her lover and Harry's wife has left him. Each encounter is a clever example of what is known in Hollywood script-conference parlance as 'meeting cute' and we really do want them to get together.

The rest of the picture traces the next year in their lives as successive idyllic New York seasons pass and they establish what Harry has hitherto considered impossible between a man and a woman, a warm platonic relationship. It is facilitated, however, by Harry's promiscuity and two questions arise. Can this friendship endure? And if they were to go to bed together even once would everything be permanently changed? This likeable, fairly ordinary couple are less angst-ridden and culture-conscious than Allen's characters, yet very self-absorbed in a 'Me Generation', Manhattan manner. They are, of course, funnier than most people, but then Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron are funnier than almost anyone, and in one brilliant comic scene you cannot be sure whether Sally herself is deliberately acting out of character or whether her creators are taking her out of character. This occurs in a restaurant when Sally proves to the cocksure Harry that any woman can fake an orgasm, by doing just that to the astonishment of fellow lunchers, a sequence that concludes with a middle-aged woman at an adjoining table saying to the waiter: 'I'll have what she's Crystal and Ryan work beautifully together, and equally good are Carrie Fisher as Sally's closest friend Marie and Bruno for Harry.

But verbal barbs and misfired Cupid's arrows intervene. I think the extraordinary popularity of When Harry Met Sally in America stems from the fact that Woody Allen has created an appetite for a certain kind of wry, charming romantic comedy of Manhattan life that he no longer wishes to satisfy. A different, less attractive side of New York and of American comedy is on display in Ghostbusters II (Odeon, Leicester Square, PG), scripted by two of its stars, Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd, and directed by Ivan Reitman with even less finesse than he brought to Meatballs. Like its 1984 predecessor, this crude, lumbering sequel is feebly plotted, has no jokes worth repeating and wastes the talent of Sig-ourney Weaver. The same team of exorcists again create havoc around Manhattan while defeating the powers of evil that are manifested through the reincarnation of a seventeenth-century middle-European sa-tanist and in a malevolent goo bubbling up from the city's sewers.

There are borrowings from Rosemary's Baby and The Blob and attempts are made to wring laughter from some dodgy situations, one of them involving the wreck of the Titanic arriving in New York harbour and the ghosts of its dead passengers and crew storming ashore to attack the natives. Hider in the House (Cannon, Havmarket, 18), the first Holly wood picture of highly-regarded avant-garde moviemaker Matthew Patrick, begins intriguingly with the release from a mental home of the 33-year-old Tom Sykes (Gary Busey), a deeply disturbed criminal loner. As a child he had been abused by his parents, who died when he set fire to then-house at the age of 12. Longing to belong to a normal family, Tom latches on to a well-off middle-class couple with two children, secretly installing himself in their attic. Tom first lives vicariously in the interstices of their lives, then systematically starts to manipulate them and to ingratiate himself.

There is an interesting idea here (Giles Cooper used a comic variation on it for his 1963 play Out of the Crocodile), but much too little attention is given to simple matters of plausibility and far too soon it turns into a mad-axeman horror flick. Incidentally, there ought to be a moratorium on these corny double climaxes featuring an apparently dead villain, having received enough fatal wounds to destroy a herd of buffalo, suddenly reviving for a final lunge at the heroine. I wrote at some length from the Edinburgh Festival about the attractions and shortcomings of Ian Sellar's promising feature debut Venus Peter (Cannon, Tottenham Court Road; Greenwich Cinema, PG). The late Ray McAnally is marvellous as the young Scottish hero's grandfather, a trawler skipper forced to sell his boat when the fish run out, and I am correctly quoted as saying so in advertisments for the film. But I'm misquoted as calling it 'deeply That was my description of the novel by Christopher Rush on which Venus Peter is based.

is less rewarding than endless love and affection round the oven door. Miss Hill's elegant heroine has yet to convey sufficiently varied passions to match the delicate asperity of the ensemble as a whole, but there is little doubt how she will decide. Since Mr Armstrong has few equals in combining the wit and dexterity of a conjuror with the leglessness of a low comedian and the nobility of a Mensch, and since Mr Williams does not act, there is really no contest. aged baker (Alun Armstrong), arrives in the village with his beautiful young city wife, Genevieve (Sharon Lee Hill). The greedy and prurient villagers fall on his baguettes (why no smell of fresh bread in the middle-rear stalls?) and virtually will the lonely girl into the arms of Dominic, the local stud (Drue Williams), who carries her off.

The baker goes to pieces, while insisting that she will return. Which of course she does, enfin, because hot sex with a banal and conceited young man Good Person, too long. It is now called a 'comedy musical'. The American influences of the time which sound so clear on the recording Sondheim's Company, Kander and Ebb's Cabaret, Jerry Herman's anything are subsumed at the Phoenix, where sights and sounds take us closer to the delicate, bittersweet Franco-American fantasies of Fanny and Jean de Flor-ette. We are to witness one more skirmish in the bickering, communal sex-wars of Pagnol's Provence.

Aimable, the new, middle- du Boulanger (1936), it was withdrawn before reaching New York and recorded, in a very well-sung performance, on an obscure record-label called Take Home Tunes! So are cults born, and indeed no one could complain that there were not tunes to take home. Trevor Nunn, the animator-in-chief of the Eighties musical, has unexpectedly reclaimed it for London and, with new numbers from Stein and Schwartz, produced an extended version that is full of delight, humour and sentiment even if, like The Railing against British industry Deborah Warner's scrupulous production serves this long and rambling morality like a clear pane of glass. Her grasp of the visual aesthetic required to stage one of Brecht's most mathematical plays on a large open stage is instinctive. But there is, of course, much more to The Good Person than devising an environment for an adventure which is really a meditation on the impossibility of being both poor and good. The chief task is to sustain a laid-back and dialectical narrative with few conventional highlights over three hours, and here Warner is, at present, less successful than in her exceptional RSC studio productions.

She savours the play with sharpness and reverence; the sharpness draws vivid sketches of the urban poor who surround the protagonist, led by those privy to her game: Wang, the ironic and ingratiating water-seller (Bill Paterson) and Shin, the malignant, black-toothed widow (Susan Engel) with whom she lives. The reverence, however, and slow, deliberate pacing reveal the play's repeti-tiveness and allow the gifted Postlethwaite to invest the pilot with an anguished sentimentality more suitedto The Bells. Brecht said that no play ever gave him so much trouble, and The Good Person of Sichuan is, in the end, much too long and technically too ingenious for its own good: whoever plays the heroine must find a way to impersonate her male surrogate that is both plausible and advances the paradoxical truths about human misery, cruelty, wealth and gender contained in the play. Shaw is no more consistently successful than Peggy Ashcroft in the first British production of the play. Her Shen Te is relaxed, feminine, intelligent, and entirely engaging, but she gives the phantom fraternal protector a hoarse mafioso mumble that distracts from what is actually being said.

Stephen Schwartz and Joe Stein's The Baker's Wife (Phoenix) dates from the start of the serious decline in Broadway musicals 15 years ago. Based on Marcel Pagnol and Jean Giono's movie, La Femme Michael Ratcliffe enjoys Brecht and French bread farce. THE disguised gods walk down into the city at nightfall and later descend on wires from heaven in raincoats, bowler hats and white wings against a dark curtain of stars. Sue Blane de fines Brecht's desolate Chinese suburbs in The Good Person of Sichuan (NT, Olivier) as a place of dereliction in which buildings are never completed or have been half-destroyed by earthquake and civil war. Towering whitewashed walls are held up by timber buttresses and a gigantic diagonal tie-beam stretches across the stage; at the toot ot all this monumental chaos scuttles the army of the desperate, permanent poor.

We are invited, somewhat senten- tiously, to remember the homeless beneath Waterloo Bridge, but Blane's city looks more like Beirut. Only the cheerful and innocent prostitute Shen Te (Fiona Shaw) gives the gods shelter, and with their unlooked-for money she gives up whoring and buys a shop. She proudly conjures it from above with outstretched arms and the sky fills with grey washing like clouds of rain. Her benevolence attracts all the scavengers of the district, and to escape them she impersonates a ruthless imaginary brother, Shui Ta. Shen Te 'disappears' from the neighbourhood, but still talks to us.

The beggars flee, leaving two sacks of opium on which she supports the whingeing, grounded pilot (Pete Postleth-waite) with whom she is in love. Pregnancy threatens her disguise, but not her virtue. At the start of the second half she walks in the quiet, sun-washed streets of the city after dawn. True contentment, she reminds us with level-headed simplicity and aphoristic perfection, lies not in having your head in the clouds but your feet on the ground. Brecht the poet of the city speaks: metaphor and experience become one.

At moments like these, two. She can enlighten the audience on the latest design modifications in a camera but when she refuses to become an engineer, she loses her father's interest. Danny is ambitious for affection but not bright enough to secure it. Russell Beale and Sharp show convincingly how the spurned desire for approval curdles into bitterness. The overriding tone of Po-liakoff writing is bitter.

Although the father has different cause for complaint from his offspring, everyone is lamenting and their complaints are leavened only by facetiousness. Poliakoff argument is that inventors in Britain are thwarted by industries that do not recognise them (a theme that has its origins in his earlier play Breaking the Silence). In a compelling lecture at the Albert Hall, Bill attempts to shame his Kate Kellaway on Poliakoff's train of thought at the Pit and Vaclav Havel's trilogy at the Soho Poly. STEPHEN POLIAKOFF's new play, Playing with Trains (The Pit), is about invention and dissent. Engineer Bill (Michael Pennington) has packaged himself as an entrepreneur of flair; he upsets television presenters, civil servants and the captains of industry.

He also upsets his family. As a father, he is at once interfering and neglectful: his moon-faced children Danny (Simon Russell Beale) and Rox-anna (Lesley Sharp) have, with unendearing precociousness, appointed themselves experts on his business affairs. Roxanna is the brighter of the for their subject transcends politics. This trilogy, directed with unpretentious sensitivity by Peter Casterton is partly about the disappearance of trust. In Audience Ferdinand Vanek (Tom Knight), a dissident writer, is invited to drink with his boss, the master brewer.

Vanek speaks in a low colourless voice, while the maltster (superbly played by Seamus Newham) tops up his glass with the refrain: 'People are real bastards, take my word for But it is hard to know what words to take from him. And in the cruelly funny Private View, Vanek visits an old friend, now a government-approved writer, who boasts about his life, advising his erstwhile friend: 'One must never give up even if one doesn't find precisely what one's looking He is speaking of the furnishings in his flat. mm audience into seeing their own backwardness. 'People are not getting the technology they he insists. As Bill's innovations make his fortune, his children become increasingly like spare parts.

Then he unexpectedly loses a libel case: fortune's mechanised wheel seems about to run him over. Poliakoff arguments are agile, the emotions are slacker, less interesting. Ron Daniels' trenchant production offers us an excellent machine looking needlessly for a heart. In The Vanek Plays by Vaclav Havel (Soho Poly) hearts are endangered by the state. There is great excitement in watching these slight, deft plays while their author is working hard to make them out of date.

It does, however, seem unlikely that history in Czechoslovakia will tidy them away for good, 1 il jjPEQ "WONDERFULLY FUNNY" Daily Express BOUCICArrr TilOTS p. PAUL EDDINGTON The Observer invites you to a Shopping Evening at Harvey Nichols on Monday 4th December To celebrate the launch of their new menswear floor and also the presentation of the Harvey NicholsObserver Young Businessman of the year award, the department will open it's doors after hours exclusively to Observer readers. Taking place between 6.30 to 9.00 pm, the evening will be a chance to shop at leisure and take advantage of special purchases and free gifts from Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss Georgio Armani, Reporter, Byblos and Harvey Nichols' new own menswear. Live jazz, champagne, whiskey and mince pies as well as a prize draw and fashion show will complete the evening. To gain entry, bring this copy of The Observer with you to Harvey Nichols, Knightsbridge, SW1X 7RG, ANGELA THORNE DIRECTED BY SAM MENDES DESIGNED BY DAPHNE DARE LIGHTING BY BILL BRAY EXECUTIVE PRODUCER JOHN GALE PREVIEWS FROM DEC 11 OPENS DEC 13 4 SOLUTION Wishful thinking jut THEATRE ROYAL HAYMARKET The answer to your Christmas presents..