The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 34

THE GUARDIAN Friday February 24 1989 Anatomy of a lout THEATRE: Michael Bllllngton on a strangely un-lrish Juno And The Paycock at the National and Tennessee Williams in Brighton Tragedy in a Dublin that never was 34 ARTS GUARDIAN Gill's production Gary Oldman is the star of a television film with some uncomfortable things to say about violence. He tells Adam Sweeting why he's playing a character he despises daughter, Mary, loses her devoted admirer once she is no longer a symbol of pure Catholic womanhood. O'Casey explores his theme in dialogue that has the instinctive eloquence of the Dublin streets; but amongst the key performers, only Tom Hickey's masterly Joxer Daly exudes an authentic Irishness. Taking his cue from the text Mr Hickey gives us a furtive, shoulder-shrugging figure in hobo's hat tailed coat and hobnail boots. But instead of coating Joxer in scuttling charm, Mr Hickey reminds us that he epitomises mendacity, disloyalty and when, for instance, he tears up his daughter's book it seems a momentary flash of anger rather a mark of his petty, ignorant destructiveness.

Linda Bassett as Juno has the right suggestion of over-burdened domesticity-, when she fries up a breakfast or puts the kettle on the hob she makes you feel that she has been doing this all her life. But when it comes to the great final plea to, "Take away this murdherin' hate an' give us Thine own eternal I miss the piercing sense that she is speaking for a generation of Irish mothers. The Boyle family, with the exception of Linus Roache's haggard Johnny, seem oddly English: it is the minor roles, including Pauline Delaney's grieving Mrs Tancred and Fabian Cartwright's desperate suitor, that breathe the spirit of Dublin. The result is a production with many good touches (I shall not forget the way the characters sit transfixed in front of the horn gramophone as if mesmerised by its novelty) but one that lacks a sense of rooted authenticity. O'Casey, I suspect demands meticulous realism and totally Irish casting to convey the sensation of tragedy being spun out of the mundane texture of everyday life.

This is a Dublin Autolycus stuffing bread into his pocket and wrapping money in a filthy kerchief; and there is a malevolent glee about the way he urges Mrs Madigan to re-possess the Boyles' gramophone. When Mr Hickey goes off-stage you feel he exits not into the wings but into real life. About the other major performances my feelings are neutral. Tony Haygarth's Jack Boyle, with Popeye sailor-pipe stuck jauntily in his mouth, captures the character's swaggering fecklessness. But Mr Haygarth is too much the love-able drunk and too little the cruel father and husband: Tom Hickey as Joxer Daly anything I don't really believe called the Inter City Crew (motto: "We came in peace, we leave you in with ambitions to lead a united army of British thugs into Europe to take on the locals.

Rival gang-leaders, however, dispute his right to be 'Top Boy', and carnage ensues. It's simple and in-timidatingly effective. For Oldman, thespian phenomenon turned movie star thanks to Prick Up Your Ears, Sid Nancy, and a batch of forthcoming movies including Martin Campbell's Criminal Law, Bex represents many of the things he detests most. "I hate all that behaviour," he muses, a slight quietly-spoken figure perched on a sofa in his agent's office. "That kind of treatment of women and pub life it's my idea of hell, sitting in a noisy, smoky pub." The BBC originally hadn't dared to ask Oldman if he would be interested in the part because they assumed he was now too big a star and would be too expensive.

"They haven't got any money to give you," splutters Oldman. "But you do it because you believe in the piece and you want to work with Alan Clarke. Unfortunately quality and money don't sit very happily together. I saw Michael Caine the other week on TV, and he said (adopts Michael Caine voice) 'I soon realised that to maintain a very high standard of living I had to do a very low standard of movie', which I thought was a very funny line. But I haven't really lost my integrity.

I can't do anything I don't really believe in." Al Hunter, a mild man with a bouncer's build, spent a year researching The Firm, talking to ex-gang members and policemen engaged in anti-thug operations. He discovered that the gangs comprise a broad social cross-section, including quite a few ex-army and even a doctor in the real-life Inter City Firm. But when all the fact-finding and analysis has been done, it's Oldman's performance, and his relationship with his wife, which makes the film work as drama. His wife, as it happens, is played by his real-life wife Lesley Manville. "We went up for the parts completely independently," Oldman explains.

"We've worked together before, they Juno and the Pay- cock at the Lyttelton is a cool, clear and by no means unenjoyaDle version of O'Casey's great tragi-comedy. What it lacks can be very simply stated: the sound of authentic Irish voices in some of the major roles and a set that exudes the decaying seediness of a Dublin tenement in 1922. The latter is crucial. North Dublin in O'Casey's time had a higher death-rate from disease than Calcutta and 20,000 families lived in one-room apartments. This was the key to the Dublin Gate Theatre's recent revival which showed the Boyles living in a world of broken windows, peeling walls and torn horsehair chairs.

It was not picturesque squalor but a reminder of how deprivation destroys personal values. Deirdre Clancy's set at the Lyttelton lacks that sense of an occupied ruin. In the background is a misty vision of Georgian Dublin: in the foreground is a modestly pleasant two-room apartment with a communal tap on the landing and stairs leading up and down to neighbouring floors. But its pristine neatness undercuts the second-act transformation when the Boyles, believing they have come into money, import plush furniture. It also blurs the point that O'Casey's play is as much a Socialist attack on ruinous poverty as it is a humanist lament over internecine violence.

It is a great play precisely because it shows the characters being stripped of their illusions in just the same way as the Boyles' home is denuded of possessions. Jack Boyle, the strutting paycock, loses the inheritance that he hopes will keep him in parasitic clover; his wife, Juno, loses her son to the fevered cause of Irish Nationalism; and her impregnated In praise "MW7THAT is the ideal stage J4 shape? I don't believe there is one perfect form. But watching David Thacker's Young Vic touring production of The Glass Menagerie at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, I kept thinking how much it would have gained by being seen in the round. In the handsome old Brighton theatre the audience is disposed in tiers according to income and class: in the circular Young Vic democracy prevails and we all share the same experience. That.I suggestis a major factor in Mr Thacker's recent triumphs with Ibsen, O'Neill and Miller.

His nroduction of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie is poignant true and honest without disguising some of the play's flaws. The preparations for the Gentleman-Caller, whom Amanda Wingfield hopes will redeem her crippled daughter's existence, seem unduly protracted. Williams's writing occasionally lapses into a THE reason violence gets written about so often is because it fascinates people, says Al Hunter, who was fascinated enough with it to write The Firm. "If anybody says it doesn't fascinate them, I think they're lying. It frightens and fascinates you, and that's why we have to explore it in our own minds or through television or through any media." The Firm was three years in the making, has eventually come to the screen despite a tabloid smear campaign ('BBC Boot Out Sick Play On Soccer Yobs etc), and it tells the story of a gang of hardcore soccer hooligans who pursue their fixation with "the buzz" of physical combat to its logical limit Director Alan Clarke took Hunter's original two-hour script and has pruned, honed and sharpened it into a brutal, streamlined piece of drama.

Vital to the film's stinging impact is Gary Oldman's portrayal of Clive 'Bex' Bissell, estate agent and loving father, during the week, ultraviolent thug at weekends. Bex is the leader of an only-just-fictional squad of hooligans Si wa mm 'Mil 4J WILLIAM HURT of fragile fantasy Gary Oldman 'I can't do used to call us The Lunts at the Royal Court that was the famous acting couple before the Oliviers. I love working with her, and a lot of the barriers for playing man and wife were got rid of. "Acting is the only job I now where you can go for a read-through and not know someone, and by 11.30 you've got your tongue down their throat." Despite Alan Clarke's intention that Bex should be "not merely unsympathetic" but Oldman plays him with an intelligence and delicacy of touch which inevitably draws you into speculation about motives and loyalties. Why should a successful estate agent with a home and a young family need to go fighting with knives and clubs? How does a boyhood fixation with West Ham United become transformed into barely-controllable aggression in adulthood? What is wrong with Bex? "I could sort of understand him, but not in an intellectual way," says Oldman.

"I think acting isn't a cerebral thing, it's a felt thing. You can talk the thing to death, then Alan GEENA DAVIS. PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFERY the character's own point of view: not as a cracked Southern belle wreathed in gossamer pathos but as a woman clinging tenaciously to her past Buoy-: ant springy and throatily seductive, Ms York's is a beautiful study of a woman cocooned in a romantic dream. Suzan Sylvester brings to Laura both the right introverted prettiness and a wonderful look of doomed resignation when her hopes are crushed. Daniel Flynn is also excellent as the Gentleman Caller he treats Laura with punctilious courtesy while making it clear that he belongs to the external world of movers and shakers.

And Richard Gamett plays brother Tom (Williams's spokesman) with a suitable blend of mutinous anger at his imprisoning home and guilty remorse at having abandoned it. After Brighton, The Glass Menagerie tours to Buxton (March 14), Bristol (March 20) and Birmingham (March 27). scented lyricism. But the play has two overwhelming strengths. One is the feeling that Williams had to write it that he was compelled to acknowledge both Iris own desire to escape from his suffocating St Louis background and his subsequent guilt The other strength is the way Williams, the poet of frustration, addresses the key theme of his entire oeuvre: the conflict between the martyred, sensitive spirit and the harsh world of material fact Amanda Wingfield, with her dreams of summer picnics and endless suitors, and her daughter Laura encased in her imaginative world of glass animals, may be living off fragile fantasies.

But Williams compassionately suggests that their world is just as valid (and even preferable to) that of knowledge, money and power represented by the upwardly mobile Gentleman-Caller. Susannah York recognises this by playing Amanda from IS; PHOTOGRAPH: KEVIN OAVES the same adrenalin running as the gang themselves. You know it's the climax to the film, the big fight Hopefully you sit back at the end and say 'I understand a bit now', from a safe distance." Oldman cuts in. "I think also that really good drama does that. You find yourself liking the baddies, or even laughing with them, then thinking 'Oh God, why am I laughing with Like Richard HI, a wonderful evening out.

It's not nostalgia, but often when a play is a period piece, you're so many steps removed from it "I think it's good, looking through the window at people like Bex." Intriguingly, football barely features in The Firm. The action takes place in pubs, on the street or in the home. According to Hunter, this merely reflects the facts. "The police have been so successful that they've displaced the problem onto the streets. You can't get rid of the problem, you just push it somewhere else, and to a certain extent you can't blame a police force for trying to push the hooligans somewhere else so it's somebody else's problem.

"But the gangs will say to you 'We're much better for society than a horde of 200 people gallivanting up and down a high street because we pick our targets. We only want to fight people who want to fight us'. It's not random, and they see that as something that elevates them above the normal society of hooligans." Watch it and see. The Firm will be shown in BBC 2's Screen 2 slot at 10.10 pm on Sunday. Peter Brook fcr fr BrooU.

Mylw CiiwtMit, Centre Intkk national ik in' KATHLEEN TURNER Clarke would say, 'Well I don't know what you're fookin' doing but keep doing it'. You feel the buzz." Bex has a quick sense of humour, and he isn't a moron. Humiliating a wavering member of his gang in front of the others, Bex sneeringly reminds him that he has an A-level in sociology, and has just been giving a demonstration of "peer-group One of Clarke and Hunter's points is that thuggery can go hand in hand with affluence and education. "I was shocked when I read this script" Oldman recalls. "I always thought it was teenagers.

I thought unemployment had a lot to do with it and my attitude was well, there's no chance of getting a fucking job, you're so angry, why not go and take it out on each other?" Of course, these aspects of soccer violence have been identified before, but Clarke's film, appearing in the midst of the identity card debate, strikes a timely note. Bex's gang, loudly ordering drinks in a pub and doing Loadsamoney impersonations, aren't freaks or outsiders. They're people you jostle on the pavement or at the bar, every day of your life. They probably painted your house, or sold you your car. Clarke's flair for directing violence is again conspicuous, despite Oldman's claim that "he's a very passive and the final fight sequence pumps up teeth-clenching quantities of adrenalin.

Is Clarke's delicate' balance of terror and excitement too glamorous? "No," protests Hunter, "that's a very important part of the film. You go in there with Bract by i br -ran Tiff i 0 kn The OM MuMum of Monday a film that should please everybody -David Mamet's Things Change', a comedy of some grace and style by one of America's most intriguing new DEKEKMAIXXHM-THEGUARD1AN "A subtle, sensitive and leisurely picture moments of dry humour' Barry Norman, BBC TV FILM '89 THEATRE-SHEmElD WINNER BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR NEW YORK FILM CRITICS CIRCLE 0E MANTEGNA DON AMECHE CKEATHtNK THKA.THAI.KS Scottish Chamber Opera Enskmbi.k TBHmmHM Ttarapert. Alterc Oriv. OlMflow) Mtfc twidy Mtfi April t.OO pm CMS, UM (Cowantan mHoM) fcwm THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, VvWMJWWMHUKr-K A comedy about two guys who take the mob for a ride. COLUMBIA PICTURES presents a FILMHAUS fsoduction DON AMECHE JOE MANTEGNA "THINGS CHANGE" ROBERT PROSKY RUIZ KMAN MAMFT tfft rm, riinnnm 1 lift 41 SSSrSS? Mafow IF? Tfcoi-rouii (HEASffl SI COUMBU TOSTAB HUB OM I GIL- A- TRACED I.E COttCOUMArCTXSKUSnaKUmrciGBMClV SMGMWLWCEKASDANr, SPHYLUSCMLEwjWiNMAIXDVlCH "IJMNCEKASDANCHARLBOT twrati- not K3tucrtnixrats 3 hWffr nr MM I.