The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 11

STAGE GUARDIAN Friday April 81983 H' AiPDim Son But there's a freedom in the old, a basic awareness of human frailty and. of the passage of tHe time, all mixed up in the brain. I feel it myself how. He describes it as a state being awake and dreaming, a kind of- speculative reverie between the two states. And you.

recognise, a Hordern performance from that assessment. But any impression of Hordern as" a casual, extrovert player, whose acting just happens when he goes on stage or before the camera is quite wrong. The part does not take him over or if it does, only in a limited fashion. It's, a sort of compromise. You know the.

play so well, and the part and the emotion, that- you can't be taken over. You've the discipline of lines, of moves, of restrictions of and acoustics. The ingredients of your -performance have to be technically there-, working with the subconscious." But he can remember back to Lear or Prospero, leaving the stage at the end of a big scene and almost not knowing I've played it. Within the discipline of the stage you're lost." requires even more of the discipline of the need to create a' response and laughter. As for the famous Hordern mannerisms, he says that he hardly knows at the close of a scene or an act where he has- made' use of them or how.

He makes it sound as if a useful working relationship or compromise between discipline, and spontaneity' takes place. His most recent decade in the theatre, ranging from his Gilbert Pinfold hearing a conspiracy of voices to his geriatric King Lear and his Stoppardiah academic dazzled by his own intellect, has finally brought him to the top of the slope. But contemplating the view from there Hordern does not brood or hanker over great roles. He sees himself as bit old and idle," basking in "a time of semi-retirement." The call for him to play Sir Anthony left him doubtful at first. Have I got to pull my boot straps up," he asked himself, and was at last coaxed.

I'm enjoying it enormously" he says with some surprise. When The Rivals is all over the coaxing of Michael Hordern should not be allowed to stop. IN 1937, at a time when Giel-gud, Olivier and Richardson were already established as the new young heroes of English theatre, a 26-year-old commercial traveller gave up selling chalk and blackboards and ink to the schoolrooms of England and chanced his safe, dull life. I threw my bonnet over the windmill on Friday and on Monday I crept through the stage door of the Savoy theatre as the third assistant manager." Sir Michael Hordern had made a debut of sorts and it seems appropriate for an actor whose career has been a stealthy, delayed progress to the top that it should begin with this tiny whimper. And it took Hordern, allowing for five years' enforced absence for war service in the navy, until 1950 to begin his ascent and achieve the roles and notice his natural, untrained talents deserved.

He returns to the National in The Rivals very much the leading man. It was a performance in the tiny Arts Theatre as Chekhov's Ivanov and the old discarded author in John Whiting's sensational, competition-winning Saint's Day, which did the trick and made his name. Chekhov meant nothing to me," Hordern says with one of those famous shrugs. He came fresh and unknowing to the role and was so applauded that what he aptly calls, the theatrical corridors of power came to see. In those days Glen Byam Shaw, co-director with Anthony Quayle of the then Stratford Memorial Theatre, was a man of high influence.

And for the season of 1952 Hordern was cast by him just below the level of the stars, in a line of roles, which might have been calculated by Byam Shaw to show up his discovery Menenius in Coriolanus, Caliban, Jacques and Sir Politick Would-be in Volpone. Hordern, who insists that he has never had any specific theatrical ambitions except to be an actor," once more began without either assumptions or knowledge. I knew nothing about the plays Coriolanus I hadn't even heard of but Byam Shaw said to me "will you promise you won't read them So I came to the first rehearsal with the script as if they've just been written." The season worked triumphantly for him Kenneth Tynan even used the word "great" for his Menenius. Michael Hordern picture by Kenneth Saundert about to open in The by stealth Rivals at the National Theatre, talks to Nicholas de Jongh behind his back, while the rest of a mobile body is otherwise engaged shoulders hunched, eyebrows signalling degrees of alarm, head shaking in amazed dissent, the voice in a sequence of grunts, murmurs and sighs, suggesting a whole rest-home full of decrepitude. It often looks as if various parts of him have scuttled off in directions of their own, fired by spontaneous urges.

He is a very vigorous and youthful 71-year-old, and one who confesses an inveterate affinity with the old. "It's not that one respects the wisdom of old age. I don't. mi at olliimg W. J.

Weatherby reports on Edward Albee on Broadway EDWARD Albee's new play on Broadway, The Man Who Had Three Arms, has been interpreted by New York drama critics as an exercise in self-examination. Just as Albee knew early fame as a dramatist and became an celebrity only to into a series of Broadway flops, so his hero, known only as Himself, famous and rich bcause he had a third arm on his back, and when his arm withered away so did his fame and riches. When the play opens, Himself, brilliantly played by a two armed Robert Drivas, is iappearing as a has-been at a local lecture hall, his fee cut from a personal appearance, to $500 and a glass or two of gin. Except for a club woman and a chairman who also impersonates characters in the hero's past the audience is treated to a two-hour solo harangue that is bitterly moving at its best, but too often wildly self-indulgent as the missing third arm becomes an easy symbol for an atrophied talent. Overnight celebrity turning to ashes is a familiar story in the United States.

Albee hints of such victims as Elvis Presley, though Presley re- mained a crowd pleaser to his drug-clouded end. More poignant was the case of a celebrity like Albee's fellow playwright, the late Tennessee Williams, who continued to work with distinction, but lost the interest of the public. But clearly, Albee has in mind his own predicament. Ever since he followed up his well-received early one-acters with the sensational, full-length Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that had a long Broadway run and was made into a movie, Albee has been trying to repeat this effort of successful mass-communication and has met with deepening failure. Full length plays, one-acters, adaptations of successful novels nothing has worked for him with the old sureness.

Both critics and audiences have treated him as if he had grown out of touch or, as Albee puts it in this new play, had lost the third arm that brought him the early attention. This undoubtedly is a heartfelt play that Albee has directed himself with geat economy and discipline, but it is the kind of personal statement that is profitable only when a dramatist has a devoted following. In the high-priced Broadway theatre, where audiences come largely for a night out, an evening of Albee breast-beating introspection must seem an expensive self indulgence. None of the most influential New York daily critics has been enthusiastic. Frank Rich in the New York Times wrote it wasn't a play but a temper tantrum in two acts." Douglas Watt in the Daily News declared the harangue held his interest "but the evening is arid, the metaphor unimpressive." Clive Barnes in the New York Post called it a very curious play," It is certainly a rare bird on Broadway a play of -ideas but in this imaginary 1 231st lecture in a local club's age-long series on Man on Man where Himself 's prede-i cessors have included Herbert Hoover and Dylan Thomas two other celebrities who also lost their third arms Albee is once more presenting with powerful ori- ginal rhetoric some fairly unoriginal ideas.

He is not the first writer to see himself as an intellectual force whose real talent is to open up our feelings. The missing third arm in his case may simply be a failure to understand what he can do best. oooooooooooooooooooo "A MASTERPIECE" In the Olivier April 14, 15, 18 at 7.15. flprill6at2.00&7.15 SS? Then April 29, 30 nfff Michael Hordern, a career taken And in that decade we began to see portraits from Hordein's remarkable gallery of distressed gentlefolk and authoritarians, drifting urgently out of their right minds. And even if 1959 brought a highly variable verdict from the critics who watched his Macbeth at the Old Vic and his Pastor Manders to Flora Robson's Mrs Alving in Ghosts, Hordern was quickly able to recover from those who said he had imposed comedy on Shakespeare and Ibsen where none was intended or existed.

I got chewed up for Mac Helen Mirren Cleopatra at The Pit Crystal Clear (Wyndhams) Gut-wrenching study, devised by Phil Young, of what it means to go blind leaves you shaken and stirred. Charley's Aunt (Aldwych) Griff Rhys Jones scoops up the laughs as the reluctant transvestite in Brandon Thomas classic. Michael Billington ROCK BENEFIT for Sizewell-B campaign Ironically titled Too Hot To Handle, this anti-nuclear event has a starry innrmr amusement and capsized the production. Hordern's progress was not checked by all this, nor did it diminish his regard for critics. He is an exception to the prevailing rule that actors despise, detest or ignore the breed (except sometimes when the notices are good).

He is grateful for them and they have returned the compliment in ample measure. "It irritates me profoundly when actors say they never read the notices. If they don't they're presumptuous. Second only to very good directors I've learnt more from critics than next Tuesday with the Joyce Trisler Danscorapany of New York. There are two programmes and the first includes excerpts from Spirit of Denishawn.

Ring 01-278 8916 for details of cheap ticket offers for the five companies appearing during Spring into Dance. Mario Maya brings his gypsy flamenco theatre back to London on Monday and will be at the Bloomsbury Theatre until April 23. This is serious flamenco, not tourist trade. Outside London next week offers several premieres. The Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet at the Birmingham Hippodrome give the first performance on Wednesday of The Winter Play.

Scottish Ballet start their spring season at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow on Tuesday with Peter Darrell's Swan Lake and on Friday show two new ballets (together with Les Sylphides) on an all Chopin programme. The new works are Quarrels Not Their Own by Peter Royston with designs by Kenny McLellan danced to Preludes, Etudes and other solo piano pieces, and Gardens of the Night, with choreography by Darrell, danced to the Piano Concerto No 2 in Minor and dealing with the relationships of George Sand and Chopin and Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. London Contemporary Dance Theatre will be at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester next week and Northern Ballet Theatre will be at the King's Theatre, Southsea. Mary Clarke OPERA Don Carlos (Covent Garden tomorrow, Tuesday, next Friday). Worthy stab at French version, with much seldom beth," Hordern ruefully recalls.

And he quotes from memory the comment of one malicious critic who said he played the Thane of Cawdor like an Armenian carpet seller who would not even have been shown through the backdoor of Dunsinane. "It was very clever, very ciiepgf, very funny, awful, wicked and cruel." He concedes that Macbeth mastered him but insists that laughter belongs in the doomed hinterland of Ibsen's play; when he was replaced by Donald Wolfit for the play's transfer the famous old declaimer outlawed the faintest flicker of line-up including Madness, UB 40. Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Rik Mayall. At the London Victoria Apollo, Sunday. Billy Fury Memorial Concert epic nostalgia as Billy's friends pay tribute.

With Marty Wilde, Joe Brown, Alvin Stardust, Dave Berry, Brian Poole, Craig Douglas and Helen Shapiro, at the Beck Theatre, Hayes, Middlesex, Sunday. Gil Scott-Heron: this black American poet and songwriter has created a remarkably intelligent fusion of political commentary with modern funk, but in performance it can weaken into dan-ceable sloganeering. At the Commonwealth Institute, Thursday (for three nights). Big Country terrific young Scottish rock band (formed out of the remnants of The Skids) with a Cinemascope grandeur and a sense of humour. At the Hornsey Floral Hall tonight, Redcar Coatham Bowl Sunday, Edinburgh Dance Factory Monday, Dundee Dance Factory Tuesday.

Fourteen Karat Soul highly rated New Jersey acapella group at London Dingwalls Thursday, Mary Harron DANCE THE ROYAL Ballet ends its present season at Covent Garden tonight with La Fille mal Gardee and with a new Lise. Rosalyn Whitten dances the heroine partnered by Stephen Jefferies as Colas. Sadler's Wells starts its season of Spring into Dance 3 BRIEFING THEATRE SHERIDAN'S The Rivals gets its first-ever production at the National Theatre Peter Wood directs in the Olivier with Sir Michael Hordern giving his Sir Anthony, Ger-aldine McEwan her Mrs Malaprop and John Gunter evoking eighteenth-century Bath. The same night Adrian Noble's speedy, sold-out RSC production of Antony and Cleopatra moves into The Pit with Michael Gamfoon and Helen Mirren in the title-roles. Willy Russell's Liverpool musical, Blood Brothers, comes to the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, with Barbara Dickson in the lead and Ben Kingsley (in what could be an Oscar-winning week) opens at the Lyric Hammersmith in Kean, Rayimund Fitz-Simon's solo play about the great actor.

Elsewhere the Black Theatre Co-operative present Edgar White's The Nine Night at the Bush, the Cambridge Marlowe Society bring The Comedy of Errors to the Almeida Recommended Lorenzaccio (Olivier Thursday to Saturday) Epic production by Michael Bogdanov of the Musset masterpiece about a murderous Florentine anti-hero played by Greg Hicks: theatre on a bigger scale than we are used to. Commedia (Lyric Studio) Passionate play by Marcella Evaristi about an Italo-Scot-tish family discovering their widowed mother has a lover touching performance by Colette O'Neil. I cpfl unnv aav an 81 lo anyone. Over and over again I've read something in a notice and thought 'By God, yes. It hits the nail on the head And that Old Vic season at least reaffirmed his ability to cross from heights tragical to areas comical, and showed up the now treasured anthology of Hordern mannerisms.

Memories of Hordern on stage and screen must take in what might be called Hor-derniana the palm of the hand smacking the forehead in anger; chin stroked or pulled as if the flesh would come away; fingers on the right hand restlessly playing heard music, but labouring from an inadequate Carlos (the Basque tenor Teyo Gar-am) and a less than wonderful Eboli (Livia Budai) and Elizabeth (Stefka Evsta-tieva). Bernard Haitinck conducting however, is pretty marvellous, and Thomas Allen (Rodrigue) and Robert Lloyd (Philippe II) achieve real excellence. Even the old Visconti staging can still impress. Rusalka (Coliseum tomorrow, Wednesday). Brilliant David Pountney staging of Dvorak's passionate, triste fairy tale with Sarah Walker a glorious witch, swinging her black cats like a lacrosse racquet, and John Treleaven and Eilene Hannan impresses as Prince and Water Nymph.

Lazaridis has never produced more evocative designs, superbly lit by Nick Chelton. Don't miss last chance. The Force of Destiny (Coliseum tonight, Tuesday, next Friday). Energetic, strongly cast revival of sprawling masterpiece. Parsifal (Oxford tomorrow week).

Last chance to catch Mike Ashman's wonderful staging, conducted by Anthony Negus. Warren Ellsworth is a Mowgli-like emotional Parsifal. Donald Mclntyre's Gurnemanz is the hit of the show. Tom Sutcliffe 5tiifst133iC ARTS THEATRE nM M2U2 MIKT WtWORT kTKKT VC MhUWum EVG8TUE8TOFRI830 SATS OjOO and 9,00 fiMKcflHWalsIW'attMctt by de Musset translated and adapted by John Fowles NATIONAL THEATRE Box Office 01 928 2252 The Royal Opera Donizetti's Don Pasquale In Italian Credit Cards 01 928 5933 I Royal Opera House Arts Council OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 'Armageddon comes and we are in a place to which no picture has ever taken us before THE NEW YORKTIMES ABOUT THE BOOK PATRICIA R0UTLEDGE "Geraint Evans' portrayal isimpeccable iii detail delightful in action, full of subtly. touching illuminations" Financial Tima coloratura soprano of star standard.

"An intrinsically beautiful voice deploys it with' consummate art." Sunday Timet WHEN THE WIND KEN JONES A NEW PLAY BY RAYMOND BRIGGS i Jk Conductor: Guido Ajmone-Marsan Cast includes Luciana Serra, Geraint Evans and Jonathan Summers. April 11, 14,16,20,25, 27, 30 at 7.30pm Tickets: 5, 9, 12.50, 16, 19, 22.50 Telephone Reservations 01-24010661911 Access and Visa Cards welcome Genial EvuiDon Fuquite. Photo: Donald Soulhim NEW OPERA COMPANY DOUBLE BILL OF BRITISH' PREMIERES A FULL MOON IN MARCH John Harbison INNER VOICES Brian Howard Tonight and Tomorrow at 7 pm BLOOMSBURY THEATRE, GORDON STREET, WC1. Box Office: 01-387 9629 Whitehall Theatre Trafalgar Sq. SW1 Tel 01 .930 669277656 C.

Cds 01 .839 697S CREDIT CARD TELEPHONE BOOKINGS ACCEPTED I.