The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 10

10 Friday October 29 1971 ARTS GUARDIAN review PLAY FOR TODAY EVELYN on television by Nancy Banks-Smith generous than her lovers who tend to hnd themselves a bit short at the moment a victim figure and a Marilyn Monroe part. Her world is without hedges. An open plan open house. Indecent or, at best, untidy to the middle-aged nund. All this borrowing money from your husband's girlfriendboyfriend or recommending your ex-husband's hairdresser to youn ex-lover.

But the play itself, as if in compensa-tion is extremely neat and tidy. Like a bedroom farce except that the interlocking lovers tend to ring the 'phone instead of the doorbell, dropping into the bedroom for a chat as if they had a key a form of hospitality which affronts the man, who likes -to be monogamous in his adultery. And the dialogue is unnaturally, formally tidy. A very tidy parcel indeed. And not everybody nor every playwright can tie a parcel properly.

"The Lovers" (Granada) a not dis similar situation is in spirit a generation, a culture, a million light years away. I tell a lie. Precisely 200 miles away. The goings-on in "Evelyn would, it is evident, never go down Rawtenstall. I THINK Evelyn," BBC-l's Play for Today, had considerable charm.

And I don't know why I should sound so aggressive about it except, perhaps, that I fear you may despise it. And charm is a difficult thing to define or defend. Evelyn had the ridiculous prettiness of a present, all done up in a printed paper and ribbon roses, silver foil and soft tissue, and though the present was a little on the small side when you got to it, it was all very deftly done. The other night Today," trailing the next morning's programme, promised that if I got up at 7 am, I would be told Is The Male Menopause a Myth. But people will say anything at midnight and they never told me the answer or, if they did, I wasn't listening.

But the question is obviously one which exercises the middle-aged man, Edward Woodward, in "Evelyn" and, in a physical sense, the available girl Angela Sr-oular. The situation is trite and the girl is, in a sense, the archetypal golden-hearted tart But she is a charming sketch of a totally contemporary type generous in her profiligate, promiscuous affection for everybody; far more THERE WAS A TIME WHEN even the concept of a controversial musical was unthinkable on Broadway it was either a hit or it was a flop. And if it was a hit, that was because everyone liked it the songs and dances were good or they weren't, and that's all there was to that. Now, since last year's Company which was, and is, a hit, there are many people who can be found saying, it may be a hit, but I don't like it. This has been particularly true of this year's "Follies" which, although marginally less successful than "No, Ni Nanette," is still the second biggest smash on Broadway and a lot of people don't really like it.

On the surface, Follies would not seem to lend itself to controversy. Basically, it is a nostalgic attempt to reulorifv the Zicgfeld Musical of yore, although the name of Ziegfeld is never actually mentioned. Rather than use old songs, however, Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the music and lyrics, has chosen the way of pastiche, and songs like Broadway Baby," Listen to the Rain on the Roof" "are all new, however familiar they may sound. The show seems to have begun with a visual concept inspired by the famous photograph of a bedraped Gloria Swanson in the ruins of the old Roxy Cinema, that Sistine Chapel of the school of movie architecture known locally as Jewish Renaissance, and a telling image of glamour and ghosts in the midst of rubble. James Lion in Goldman's book is simple to the point of simple mindedness.

To celebrate (mourn) lh" destruction of the theatre in which the Follies used to play, the Zicgfeld character has invited all his old stars to a party on the stage of the theatre. And from all corners of the country have come the Weisman girls of 1919. of 1928. 1937, etc. The stroke of genius, of course, was actually to use stars of yesteryear, ranging from the 80-year old Ethel Shutta (about whom my father used glowingly to talk) down to more recently eclipsed wonders like Yvonne de Carlo.

Dorothy Collins, md above all Alexis Smith. America is the country of the comeback if only because it is also the land of the oi'erniglit has-been. But the case of Alexis Smith is different frankly, I never thought she was very good in the days of her prime. Statuesque, elegant, beautiful, but that was all. Now, with the passage of time, something rather wonderful has happened to her.

She is still statuesque, elegant etc. but she has now become warm, human, and moving, and her renditions of "The Story of Lucy and Jessie and Could I leave you you bet I could are the highlights of the show. Where is the controversy, then Well, many people say that the plot is dull and silly and given the fact THE FORCE OF DESTINY at the Coliseum Alexis Smith, Michael Bartlett, Fifi d'Orsay, and May McCarthy in Follies bourgeois Follies by Philip Hope-Wallace RICHARD ROUD on the second greatest Broadway smash Verdi's very finest things but requiring or at least presupposing dramatic and lyrical expansion plus a perfect legato which not every soprano can begin to achieve. Milla Andrew, not in her best voice, did not shirk the great opportunity but I was not exactly transported bv music which should wonderfully lift the heart. The baritone brother Don Carlos was bravely sung bv Terence Sharpe.

The production by Colin Graham is vivacious when needed, gTave when the music calls for stillness and considering the plentiful opportunities the long opera provides for timid or downright absurd conventionalities, this is an account to give anyone a vivid idea of Verdi's often magnificent work. John Barker makes his mark as a Verdi conductor, holding a good level and balance. THE SADLERS Wells English Force of Destiny" has plenty going for it and a brave and martial air, with a touch of Goya which is just right. Scenes like the famous Rataplan with Katherine Pring as a most spirited vivandiere are very much the real right thing. But of course it is a most taxing opera and Verdi, as in Trovatore before and Aida later the Master demanded that his singers should stretch themselves to the limits of their courage and compass.

There were some splendid responses to the challenge for instance Alberto Remedios phrased the exposed and difficult Tu che in segno" (as it is in Italian) with firm, manly, and musi-cianlv stvle. 1 admired this Don Alvaro and "also the fine rolling bass of Clifford Grant as the Father Superior. The Monastery scene is one of "Lenny" is something else again. Based on the life and words of Lenny Bruce, the show was directed by Tom O'Horgan who also wrote the music. O'Horgan, best known for his productions of "Tom Paine," "Futz," and Hair," is indeed the best of the new young directorial talents.

But the elaborateness of his mise-ert-scene with its giant marionettes, its masks, and its tribal figures (Jesus and Moses) only serves to point out that this is a one-man talk show. Lenny Bruce was a stand-up comic, and it seems mad to have tried to mask this fact. It didn't really matter ultimately, for Cliff Gonmn (from the original "Boys in the Band cast) does a superb job of re-creating Bruce's unique personality compounded of irreverence, obscenity and compassion. Nominally a musical, ther? arc hardly any songs, but that doesn't matter either. What is important is that we are confronted with an extraordinary personality neurotic, paranoid, even which is both an echo and a condemnation of the society which produced him.

struetivist backstage set, he sets the girls to wandering, decked out in fabulous pastiches of old Follies costumes. Independently of what is going on dramatically, they walk in, through and around the action, providing a visual counterpoint to the show until that magical moment two-thirds of the way through, when we are treated to a mini musical within the -musical Loveland," with its six numbers nostalgically evoking the glories of the man who glorified the American girl. It may all sound like something of a farrago, but the assured direction of Hal Prince seems, for me, to have held the whole thing together, and to have made of it a beautiful phantasmagoria, lit up by the heartbreaking smile of Alexis Smith, who in and of herself represents what the whole show is about. "There are no second acts in American lives," said F. Scott Fitzgerald, but "Follies" is there to prove the contrary.

that it revolves around two couples who think momentarily about exchanging spouses, it is. Then there is the question of the music. Many complain that Stephen Sondheim's music is not the kind that you come out of the theatre whistling. And again, that is true. It does seem to me that this supreme lyricist is melodically a little monotonous.

On the other hand, the man who could write a song that begins God, why don't you love meOh, you do see you later dearie can't be all bad. But if the story Is not all that exciting, and the music not all that tuneful, is it just the lyrics that makes the show so appealing No. Visually, it is probably the most stunning show ever seen on Broadway. The sets and costumes are by the same Boris Aaron-son who did Cabaret and Company," but this time he seems to have been in on the show from the start, and far from just providing the decor, he has been allowed to mould the whole show. And so, as if a movie, his stamp is everywhere.

Against the con- KEMPE AND THE RPO at the RFH by Meirion Bowen She sas sensitively supported by the RPO with the conductor, Rudolph Kempe, in his favourite role of restraining the less important detail in the orchestral texture. Kempe proved a rather stolid Kapellmeister for the re-creation of eighteenth century wit and Haydnesque charm to be found in Prokofiev's Classical Synii phonv." His tempi were rather inhibiting early on, and where neatly pointed phrasing was asked for it was missing. Kempe 'was far more at home in the world of Dvorak, whose Eighth Symphony (in major) he gave an elemental life that lifted it on to another plane. It's in some ways the composer's most successful fusion of nature-music and nationalistic elements in' a symphonic mould. Kempe gathered together the various strands of the work with a superb sense of timing, and the final power and balance were exact and inexorable.

THE YOUNG KOREAN violinist Kyung-Wha Chung has little difficulty in riveting the attention of a large audience to her playing, no matter if the music itself be second-rate stuff. Ih a Royal Philharmonic Orchestra concert at the Royal Festival Hall, she threw herself into the Max Bruch Violin Concerto with a verve that suggested it to be less the Hollywood-formula piece it can often seem. Technically, she's far from flawless. Her intonation was always suspect: over-fast vibrato may account for her tendencv to lean towards the sharp side. Occasionally, too, her delivery of fast scale-passages was wild, inaccurate.

But she lived every note, wrong ones as well as right ones. Music of this sort dies when machine-like compet-tence overtakes its interpreters. Kyung-Wha Chung attended to the orchestral part and her own with equal fervour. Til man WhO HatSd War outstanding ILtrapher of titlVMnmWn ANDRE TCHAIKOWSKY in Lancaster by Gerald Larner New York. The other, after this exhibition, will take its place in the permanent collection of The Royal Photographic Society There is always something incongruous about reportage photographs printed as art objects, and treated in such a precious manner.

The saving grace of this exhibition is that, alongside the prints, are the original spreads from the pages of "Life." These tear sheets alone would have made a fine exhibition. Larry Burrows did not make single all-encompassing photographs his work was shot as sets of images on related themes, specifically for a marriage with text and presented in a magazine layout where the picture size ratios, captions, introductions, and number of pages were all conceived as a final unit. To extract a single picture, no matter how fine, changes tne viewer's attitude to the pictures. They are then seen as art objects, not as links in a story chain Larry Burrows was a great photo-journalist, with the emphasis on he was not a great photographer. This is not to belittle him or his work.

It merely asks the viewer to look at his pictures from another angle; it is unfair to single out one shot from a carefully conceived essay and endow it with an importance that it does not merit. It is unfair to Larry Burrows his essays rank among the best war coverage there has ever been. Larry Burrows had one ambition My deepest wish is to be around (in Vietnam) to photograph both South and North in peaceful times." It was unfulfilled. expressions on their faces He explains You don't just take war pictures to show the blood and the gore. There's a gentler way which still has the same impact.

Many photographers out there capitalise on the element of grief there's no feeling from the heart. And you must have a reason to show people what others go through. When someone is wounded there's a strange silence. You can't always show those moments. Sometimes their need is greater and you go and help." This conflict between acting as an involved human being and an objective recorder of events was always a real problem for Burrows Tf you're on a hill and you see people hit by a shell or whatever has come in, and you see the dead and wounded around you, you reflect for a number of minutes.

Then you realise that you have a job to do. But you don't do it to the degree of running around like a madman. You do it more discreetly, gently. There are times when people grab hold of you and say 'Would you help with this body, would you help with this wounded man I want to say No, I have a job to do', but I don't think it's my right to sav that, so I do help." Forty oi Larry Burrows's photographs arc now on display at The Koval Photographic Society, 14 South Audley Street, London 1. The prints were selected by his colleagues on and have been produced to an archival quality designed to last for more than one hundred years.

One set of these photographs will be lodged in the Museum of Modern Art, indifferent. And I felt I was freed to act on that condition." Larry Burrows was born in Hornsev Road, N7, in 192G. His first job was as messenger boy in the photographic department of the Daily Express later he joined the Keystone Press Agency as a darkroom assistant. At the age of 16 he went to work as a photographic printer at Life magazine in London. lie was given a few simple assignments after the Second World War, following a short break as a wartime eoalmmer, and thereafter was a staff photographer and stayed with the same magazine throughout his photographic career.

His Vietnam assignments were the most extensive and effective coverage of any war in colour to this date. But Larry Burrows was no loose war-wanderer with a couple of Leicas around his neck and a pocketful of film. He was an expert technician, hunking vast cases filled with elaborate accessories around the hot spots of South-east Asia. He used remote controlled cameras, attached to the outside of aircraft, filters, telephoto lenses, extreme wide-angle gear, anything, as long as it depicted the war with such impact that even the most casual viewer of the magazine could not fail to note the content. Although many of these pictures are incredibly beautiful, his most effective subjects were not the grand-slam set-ups.

but the simple warm records of the people caught in this bloody trap You can't photograph bullets flying through the air so it must he the wounded, or people running loaded with ammunition and the LARRY BURROWS was an English photographer whose name was synonymous with the recording of America's private war. He first went to Vietnam for "Life" magazine in 1962 when the USA was ankle-deep Indo-China. It was, Larry said, still "a very small war, a miserable little war." Although 12,000 Americans were there, combat deaths had scarcely reached two dozen. For nine years he photographed the escalation of the war, its protagonists, its settings and its victims. Larry became one of these casualties when he was killed in action on February 10, 1971.

He was 45. It is ironic that he met his death while riding in a helicopter which was shot down over Laos, with no survivors reported. His finest pictures were contained in a photo-essay "Yankee Papa 13," the story of a similar helicopter mission from Da Nang, which was raked by machine-gun fire from the Vietcong. One of the crew was mortally wounded and died in the arms of his weeping buddy. Larry Burrows's reasons for being in Vietnam as a war photographer were articulated in his justification for allowing his camera to intrude on this sufTering.

It's not easy to photograph a man dying in the arms of his fellow countryman and later to record the breakdown of his friend. 1 fought with my conscience. Was I simply capitalising on other men's grief? But I concluded that what I was doing would penetrate the hearts of those at home who are simply too ANDRE TCHAIKOWSKY is one of the few pianists who can play Bach on the modern concert grand and make it sound a natural thing to do. He devoted a whole recital to clavier music by Bach on Lancaster University's Bbsendorfer piano last night. Sometimes, particularly in the Goldberg Variations after the interval, there was a temptation to speculate on how much better, or, at least, how different it might have sounded on the harpsichord, but the first half of the recital was almost as convincing as it was exciting.

The Italian Concerto was perhaps the best example of his treatment of Bach's virtuoso harpsichord music. Tempo remained firm, not rigorous but definitely regular. Rubato was not excluded but it was discreetly used, usually as much for the sake of subtle piano colouring as for phrasing. Nor did he feel it necessary to restrict himself to the terraced dynamics, to which the harpsichord is allegedly limited. There were no Rossini cres-cendos, but diminuendo and crescendo were effectively used over relatively short periods.

As for sudden contrasts in dynamics, these were used most dramatically and over a far wider range than would normally be obtainable on the harpsichord. There is, of course, justification for this in the Italian Concerto, since Bach himself makes a special and more than usually elaborate point of dynamic contrast in the structure of the movements. Whether he would have been surprised by the sudden crashing left hand in parts of the last movement is another matter, but Scarlatti would no doubt have enjoyed it. Perhaps the major difficulty in playing Bach on the piano is the achievement of clarity between the contrapuntal voices. In the two-part writing of the Duets, four of which Mr Tchaikowsky played last niht, the problem is not so great.

But in such passages as the Quodlibet, the last of the Goldberg Variations, it certainly is and here he performed prodigies of tcxtural perspective, and to an extreme. The sustaining pedal must, of course, be discreetly used, as it was in all but the twenty-eighth of the Goldberg Variations. Predictably, the slow and highly decorative twenty-fifth Variation did not suit the piano as well as the Andante of the Italian Concerto, which was beautifully played and all the more serene for its comparative simplicity. Predictably, too, the twenty-ninth Variation could not sound as brilliant on the piano as it should, and the intelligently played canon of the eighteenth Variation was quite changed in character without the trills which the harpsichordist must introduce to sustain the line. It wa.

however, a great achievement. The only real cause for regret is that the Goldberg Variations (occupying only one half of the recital) had to be deprived of their repeats and, consequently, of at ieast half their stature. Out of the city rock music by GEOFFREY CANNON VAN MORRISON, The Band, and the Beach Boys, were all, six years ago. making city music: Van as the lead singer with Them, the Belfast band who, properly looked after, might have proved as big as the Stones The Band, as The Hawks, first Ronnie Hawkins's back-up band, then the band that Dylan acquired to go electric the Beach Boys as the lyricists of mechanised fun. Now, all three have consolidated themselves as musicians of the countryside, with new albums.

Surf's Up is the Beach Boys' 24th album. Ever since he stopped touring with the band, Brian Wilson has been the prey of his own moods, and of visitors who have foisted their musical ideas on him. Van Dyke Parks, who writes pretentious words, messed Brian up in 1967. particularly on the album Smiley Smile (EMI ST 5001). The title track of Surf's Up was written by Van Dyke Parks around that period, and Brian sat on it until now.

Its Made For These Times" on that music saves it. Its delicacy is close to A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM in Manchester by Merete Bates ECONOMISTS' BOOKSHOP Open Until 7:00 Tonight For Social Science Students Cl.irc Market. Portugal Strt, W.C.2. Near Aldwvch jnd LSE. Pet Sounds (EMI ST 245S).

released in 1966. especially to You Still Believe in Me and I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" on that album. Its subtle shifts of pace and timing, and delicate harmony singing, put it in the top flight of Beach Boys' numbers. But Brian Is now prone to release songs on themes he doesn't understand. The most spectacular example of this is on the album 2020 (EMI E-ST 133) The song Never Learn Not to Love on that album was written by Charles Manson (uncreditod), who was well-known to Dennis, Brian's younger brother, the time.

Cease to resist I'm your kind. Come in, closer, closer, closer," go the words, after a spooky corridor-of-time tvpe intro. Alan Jardine's and Mike Love's ideas of ecology and students "Don't Go Near The Water" and "Student Demonstration Time" are unimpressive. What the Beach Boys are best at, is harmless escape and fantasv. Recently, a reporter from Time went to LA from New York, to see Brian.

After he'd arrived. Brian rang him up and said, sorry, he'd like to talk but he was feeling a little drowsy dropping off now Brian's own song Til I Die expresses his mood. I'm a leal on a windy dayPretty soon I'll be blown away." If you like David Crosby, give him up, Brian Wilson is two classes better. Surf's Up is distributed by Warners (RS 6455) It's quadraphonic, too. The stand-out track on Cahoots, The Band's new album (EMI SMAS 651) is 4 Pantomime Van Morrison sings on it.

Van's internal rhymes Oh Richard tell nie who's got the joker and is it poker and his falling illness Everybody got stoned it was a gas it was a smash and emphatic self-insistence, have never been so well married in music other than straight KB, as with The Band's ribbons and skeins of sound, self-possessed, intricate and yet plain to the senses, like all the best patterns. Life Is a Carnival echoes Brian Wilson curiously. We're all in the same boat ready to float off the edge of the world." "Last of the Blacksmiths has a Dylan-style line: Found guilty said the judge For not being in demand." And again (another song by Robbie) "Did you hear about the railroad going under It would run right by my door I cant hear it any more How can you get to sleep whe i the whistle don't moan Only Rav Davies of The Kings has ever approached The Band's talent for stinging accurate yet courteous observation making an ideology out of things seen. And The Band are fine musicians, too, as their recent concerts in Paris End London proved to me. Tupelo Honey (Warners WS 19o0) is Van Morrison's eleventh album, what with Them albums, albums deleted or issued abroad, and his six albums as a solo singer.

With Neil Young, Van has the ability to shift his notions and themes from album to album, so that until may be a fourth hearing one's reaction is hmm, not so good as the last one. He has the very uncommon quality of singing common thoughts, and making their banality new. How can anyone make love meaningful, without magic? He sings "You're my woman. You bore my child Lord. I want to thank you and.

by his careful attention to the words, he makes them his and makes them work. (Tim Hardin and John Lennon have other ways to make such sentiments work). I don't want to try to throw a rope of words round Van Morrison. If you know him, Tupelo Honey is certainly as impressive as any of his solo albums. If you don't know him, please acquire the other albums, too.

You too can be a woofer lover. Each month Hi-Fi News carries tha latest news, views and ideas In the field of HI-KI. STAGE A new play and we demand some new idea, if not tremendous then trifling, and at least consistent direction. Stage Shakespeare and, it seems, we've done enough. Or at least the New Shakespeare Company has by merely propping up "A Midsummer NTgnt Dream in a hollow and all but empty Manchester Opera House.

This production belies their name. There is little new it a rag-bag of odds and ends gleaned from the past, laced, and titillated with fashionable sexy innuendoes and so rift by indecision we can only sympathise with the actors for getting it on and getting through it to the bitter, disintegrating end. There may have been a glimmer of an idea in taking the cue from Titania's question of Oberon "Why art thou here, come from the farthest steep of India But there seems to be some confusion in rigging out Oberon like an Indian chief and, if that's what he was, surely Titania was his squaw But she swoons around in nubile pink and turquoise with the glossiest of phosphorescent lipsticks. Ii there must be Red Indians and why not because of late we've been subjected to. sickened, and satiated with fey fairies then why not go the whole hog and dress the Athenians as cowboys This may prove irreverent but at least it would be decisively so.

As it is no one seems to know if they're meant to play straight or send up. Quirks of modern sense slip into old, rhapsodic nonsense. Hermia all but snickers at her father's threat of death or chastity for disobedience. Puck can choose between hamming the hard-pushed skivvy to the audience or prostituting servility to his master. Only Helena, played by Marilyn Taylor, somehow manages to resolve the Eeneral.

intrinsic vacillation in her personal clearsightedness. Altogether you're not surprised to find the direction is from Richard Day's original by Peter Watson. To direct a direction is a contradiction in Itself, Pius some 3U pages oi recora reviews ana music features covering oacn to Atomic Rooster. November's issue a Iso to 1 1 of the record i ns of the 'Svmohonvof a Thousand' In Amsterdam. It reports on the European Hl-nshowsand gives sorrt useful hints for wall mounting your equipment.

It's all in November's Hi-Fi News Record Review.On sale at Newsagents now. 20p. hi-fi news.