The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 24

24 ARTS GUARDIAN THE GUARDIAN Thursday. January 26 1989 Laughing all Paul Sayer, psychiatric nurse turned Whitbread Award-winning author, talks to John Vidai Echoes in a silent world the way to the cells The life and happy times of a spy who made treachery a family business Walker's best friend, was inter when he was 27 (he is now 33) and since then his hope has only been to be published. In his dreams he hoped for a few kind reviews, perhaps a few acerbic lines in the "quality" press. (It did better than that; Norman Shrapnel in this paper described the book as "My intentions were and are purely literary. Let's be honest no one thought of this as a best-seller.

I know the fate of most novels. I saw it very much as an attempt to find my own voice." It's a voice he says that has been most influenced by the unsentimentality and precision of Beckett and Kafka. As he reaches towards his own style he is aware that such success so soon is potentially damaging. More seriously he worries about the ethics of culling a piece of fiction from the serious business of psychiatric nursing. "What right have I And what rights have the journalists and 0 Teetering on the edge Vivian Tierney, Rodney Macann and Geoffrey Pogson Tom Sutcliffe finds Reimann's Lear receiving its ai ine oonseurn musica thn Sounds of savagery Nancy Banks-Smith Meet it is I set it down.

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain fTJHE thing about Smiley, II oi course, was that he II wasn't. Smilev. that is. JBL Nothing in fiction leads one to believe that you may be led to a spy by the sound of laughter. John Walker is as bald as half an egg.

The other half twinkles and chuckles. His spectacles sparkle. His jaw wid ens in a smile like a chipmunk stuffed with nuts. A positively Pickwickian little person. I should think he is the life and soul of Unit in the Marion Penitentiary, Illinois.

In the consistently boggling series Dispatches (Channel 4). Walker talked for the first time on television about his 18 happy years as a spy for Russia. He recruited his brother, his son and his best friend as spies too and, when he went down for life, took them with him. It was his ex-wife, Barbara, who finally told the FBI. He describes her as a ridiculous drunk.

He has a strong sense of me naicuious. "I suppose Barbara would be described as a mistake," he said. "If you consider the fact that I didn't murder her in 1968. In a Ludlum novel that would be the way to eo. She was the weak link in the chain, the only way i couia nave been gotten to." He was a US Navy warrant officer and in a photograph with other servicemen he looks remarkably like Sgt.

Bilko, centre stage, assured, slightly shifty. For 18 years he sold the Russians ultra-sensitive cryptographic secrets, technical manuals from which cipher machines could be reconstructed, cipher keys. "I'm reliable," he said. "I did perfect work for both governments. Neither had a complaint" Gurgle.

It's a spot of luck we didn't have a war then for we would have lost it. The damage was incalculable, perhaps permanent. The Russians were at tunes unnervingly nonchalant about cryptographic equipment. They told him, for instance, not to bother stealing a most advanced cipher system which is still in use. The implication was that they had it already.

Walker said his US debriefers "literally went pale" when he told them. Gurgle, chuckle. "You have to assume they're not arresting everyone. What percentage do you think they are arresting? Half? One per cent? Who would even want to guess?" Giggle, giggle. He was choosy about the conditions of the interview.

No questions about his family or motives. No handcuffs, leg irons or prison uniform. He would not, he said, appear "in a demeaning Poor old Jerry Whitworth, PHOTOGRAPH: CLIVE BARDA British premiere a tn Shakocnoaro I IMtWWfur WMI tenor Edgar (Christopher Rob-son). Without metrical shapes, of course, rhythm is always free-floating: a major drawback of yesterday's avant garde musical language. Gramss commits some errors in production.

The close is badly muffed. And though the sexual electricity before Gloucester's blinding was interesting, the horror did not register with an excess of gore. Eberhard Matthies's single set, though it makes a great physical setpiece of the storm complete with streaming cellophane, dry ice, and heaving floorboards, is really very 1970s. (So much for Reimann's questionable assumption in his programme note that "the storm is really just a metaphor for the storm within surely it is Nature's continuation of a world upturned?) Ren-ate Schmitzer's jagged primary colour make-up and smart ad-campaign designer hairstyles aimed to make the British horrors alien, when Lear should be of our time and place. A pity the opera was not fully repatriated by ENO in a David Al-denDavid Fielding staging.

But after arduous preparation musical results were excellent. Paul Daniel, conducting, presides with thrilling commitment The cast, Jaffe apart, has no weak links. Rosa Mannion's Cordelia augurs well for more vocally rewarding roles here. As Edmund, Alan Woodrow's screamed out top note for the word "bastard" was spine-tingling. And there was marvellous determination in Phyllis Cannan and Vivian Tierney's revolting sisters, in Nigel Douglas's touching shrill Kent, in Rodney Macann's feeling Gloucester and Christopher Booth-Jones's noble Albany.

Performances tomorrow, Tuesday, next Thursday, February 9, 16, 18, 23 and March 2. viewed in a prison shirt against a Darrea window with a watch tower beyond. Jerry was tearful: "What happened was nof what I thought was going to happen. I'm very sorry." As he got me plus ass years he has something to be tearful about. Walker, recruiting him.

said they would be spying for Israel, wniiwonn saia, i giaa oi that. I'll do it." Walker spluttered. "Somewhere in there Whitworth slowly figured out what was really happening." He raised his top lip to show merrily gleaming teeth. He was exceptionally deft at locating and exploiting weak ness. The Navy's slackness: "K- Mart protects its toothpaste bet ter man me wavy protects its top secrets." His daughter Laura's diffidence: "He'd break you aown.

Make vou feel like the lowest form of life. He said, iou Know, you re not a very bright personality. Why don't you let me help you make a lot of Barbara Walker, the ridiculous drunk, said she informed on him to stop him recuiting their daughters as he had their son, who worshipped his father. A quirky, perky, twinkline. winkling, wicked little devil.

Elenhant mRC. 91 riir-toH by Allan Clarke, was an exceptional thing. I have seen nothing like it and don't expect to Sep nrtvthinfr lilro it atrain Cm 40 mimitpe mpn etrvvla ctaaHilv down long fluorescent cdrri- uurs, across vacant lots, round an echoing and empty swim-mine hath rinwn email TiatVic closed doors. They seemed to be looiong purposemuy tor some- nnfi anri whpn thpv fnnnH him they shot him. Again and again and again and again.

The camera always lingered nn the ripari hnHv nitiptlv dar ing as if waiting for it to move. ine nuier always waiKea away with thp camp niiiflr mafoh M. body spoke. Except once when a man approached three youths kicking a ball about and kicked it hank fnr a while Thpn hp seemed to say, Are you Murphy?" The boy answered with casual cheek then yelled "Oh, shit!" and turned to run. Nobody screamed or looked out of a window, the place was like a pravp flnlv harlHnp Inoc w6 complained.

It S3.V.Q hprp thp nlau if nlaw ic thp. wnrrf ic pallpri Rlpnhant hp. cause there is a saying that the Troubles in Northern Ireland are as easy to ignore as an elephant in the iivine rnnm Plays about the Troubles, on me omer nana, are extremely p.asv to iennrp. Vnn kppn vmir PVPC clfirmpH anri flinch Unity ever, call a play Elephant and you nave an audience ana, once they are watching this, thPV Will tint Ctnn thnuoh it tirie a most undramatic drama. The murders were as pas sionless as posting letters, something done without a backward glance.

Sometimes there was an element of puzzle as to who was the killer and who the victim but it made little differ ence. They were both dead men. studio-brats elevating their tacky deals through self-aggrandising language. A movie doesn't just get the go-ahead: now you 'greenlight' a picture. And Charlie doesn't just say a star has committed himself to a script: he says, "This morning a man came to The religious image is vital and is deliberately echoed at the end of the play when Bobby is about to junk the prison film in favour of a dire-sounding radiation movie.

Mamet is not simply settling an old score with Hollywood. What he is saying is that the seats of power are occupied by lonely, frightened, insecure men who use use bombast as a defence and who are comically prey to suggestion. In Kaufman and Hart's Once in a Lifetime the studio-boss promotes the first person to tell him the emperor has no clothes: so here Bobby is wide-open to' attack by a temporary secretary. He gives her the radiation-novel to read as a means of getting her into bed; but his sense of self is so weak that when she finds in it echoes of modern angst he goes UL SAYER, like Sal- Rushdie's heroes in the more celebrated Satanic Verses. dropped out of a clear blue sky on Tuesday night to win the coveted Whitbread Award and the even more coveted sum of 20,000 Britain's richest literary prize.

For the publishing world it was as unexpected as Mr Sayer is unassuming and temporarily overwhelmed. Beyond the bright lights and the temporary tame, the psychogenatnc staff nurse in Orchard ward at Clif ton hospital, York, immediately earns another 156 a page for his sparse, moving and beautifully written 128-page first novel. Even Mr Rushdie would admire that In the world of literary prizes which seem to demand ever lighter and more superficially stimulating subjects The Comforts of Madness is the odd man out; which may explain its and success. The serious and reverential treatment of the interior world of Peter, a catatonic patient who has turned himself into a human receiving apparatus, transmitting nothing but totally articulate behind his soundless wall, is unfashionable, wholly unpretentious and, many publishers would believe, all but unsaleable. Although it won the little-known Constable trophy a biannual competition for the best unpublished novel in the north of England, and 2,000 (half from northern regional arts councils) Constable only printed 2,000 copies.

Today they are chirrupping over champagne and talking of reprints and big coin Like most first novels it is success born of failure and it almost fell at every hurdle along the way. Sayer's first effort, a short day account of life in a male admission ward, was, he admits, "desultory and quickly and rightly rejected." The second, he was told by an agent, "had promise but was not exciting "I filed it in a drawer and quietly grieved for six months." The third, successful attempt, came in 1987 when he had just returned or rather drifted back to nursing following a five year break when he took over a small corner shop in York with his wife. It was not a he left and worked as a storeman at W.H. Smiths (who still haven't deigned to stock The Comforts Of Madness) and then as a factory hand. Sayer wrote bis unsentimental account in his bedroom in complete secrecy over seven months.

By the time it was finished, he says, "I vowed never to bother again." That was then. While he went part-time at the hospital following its July publication, he now intends to leave the nursing profession completely. Not through dissatisfaction at what he calls "the great silent world" of the mentally ill, but to pursue his writing. "I shall continue to write about this world because I know it and there is so much more to say." Sayer and one believes him wholly says he never wrote to make money. When he left school at 17 with 10 O-levels he was happy to be a shopkeeper.

Writing seriously came violas, similarly exposed in a variant of the same melody later in the movement. That was typical, and the quality of string-playing consistently provided a sure foundation for what we have much more regularly come to take for granted in London orchestral playing, the virtuosity of wind, brass and percussion. At the end of each symphony, Ashkenazy made even more than usual of the ritual of getting solo players to take individual bows: they certainly deserved it. It was a good decision to end the series on that most popular of the symphonies, the Fifth. True, the rumpus at the end of the finale may on the face of it show the composer at his most vulgar in expressing Soviet optimism, but as we now know that was a deception.

Ashkenazy brilliantly conveyed the equivocal quality in that final outburst, just as he had done with so many of the equally equivocal oxymorons, sweet-sour, comic-tragic, which lie at the very heart of all the symphonies. So the Ninth Symphony may start as though Shostakovich is seeking to give us bis equivalent of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, but the melancholy waltz of the second movement compounds the irony, and turns genuinely tragic. Ashkenazy then took the Presto scherzo faster and more brilliantly than I can ever remember, balancing it deftly between the demonry of a tarantella and exhilarating jollity. ll MMman HOW do you enjoy King Lear? This, it seems to me, has to be the starting-point both for a composer projecting an opera based on Shakespeare, and for a producer trying to stage the result, and for the audience and critics. Music is buoyant and energetic, life-enhancing and ultimately optimistic.

It also distances, qualifies and tones the material. Music is pleasure and enjoyment; it is not pain and loathing. Above all music is destined for familiarity, which means that however frightening it seems to start with it soon becomes an effect. And Lear is not just a tale for the telling, a horrific but diverting account of family strife that would make a juicy Sunday newspaper story. Such awful things have always been, and are still being done.

The answer is you do not enjoy Lear unless you enjoy understanding pain as well as love. In Lear truth is not beauty. The play is a morality about the nature of human existence, our nature, and it can move us because it mirrors so many truths. The tale signifies in itself, but the text has such layers and possible qualifications in the refinement of staging, that it is misleading to try and distil the essence as composer and librettist must. Naturally Anbert Keimann.

whose 1978 German operatic Lear has come into the ENO's rep for a short season, and his librettist Claus Henneberg approached their task with caution and respect. Much of Reimann's music is relentlessly savage, yet it carries the text at the expressionistic vocal extremes with great skill. The violence and cruelty are amply prepared and demonstrated using a wall of brass instruments on the left of the down like a ninepin. Mamet's prime joke is that the big tycoons are scared witless. But he captures their fear in dizzyingly funny and blithely accurate language.

One minute Bobby and Charlie are telling each other they are in the "people the next they are gloating on success as a form of revenge. The worst insult Charlie can pay his old chum is that his name will become a punch-line in this town. And, when warned to watch what he says about the secretary, he replies, "It's only words, unless they're true." That is the core of the play: language as a form of camouflage rather than a means of. communication. What makes Mamet fascinating, however, is his sneaking regard for what he satirises.

He found something heroic in the sales-pitchers of Glengarry Glen Ross; and here there is a residual sympathy for these valueless go-getters whose idea of making a movie is to repeat last year's formula. Mamet attaches to the play an epigraph from Pendennis which en- ma but add no tt wind, thunder, fire, are my. daughters," while the composer selects an upbeat rhythm for a storm cabaletta. The problem is that Reimann's opera is heavily dependent on its source both for dramatic structure (however cleverly Henneberg has adapted from Shakespeare) and for character. Motives are never argued, and the music tells us they are always of the simplest and blackest apart from the relief and self-conscious pathos afforded by the Cordelia and Poor Tom material.

The result is impressive but not engaging. The opera is an illustration of a dramatic caricature, but beside the Shakespeare original its meaning is shallow. Well, so are Bellini and Gounod's versions of Romeo you may say. Lear, however, has to be a different order of challenge and responsibility. There is nothing in the opera not already in the play to which the music, however well crafted, adds.

And the adaptation poses big problems for the passage of time and scenic form. The second act is far less impressive than the first, rather as Verdi's Macbeth degenerates structurally after the snappy brilliance of its first two acts. The denouement is hurried, and one begins to notice how plodding Reimann's rhythmic imagination is. Blank verse can plod too, but not in Lear where it is offset with prose. The Fool (Eric Shilling) hanging himself rather clumsily at the end of the first act means few spoken lines to relieve the second.

Reimann counterpoints furious brass raspberryings, clatter on snares and bongos and snarling snaring fanfares with studied stillnesses for flute and alto clarinet, winding keenings that lead inspiringly into song for the fine counter PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFERY zingers; and, like Dave King in American Buffalo, he shows how Mamet benefits from a vaudevillian sense of timing. Colin Stinton is equally impressive as Bobby: he exudes the insolence of office and a brash sexual confidence while suggesting there is something hollow behind the bravura. And Rebecca Pidgeon (in what is now the old Madonna role) plays the secretary with just the right emotional directness. She is all spirituality with a hint of metal; and it is a wonderful Mamet irony that she is undone by a tiny verbal slip. But then this is a play about the way we use words: a dazz ling American comedy about a world where language is fatally out of synch with emotion.

stage and a battery of percussion on the right (both behind black gauzes) in Eike Gramss's fiercely primitivist Krefeld staging. The acting teeters on the edge of mannerism, and unfortunately in the central case of Monte Jaffe's Lear topples over. Unlike the scrupulous and consciously aged and fatigued Fischer-Dieskau performance on record, Jaffe continues to cleave through the storm of musical effects with his glutinous singing like an icebreaker right to the end. And his interpretation has an undignified relish and skittish energy that pervert the intention If any musical age could rise to the challenge, this surely would be it both of source play and of opera. What a pity ENO imported a 'star' performance to sit so uncomfortably beside the superb ensemble work from the company regulars, when a veteran local like Thomas Hemsley could have done the task so much more aptly.

If any musical age could rise to the challenge, Reimann must have thought, this surely would be it. Serial technique lends itself to fundamental effects in which horrid order is wrought from chaos. The first act of Lear builds towards storm and hovel with assurance. It is hard listening in sheer volume, yet exhilarating too. Less engaging are the vocal lines.

But it is equally difficult to imagine Verdi's poet Italianising "Rumble thy bellyfull! Spit, fire! Spout rain! Nor rain, Direct: Rebecca Pidgeon dorses those who instead of standing aloof from life take some part in the contest And he himself combines a built-in bullshit-detector with a very American admiration for those who get their hands dirty. As a play, it whips along zip-pily for an hour-and-three-quar-ters. And, although it might have been even more effective in the Cottesloe, Gregory Mosher's production colonises the big Lyttelton space and gets excellent performances from the cast of three. Alfred Molina is a particular joy as the would-be big-time Charlie suggesting a mixture of elephantine greed and naked cunning. He brilliantly balances verbal bluster with, in the last act, a capacity to come up with tmth-tewng Michael Billingtoh hails David Mamet's dazzling new satire, Speed-The-Plow, which opened last night at the Lyttelton Hollywood or Dust Edward Greenfield sees Ashkenazy and the RPO bring the Shostakovich festival to a magnificent climax at the Festival Hall The blazing finale Paul Sayer: "My intentions were purely literary" television companies who make selective, biased investigations into the difficult world of the psychiatric nurse and the people he or she cares for?" I have looked at the ques tion from a hundred different he told the Nursing Times last year "and can find no satisfactory answer.

The patients have the right to speak and yet are the most silent of the constellating groups. If my book can shed some imaginative light on the still publicly-feared world of the mentally ill then possibly my efforts might be justified." When the book was published a note went up on the hospital notice board. Someone scrawled "I've often thought about writing" below it That, if anything is the message of Paul sayer experience, because it allows everyone to believe that good literature is tor everyone and by everyone. The comforts of Madness is published by Constable at 9.35. The Ninth came in the last concert as a prelude to the Fifth, pointfully following on from the culminating work of the preceding concert, No 13, the song-cycle symphony Babi-Yar on poems by Yevtu-shenko.

That sequence underlined the way that Shostakovich in three very different symphonies, the epic No 8 as well as Nos 9 and 13 adopts a very similar overall structure, a five-movement scheme with the last three movements linked. If the finale of No 9 no doubt in defiance of Beethoven's example for all its excitement comes dangerously near vapidity, the equivocal resolution of No 13 is quite different, a strangely muted, thoughtful tribute to great men and their careers from Galileo to Tolstoy by way of Shakespeare, Pasteur and Newton. There spoke the genuine Shostakovich, as Ashkenazy's performance made very clear, helped by fine singing from John Shirley-Quirk as soloist with the men of the Brighton Festival Chorus. Dmitri Alexeev was earlier the sparkling and expressive soloist in the seemingly trivial Piano Concerto No 1 (another equivocal work), and the full Brighton Chorus sang with necessary lustiness in the patriotic final section of the early Symphony No 2, The October Revolution, a work which pointed forward even in 1927 to the sweet-sour contrasts which became so characteristic of the composer. WATCHING David Mamet's brilliant Speed-The-Plow at the Lyttelton, I was reminded of a line from T.

S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes: "I gotta use words when I talk to you." For Mamet's comedy is much more than an anti-Hollywood satire: it is actually, like all Mamet's plays, about the gap between language and feel-ing'and about the way we use words as a vaporous smokescreen. Obviously Hollywood, where Mamet had a rough experience with About The Night, provides the mainspring. And in the beginning he gets some high-flying comedy out of a producer, Charlie Fox, delivering a gilt-edged package deal to an old chum, Bobby Gould, who is now a studio head of production. The project, a buddy-buddy prison movie with a major star attached, has everything Hollywood wants "action, blood, a social theme." But, just as in American Buffalo, Mamet showed us a group of petty heisters talking big, so here he shows us the new IF AT the start of Music From The Flames last autumn it seemed a very long journey ahead, ploughing through all 15 Shostakovich symphonies in three months, it has certainly not worked out that way.

Of all the many series we have had this season, it is the one that has taken off most surely, excitingly so in a way that has rightly attracted consistently large audiences. For the last four symphonies on the list we returned from the Barbican and the LSO under Rostropovich to the original venue at the Festival Hall with Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. In the last two concerts they concluded the Odyssey in triumph, with Music From The Flames made to blaze more brightly and fiercely than ever. I cannot remember ever having heard playing of quite this quality before from the RPO even in the halcyon days of its founder. Sir Thomas Beecham.

There was a time when with hard-pressed London orchestras, the great long-legged second subject of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony would unfailingly show up impreci-sions of violin ensemble, undermining the necessary purity. On this occasion the radiance of RPO violins In that most ethereal of Shostakovich melodies was matched by the comparable purity and sweetness of the.