The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 10

ARTS GUARDIAN review HAVEN OF REST on BBC-1 by Nancy Banks-Smith MICHAEL McNAY if iu ww wm -ncv w.w The best posters a style of comedy which stopped dead never to go again. There was a certain truth-to-its-time among the theatricality. Nanny (there was of course a nannie) was given to quoting Presbyterian, improving poetry at the chinless Rupert and people did, you know. I remember vaguely, of course, vaguely but I remember being frequently told when a mere tot that Life is real, Life is earnest, and the grave is not the goal." Talking of poetrv I watched Not only "(BBC-2) partly for the pleasure of Frank Muir's company. He was in Poets Cornered, where those who fail to find a rhyme-in-time are ejected into a bath of BBC bubbles, where, I must say, he did a creditable crawl.

I suggest you listen some time to My Music on Radio in which, while Muir's musical knowledge is second to none (that is next to nothing) and his singing voice resembles the mating call of the haddock, he is extremely funny. Which is more than you can say for Haven of Rest." I have heard the mating call of the haddock. It is rather like the drumming of a Spanish dancer's heel. Which is also a mating call of a kind. We have more in common with fish than fingers.

HAVEN OF REST (BBC-1) by Alan Melville would be more at home in a box than on the box. It was a perfectly embalmed specimen of a prewar play. There were these two colonial types the natives are restless tonight drinking gin and debating whether Rupert should return home to claim his inheritance as his aunt had left him her entire estate On Certain Conditions. Whatever happened to aunts who had entire estates and left weird Whatever happened to aunts at all 7 They were a prewar phenomenon reaching their finest flower in Wodehouse. Then suddenly as if they had all caught something simultaneously there were no more aunts.

This aunt had expressed her eccentricity and bounty by running a Resi- dential Home for Elderly Gentlefolk. To wit one Lady, one leading lady, one lady novelist, one colonel, and a bounder called Benson, who was no relation of Sir Frank Benson." God knows how he got in there. The gentle were min- Istered to by the rough a comic cook, a comic pregnant parlourmaid, and a comic gardener I knows my place." was a living fossil which should be preserved in some theatrical museum as we have Htirironlal Hotel Limited, Croup. i vi ith' Destine J. II'.

T. Group, lor Kelloz Co. index finger. On. the whole, the hoardings were best, and Kelloggs best of all, with the shape of the crowing cockerel echoing the italicised for Kelloggs in the slogan WaKey waK'cy (varied in other posts to For KK'KK'KK'Kold winter mornings" and "Bed and Posters in fact make their point by a combination of wit, size, and visual impact.

The judges lament that it is not possible to make posters as good as they did in the days of the war. when designers and agencies could actually believe in the product (victory). But that is like lamenting tha passing of ikon painters because generally speaking there is nobody left who believes in that product (God etc), We must make do with what we have. MEASURE FOR MEASURE at Stratford upon Avon by Philip Hope-Wallace Designer: Peter Rivers, lor British Rail. 'TWERE is only one art form com-mon to all sorts and conditions of people the poster.

For Annigoni you have to queue, for television you have a selector switch, newspaper advertisements arc aimed at different classes of readership (quasi-scicntifically graded C. 1), because in the market, spending power pulls rank on the subtler distinctions of upper, middle, and working class. But a hoarding is a hoarding is a hoarding. Advertisers or their clients can decide to restrict the appeal of a public site the neo-Top People advertisement showing the remains of a meal of oysters, for example but the best posters have universal appeal and. pro- bably, a sustained impact you can often sense that people who don't like Guinness feel slightly guilty about it because they enjoy Guinness advertising.

So it is odd that poster design is generally bad. Travel up thp escalator at an Underground station and the main impression is of muddle. On that scale the sexy ones work best, but in this year's British Poster Design awards announced today by the Council of Industrial Design there is nothing as good or memorable as last year's girl, naked except for Elliott's boots. The judges have made a selection of 25 for 15 awards, and have commended another nine. Mr Lou Klein, director of Klein Peters acted as spokesman for I he judges and showed a marked preference for the British Rail inter-city sleepers poster, though on the face of it the advertisement did precisely what the judges object to in their report simply adding copy to a carefully selected photograph." All this shows is that it is meaningless to make generalisations.

If the photo is pointed enough, as the slcping-car picture is. then why lay down the law about posters being a graphic medium One of the best of the posters combines both an advertisement for an article in the Mirror Magazine Are your manners working class emblazoned in a no-nonsense sans serif face across a photo of a stuoby fingered, grubby nailed hand, clutching a burning cigarette between thumb and tion. Ian Richardson plays the role not as a sly and lustful ogre in the manner adopted by Charles Laughton, but cool, well-coped, demure and not belying the angelic name. Nevertheless he manages to give a steely edge to the two great encounters with the self-righteous Isabella, both of which went most excitingly. Estelle Kohler, if she did not have the kind of thunder and lightning which one imagines struck forth from Mrs Siddons, had three invaluable qualities simplicity of pathos, a good ear and likeableness.

A likeable Isabella is a rare bird indeed. Her recognition of her dead brother at the end was most affecting. The earlier scene between sister and brother (Ben King-sly) seemed less secure and needs more phrasing in the musician's sense of the word. A splendid Lucio by Terrence Hardiman and an inspired clown of a Pompey from John Kane were notable in this beautifully well instructed and efficient cast. Timothy O'Brien's setting, like the inside of a Persian chest is restful, practical and unobtrusive.

IN A BARE and wintry Stratford last night the Royal Shakespeare Company started its summer Shakespeare festival with a production of Measure for Measure which in John Barton's brilliantly intelligent handling moved at a suitably measured gait. It lasted a good three hours with only one short interval, and it has no extraneous fripperies and few larks except for one kind of madmen's masque in the gaol. Those who have been seeing the play fairly regularly over the past 30 years will recall episodes of more passion and stress, but myself I cannot remember any production so lucid the audience, for once, listened with a real understanding and the r61e of the Duke, moral contrivances and all, for once seemed not a merely tiresome kind of Elizabethan plot-rigging but the very essence of the drama. Sebastian Shaw carried out this course with' quiet and continuously impressive authority. Perhaps this slightly diminishes Angelo whose play, with Isabella, one tends to think it is.

Here he must take a secondary posi Dass? THE ITALIAN STRAW HAT at the Liverpool Everyman by Merete Bates agonising. So much so that it was a much needed relief when he trilled off into an aria or flicked into a flamenco. It was even more of a relief to indulge in concern for Peter James, as the doddery uncle, crawling round after a shoehorn during the wedding solemnities or getting into bed with a hat-stand. Paola Dionisetti swanned around as the baroness. David Casey pinioned, ponced, and postulated as the dandy.

Paul Brooke rolled and bounced as Beauperthuis. Direction by Glen Walford said as much, if not more, with gestures as the words. But, in spite of top hats and butcher's stripes, of rouge and corkscrew curls, of puppetry and rudcry. you have an odd feeling you want to cry. This production shows the best of clowning the other side of laughter.

IT'S STRIKING that, today, you don't go to see a play at the Everyman you go to see the Everyman at play. A Cricket on the Hearth" and "The Italian Straw Hat," Dickens and Labiche, may seem streets, if not countries, apart but the latter is a development on the former a typical Everyman lark. Last night, in spite of snow and only a sprinkling of audience, was warm, boisterous, and achingly funny. Sam Kelly led as the bridegroom. Tipping his toes, and grovelling on his knees through a sea of anguished kisses and mincing kicks to boot his wedding he steadily teaspooned the plot to the audience in off-the-cuff asides.

His horse had eaten a damsel's straw hat he was on a desperate quest to replace it. Needless to say suspense was miRROR mnGnzinE Designer Don Arlett, for IPC Newspaper! Diy'tnon. warts and all new films by DEREK MALCOLM WEBER'S OBERON at the Royal Festival Hall by Edward Greenfield VISCONTI wasn't allowed to keep Gcittcrdammerung as the title for the English version of his new film, since it was felt that cinemagoers might expect Wagner, without music. AVcll, that is precisely what they get in The Damned (Odcon, Kensington). They also get slices of Macbeth and Thomas Mann, and the whole of Luchino Visconti, warts and all.

It is quite an experience. The damned are a family of steel magnates, desperately machinating among each other for personal power in the first years of Hitler's Chancellorship. The Baron is murdered, the heir apparent's mother plots to have him displaced by her lover, and the SS wait on the sidelines to see which faction is most likely to deliver the plant most securely into the Nazis' pocket. But the film is hardly just a thinly disguised version of the Krupp saga. What it really treats of is Germany and the Germans, and the real damned are all those who had to involve themselves politically because their personal fortunes depended upon taking sides.

Visconti makes it his personal statement, not only about fascism but capitalism as well. He sees his characters not just as people, but as pawns in a game the devil himself has taught them to play. The feel of the movie is quite extraordinary. Art direction, lighting, colour photography (Armando Nannuzzi and Pasquale de Santis) combine to create a plush, pence nightmare that often hovers on the edge cf Italianate Grand Guignol but never quite tips over, even during the absurd but remarkable wedding and suicide scene which brings the whole thing to a close. Of course it is operatic.

Of course Visconti in this mood is first and foremost a weird and wonderful showman. But, my hat, he can make films. Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Timlin. Helmut Gricm, Helmut Berger. Charlotte Rampling and Florinda Bolkan head a remarkable cast, with Thulin outstanding as Lady Macbeth of the Nibelun-gcn.

But what one remembers is not the acting, certainly not the script but the eccentric, excessive, obsessive, vulgar, camp and bulging imagination of the man behind it all. Douglas Hickox's film of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane (Carlton, Hay-market) is a great deal better than his first film Les Bieyclettes de Belsize." But it is still a pretty coarse version of the play which persists in rubbing our noses in what Orton hinted at. and over and over again glorious inspiration goes to waste. One remains utterly uninvolved. The idea of a narration was good enough in this presentation, but it was a pity it had to be spoken by Bernard Lloyd in an eao sao refeened accent that would have stuck out even in the old DOyly Carte Company.

The singing cast was strong but hardly inspired. Joan Carlyle was glamorous as the heroine, Reiza, coping very well with the demands of Ocean, thou Mighty Monster," so completely out of proportion with the rest of her part. Alberto Romedios was a powerful Huon, not so agile in the Horrid divisions and badly floored by one top but much more heroic than Kenneth Bowen, whose tenor was too recessed for the part of Oberon. Delme Bryn-Jones and Ann Howard both sang well in other principal roles, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under John Prit-chard very fairly emerged as the real hero of the occasion. But I still hope that one day the Covent Garden management will have the courage to present Oberon as the grandest possible pageant.

Then the involvement which eluded us on this occasion might well strike home. Peter McEnery plays the wicked Sloane, and Beryl Reid and Harry Andrews arc the well-matured brother and sister who respectively fall for his leather-encased charms. Clive Exton, who did the screenplay, has kept a lot of the quietly murderous dialogue intact. But where the play insinuated, the film insists and insists. It advertises itself like one of those television commercials Mr Hickox did so well.

Andrews is, however, splendid as the repressed homosexual and Beryl Reid, though she is asked to overdo it rather, has some splendid bits of ludicrously mismanaged lechery. McEnery turns up again in Peter Mctlak's first film Negatives (Essoldo, Chelsea). This time he plays another oddity a young gentleman who dresses up as Crippcn to satisfy his mistress (Glenda Jackson) and then deserts him and her in favour of Baron von Richtofen, the First World War German air ace and a cool German photographer (Diane Cilcnto). It is a strange and not reallv convincing little parable about the distance between truth and fantasy (from Peter Everett's novel) and it often flatters to deceive. But the film is confidently handled and more than ably acted.

Mark Donskoi's Gorki trilogy, filmed between 1938 and 1940, looked a trifle old-fashioned when it was first paraded reverently round the film societies after the war. But its pure style, often magnificent acting and sense of outrage at the hideousness of Russia before the Revolution was enough to compensate for that. Now, some thirty years later, comes his Heart of a Mother, the first of a season of Soviet films at the Paris-Pullman. And I'm sorry to say that it generally seems dull and hack in comparison. For one thing, this impossibly naive hagiography of Lenin's mum might well have been made back in the thirties.

Technically, it is plodding and stereotyped. For another, what then looked a trifle starry-eyed now seems positively cynical. How can Donskoi have the gall to put into the mouth of the young Lenin all that waffle about free speech when he must know perfectly well what happens now the moment someone steps out of line Still, Yelena Fadeyeva Is good when allowed to be as a sort of Yiddishcr Mother Earth (Donskoi is Jewish and rccognisably so in his handling of some of the family scenes). And here and there we see the authentic touch of a director who once felt deeply about what he was THE CHARMING overture to Weber's Oberon has long given promise of an unjustly neglected opera. On top of that the story of how Weber, in the last stages of consumption, came to London and battled against fate to complete the work has always added to one's curiosity.

All credit then to the BBC for presenting Oberon at the Festival Hall in a workmanlike concert form devised by Brian Trowell, with the story told between numbers in rhymed couplets and the original English text revised to fit the notes more idiomatically. Such a presentation both let one appreciate the glory of the music and the impossibility of the drama. Drama is almost too dignified a word for what happens in Oberon." It contains nothing even as logical as Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and maddeningly Weber was given little or no chance to enhance the mixed-up story with characterisation in the music. Even an impossible plot would have mattered little if the set numbers were strategically placed to underline pointful emotional conflicts. As it is, they have as much dramatic relevance as pop-songs inserted into a pantomime, Hockney retrospective by norbert lynton TODAY IN The Listener Was Bobbins Wrong Two articles based on a discussion between Geoffrey Strickland of Reading University and Dr.

Lionel Elvin, a member of the Robbins Committee, on the Robbins report Views John Vaizey looks at the future of the direct-grant schools. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE DAVID HOCKNEY'S career celebrates its eighth birthday this year. In 19(52 he showed at the Young Contemporaries the paintings that first got him noticed. In 19R2, too, he left the Royal College of Art with a Gold Medal in his gold lame jacket It sounds a bit early to have one's big retrospective, especially at Mark Glazebrook's refurbished Whitechapel Gallery with its smart new screens and lights and an additional room round the corner, and thus much more hanging space than it ever had before (but beware of overfilling it). But rarely has an exhibition been more necessary and overdue.

Hockney's success was immediate and accumulative. There, in 1962, amid all the knotted brows of hard-edge abstraction and all the general pomposities of post-war art, was a young and cheeky art, unmistakably awash with talent offhand to its immediate elders yet reassuringly responsive to Great Art; witty and' legible. Hockney uent on to cap success with success. The brilliant lad from Bradford became the swinging bov from Britain, sought after by the mass media as much as by museums and collectors. sists But Hockney's vision has become more and more straightforward.

Of one recent painting he said I took a photograph of the scene and I was so impressed with it that I Just painted it like that. The difference I think between this painting and others is that it is one painting where I didn't try and dominate the scene." Domination means mostly a severe reduction in detail, or an elevation of some details and their pictorial equivalents to the exclusion of others it means also compositional arranging that becomes ever more immediate. Is Hockney a painter or draughtsman He is both, admirably. His prints and drawings include his most personal, most affectionate statements. His draw-ing-within-painting is superb and Is accompanied by a use of colour and tone that is entirely painterly even if it does without painterly gestures.

In any case, he is an acutely visual artist, with a great deal of cunning at bis command with which to find the par-ticular pictorial form for a particular thing, incorporating unmistakable feelings in cool and exact images. The exhibition opens today and com tinues until May 3. And as his fame spread it became ever nnre difficult to see his work as prk, not just as some marginal production by the man with the blond hair and the circular spectacles who came over so strong on telly. The Whitechapel puts the emphasis back where it belongs. It is a very thorough show, with 44 paintings and a great number of drawings and prints.

The exhibition needs looking at and for longer than a critic can allow himself if he is to get his piece in. It needs thinking about too, and 1 should like to suggest some questions and offer a few partial answers. How much, and how, has Hockney's work changed over the years? Clever, subtle and witty in 1962, it has become a great deal more refined, economical, and serious. Economy has meant greater decision and less playfulness. It has taken him a few vears to recognise himself.

How avant-garde is it Not particularly, in 1962 ne was hailed as a Pop artist but his interest was more in the art of the museums and in graffiti. Pop elements still occur from time to time, the graffiti influence has largely disappeared, and his interest in past art, as in poetry, per Arnold Toynbee on the future of religious belief The Kennedys PHILIP WINDSOR The Revolt against Materialism FRANK FIELD on changes in art and society in pre-1 91 4 Europe A BBC PUBLICATION EVERY THURSDAY FROM YOUR NEWSAGENT 1s. 3d. Portrait ot Aiti II tldcr, 1966.