The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 46

46 ARTS GUARDIAN THE GUARDIAN Wednesday February 8 1989 Going, going, gone with the wind Nancy Banks-Smith Jodie Foster as Sarah Tobias in The Accused is gallant in her way and worthy of respect" Tine taboo Tbuaster Can you make a film about gang rape that is not itself suspect? Jodie Foster and Kelly McGillis, stars of The Accused, argue passionately that they have done just that. Joan Goodman reports have referred to because all these thing cause a very considerable delay. Unfortunately, he is not in a position to help me with the mortgage." (Georg. are you saying you don 't have five million pounds?) Paul put down the phone with a certain controlled violence: "The latest state of play is that so far Mr von Engel" (Oh, it's Mr von Engel now is it?) "has not exchanged contracts." Georg explained, more in sorrow than anger, why no one would lend him 5 million pounds: "It's a beautiful house. When bankers and lending institutions on the mortgage side of the deal saw the picture of that property, I got that kind of side glance and there was a hint of envy all of a sudden.

Envy leaking out in a nasty green colour from the edge of the eye. "Nobody really wants to see me there, you know. Everybody would really enjoy watching me fall flat on my face. It would be the most joyful thing to happen. This sometimes I have realised." (Oh Georg, what a shame'.

I could let you have a fiver till Friday.) The next month he bought Greystone Manor. No, not Greystoke, that belongs to Tar-zan. Personally, I am always glad to see a fish get away. A gripping series, more serpentine than espionage, more blood than murder. An accidental delight of television is when one programme strikes another and causes a sort of illumination.

Elite was a word which cropped up during First Tuesday's (Yorkshire) report on debutantes and was always deprecated or pish-tushed. It was there too in the second story. The Wigan Hold, but spoken with such pride. "We feel like a kind of elite of the wrestling world," said Tommy Moore. "You've got to be fit and strong and intelligent.

If you go anywhere in the British Isles and mention Wigan they will always say 'Riley's gym at the bottom of Pyke St'." Riley's gym is a hut, bare bricks inside, corrugated iron on the roof, a broken window, a torn wrestling mat. It is heated by the sweat of the wrestlers' bodies and the yells of the little lads, crowded on the benches like squabblihgspar-rows. All the faces around the rough walls were curiously intent, youthful and innocent. Tommy Moore and Ernie Riley, both former champions, feel like brothers. It is a word that recurs: "All the lads in the gym looked on each other with a kind of brotherly love." Riley's father founded the gym and he is still a potent ghost: "We come in this gym sometimes and it's as if 'e's sat there, isn't it Tommy?" "It is, it is.

You walk up the path and you exect to see 'im in 'is trilby 'at and smoking 'is cigarette." To wrestle well was rapture. Ernie says, "I could have gone all day. I could 'ave run all day. I could have wrestled all day. I used to feel I was walking on clouds." They are arthritic now but, filmed through glass that made them ghostly, they wrestled as they used to do when they were young.

NOT since Captain Ahab and Moby Dick has there been an encounter like the estate agent and the client in Moving Stories (BBC 2) produced by Steve Poole. "Thar she blows!" the agent cried, sharpening his harpoon on his heart. The client winked his tiny eye and dived. Paul Shoefield, the agent, and Georg von Engel, the client, are much alike. Both favour lively jackets are cuddly and charming can talk the hind leg off a donkey.

The question was which one was going to be the donkey The house was a 10-bedroom spread in Hampstead calculated to cause instant snow blindness with its wall to wall whiteness. Price 4.750,000. Georg, a romantic, thought it looked like Gone With The Wind. His wife, a realist, pointed out that they needed a round bathtub. Possibly for Georg who is round bathtub shaped.

They were living in a serviceable stuccoed semi in Hoddes-don. The full force of that may be lost north of Watford. Hoddesdon is the sort of place that is on the way to somewhere else. Georg explained this, as he explained much else, in an expansive yet somehow impenetrable way: "The people I do business with in continental Europe come to me for the project funding guarantees of one of my trusts to finance their industrial enterprises." (Are you telling me you lend money. Georg?) "When they come to a semidetached house outside of London they say 'Wait a minute! It looks like a dog I need some place they say Foreigners, the French are the worst you know, expect me to live in Buckingham Palace." Paul, like Gypsy Rose Lee's mother, believes that God is love but get it in writing: "He's got all the trappings.

He's got the Rolls-Royce, the attractive wife, who dresses beautifully: He's a very flamboyant man, who has garden parties that, according to him, rival the Queen's and he's just the sort of man you're suspicous of because he may not have a pot." (You astound me. Paul!) Georg was buoyant and twinkling: "I will be in a position to complete all this in if nothing goes wrong about ten days." (Er, what do you mean, Georg, 'If nothing goes wrong'?) A month later and Paul's calls are still full of bonhomie, warmly concerned about Georg's health: "Hello Georg, how are you?" "Some people," he said, putting down the phone, "need a kick up the backside to get them going." Georg disappeared like God in a financial cloud from which emerged obscure utterance: "Paul was honestly upset when he had to learn from me about the practices of institutions as I body on the men even more than the women. We did it first and it bonded the company together. We would finish shooting, and then hold on to each other and cry." Indeed, filmed from the victim's point of view, the scene is as difficult and uncomfortable to watch as Foster says it should be, and it's hard to see how anybody could find it titillating. Jaffe and Lansing originally rejected Foster for the role wasn't that they hated me," Foster recalls with a grin.

"It's just that they were very careful about casting and I had to convince At that stage, they wanted Kelly McGillis to play the victim. Since the film's release McGillis, with considerable courage, has talked to the press and TV about the fact that she herself was raped in a New York apartment six years ago. However, she says her personal history had nothing to do with her decision to play the lawyer rather than Sarah. "Oh the contrary, my own rape was very much why I did this film, very much the reason I wanted to be involved. At the same time, I feel very strongly about not using my work as therapy.

I don't look on it as cathartic and it wasn't. "I had my choice of the two parts and I chose the lawyer because she was a greater challenge to mc as an actress. She goes against everything I believe and am. Certainly I have an emotional reaction to sexual assault and rape crimes and Katheryn doesn't. What I hoped was that the film would help IT SHOULD be difficult to watch rape.

It should make people squirm. I don't think anybody should be comfortable watching that kind of human violence, says Jodie Foster who plays Sarah Tobias in the controversial new film, The Accused. Americans indeed found it difficult and the film had only a modest success there. It's a film in what is coming to seem the house style of its producers, Stanley Jaffe and Sherry Lansing. They make big, bold, sometimes lurid movies "with strong social themes.

-Without A Trace was about child abduction. Their big hit Fatal Attraction was the most fictional and concerned extramarital The Accused is about gang rape. The film takes its cue from an actual event that happened in Massachusetts where a young woman was gang-raped on a pool table by six men while the other patrons of the bar cheered them on. In real life, the case was successfully prosecuted. In the film, which opens after the rape with Foster's Sarah Tobias running bruise- tim herself, albeit of a different kind.

Foster was the fantasy "love object" of the mentally ill John Hinckley, would-be assassin of ex-President Reagan. Says Foster, who has made 26 films in her 25 years: "I think I grew up on this film. It was the first time I ever admitted to myself that I was an actress as opposed to acting being something I was doing until I grew up. I think I've always disassociated myself from that part of me. Acting was a job I did but I wasn't an actress.

"In many ways I feel this is the most important film I've ever done. It wasn't always fun it was often very difficult to do but you don't make movies just because they're fun. There are sometimes deeper reasons and certainly there were for The Accused. I wanted Sarah to be able to prove herself. To be a good witness, to find her own voice, to prove to society that she could rise above their low expectations of her.

If I did that, I'll be happy." According to the critics; she did that and more. The attacks on the film were not aimed at Foster but at the extended rape scene which ends it. Some critics felt The Accused did much the same thing that British tabloid newspapers have been attacked for doing exploiting sex and violence under the guise of condemning them. Foster has no time for such charges. "That scene was the hardest thing for any of us to do, but it was what the whole picture was about and we would have been wrong not to tackle it.

It was hard on every Cottesloe Nicholas de Jongh Roots DOWN in farm labourers' Norfolk, where Arnold Wesker's Roots is set, socialism is regarded rather like a nasty sexually transmitted disease: "Perhaps you can pass it on to someone near you." And as for ideas otherwise known as "high-class squit" well they only cause trouble in the countryside, better to take them back to London where such things belong. This everyday story of country folk, revived for one of the National Theatre's touring productions to schools and colleges, was given a messiah's welcome when first seen in London, at the Royal Court, 30 years ago. It opened doors on worlds from which London audiences and critics had been barred. Here was a play with not only a kitchen sink, but also a tin bath and a labourer's family whose sights in Harold Macmillan's days of "never-had-it-sogood" had not far risen above the poverty level. Applause sounded out loud and pervasive.

Kenneth Tynan found the final act, in which the family sit down to a high tea of sandwiches, trifle and jelly washed down with indigestible home truths, quite the most af- give other rape victims a voice, that it would open up the whole subject for discussion. Rape is a crime that has been hidden too long, been clothed in secrecy. I find it in myself. Even now I still feel embarrassment about discussing it, while intellectually I know I shouldn't." Both actresses, producers Jaffe and Lansing and director Jonathan (Heart Like A Wheel) Kaplan say they wanted to expose the doublethink surrounding rape the way women are expected to behave better than men or be punished for it. If a woman is provocative she "gets what she If a man can't restrain himself, he's excused.

In The Accused prosecutor Katheryn sells Sarah down the river, plea-bargaining the case away for a minimum sentence. Sarah's violent reaction finally forces her to re-think the position and mount a case against the others in the bar who looked on and encouraged the crime. Says Jodie Foster: "It may- seem surprising but in a strange way this was an uplifting film to make. Every day we came home from work knowing we were doing something important. Important on a practical level, to encourage people to report the many rapes that go unreported in this country.

Important to women in opening up a topic which is still largely taboo. And important to men and women both: to encourage them to discuss, to create a conversation." The Accused opens on Friday. February 17. tionate domestic rural comedy. Wesker conjures up a village world in which Beatie's mother gauges time by counting the hourly buses, and dramatises her days with talk of cancer, thromboses and the mental hospital; her sister and her ailing father react with as much suspicion to Beatie's new ways.

But for all Wesker's affectionate evocation of this world, the play itself seems languidly anecdotal, lacking dramatic shape and focus. Further Wesker's idea of culture seems a little high-minded and cerebral. But in Simon Curtis's shrewdly cast production these qualifications are somewhat annulled. The stage setting, by Bunnie Christie, with its huge back wall and stage decorated with kitchen props is redolent of a Royal Court studio production, and conveys a meticulous sense of impoverished, serene rural life. And the performances are as precisely gauged.

Best of all is Pam Ferris's Mrs Bryant, a bulky matriarch, stentorian of voice, a battle axe with a soft edge. Maria Miles's Beatie is full of ardour for a world beyond her family's grasp, even if she does not fully register a sense of shock at being jilted. The supporting cast particularly two fine cameos from Ewan Hooper as a dying old lecher and a gnarled paterfamilias looked to these metropolitan eyes like the real thing. Robin Thornber on the US playwright whose work finds more acceptance abroad Who's afraid of Edward Albee? dand shocked towards a highway where a truck driver picks her up and takes her to hospital, there are problems. Sarah is not your usual Hollywood heroine, or virgin-ally innocent victim.

Instead, she's a tough-talking, pot-smoking, free-drinking (Scotch in the afternoon, no less), overtly sexy waitress. She lives in a trailer with a loser of a boyfriend, drives a car with the licence plates 'Sexy Sadi' (we learn later Sadi is her dog) and never uses a ten-letter word where of four-letter one will do. The Accused's final twist is to have Sarah's case handled by a female prosecutor (played by Kelly McGillis). Educated and aloof, McGillis learns from her interrogation that Foster had had a fight with her boyfriend on the night of the rape and gone to the bar in a reckless mood. She'd smoked some pot, accepted a drink from one of the patrons, flirted and danced suggestively to the juke box.

What, McGillis's attitude implies, did Sarah expect? The Americans critics were sharply divided over The Ac cused but all agreed Foster's performance is sensational. his fault. The later, more experimental works tend to make commercial managements nervous. "I teach a good deal I'm now teaching at John Hopkins University, which I do every January. I lecture, I direct, I write.

I've got a new play called Marriage Play which had its world premiere last year in Vienna, where I've worked for a number of years directing American plays. All being well.it should be on in London by the fall." He's currently writing another radio play for the BBC his last one, Listening, was broadcast in 1976. It seems odd or perhaps it's not that a writer who is as obsessed as Albee with the American dream and its illusory nature is more honoured in Europe than in his own country. "The more complex plays, the ones which tend to be rejected by the commercial audiences in the United States, tend to be more accepted in Europe. Whether that's true in Britain, I don't know.

Do you consider yourself a European?" At a conference in Istanbul a year ago he was told that there had been 30 productions of his plays in the past ten years in the Soviet Union. "The ones that haven't received the proper attention in the US are more popular in Europe." Why is this? He believes it's due to an initial over-reaction by the critics. "We have to create new gods all the time, and you can't have a crowded Pantheon. So you topple some people and raise other people up. It's all arbitrary and artificial.

But the ultimate judgment takes place about a hundred years down the line so it's silly to McGillis Foster herself says she "loved Sarah. She's uneducated and has a hard time expressing herself, but these things aren't crimes. She's unaware of danger and that may be her only crime. But she is gallant in her way and worthy of respect." For the Yale-educated actress, Sarah might seem a difficult character, but Foster says: "I may by education and experience be closer to Kelly McGillis's character, but Sarah is closer to my heart. In some ways I wish I were more like her.

She's intuitive, open. I tend to be more analytical and verbal." What Foster doesn't say, but everyone knows, is that she has some experience of being a vic Revival Edward Albee" worry about it." American theatre didn't really start until after the Second World War, he said. "It's got a very short history and it's had to compete with film and television. As European society has become dominated by film and television the quality (of writing) has declined." Broadway, he said, is unimportant. "It misinforms the American people about what is going on.

Our serious theatre is in the regional theatres and the university theatres. Broadway is for out-of-town people, expense account people seeking forgettable entertainment. It's just commerce, that's all." Because of the investment that's involved? "I don't think it's only that. Well, it does make cowards of knaves, doesn't it?" Albee himself was a producer in the Sixties, staging 120 plays by writers like Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson off-Broadway but, he said, "it got terribly Now he is only involved as an occasional co-producer of his own work. "I just keep writing plays.

When I finish this radio play I have two other plays in my head that I want to do. I just hope that I can keep surprising myself." Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? is at Birmingham Rep until February 25. Maria Miles as Beatie fecting thing he had seen in modern drama. Thirty years on Roots still raises searching, significant questions. Beatie Bryant, the farm labourer's daughter who has been three years in London with a young intellectual lover, returns home to try and convince her mulish, blinkered family that education and culture need not be the prerogative of the rich, the privileged and the sophisticated.

"We want the third rate, we've got it," she cries to her family who subsist on the Light Programme, the Evening News and small lashings of village gossip. By close of play Beatie has been jilted by her young man, but realises, in a fashion which seems rather too glib for comfort, that she now has a good mind of her own. Doors will open. Yet Roots does not face up to the questions it raises. The play is very much an affec LEONARDO DA VINCI ARTIST SCIENTIST INVENTOR HAYWARD GALLERY SOUTH BANK CENTRE LONDON 26 JANUARY -16 APRIL 1989 ADMISSION HN-UI iu.v niUi-SAl SU WHATEVER happened to Edward Albee? It's 30 years since The Zoo Story and The Death Of Bessie Smith first hit New York and London after being premiered in Berlin and we've hardly heard anything of him since the National Theatre revived Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? with Joan Plowright and Paul Eddington, in 1981.

"I've been writing plays fairly constantly," he told me on the telephone from Baltimore, "some of which are commercial disasters, some of which are admired by fellow playwrights." There are now 25 plays, including four adaptations, in the Albee canon; if we only ever see a handful it's hardly piy5hiswoi his les liaisons dangereuses "It remains the most exciting and challenging night out in the West End" Independent 30 Nov. 1983 Ambassadors Theatre West Street. London WC2 Box Office 01 -836 6111 I RuoiJrJ IntttmMon "AN OPERA OF SHATTERING THEATRICAL POWER" Sunday Telegraph TOMORROW. THEN FEBRUARY 16.18,23 MARCH 2 AT 7.30 SPONSORED BY THE BARING FOUNDATION ENGLISH NATIONAL OPERA LONDON COLISEUM ST MARTIN'S LANE. LONDON WC2N 4ES BOX OFFICE 01-836 3161 "A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT ANYONE WITH THE SLIGHTEST INTEREST IN MUSIC THEATRE MUST GO" Evaning Standard "ONE OF ENO'S MOST MEMORABLE NIGHTS" Indaaandant MONTE JAFFE AS LEAR "MASTERLY IN EVERY DETAIL OF VOCAL AND PHYSICAL MOVEMENT" Financial Time "A SERIES OF TABLEAUX OF STUNNING BRILLIANCE A SUPERLATIVE PERFORMANCE" Sunday Ttlortph "UNDER PAUL DANIEL'S BATON, ENO IS PERFORMING AND PLAYING LBAR WITH SPELLBINDING BRILLIANCE" Financial Tim as "A TOTAL TRIUMPH" Time "CONSUMMATELY THRILLING Punch "THE STORM IS THE CENTREPIECE THE MOST WONDERFULLY VIVID STAGING OF ITS KIND I'VE EVER SEEN AT ENO.

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