The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 35

ARTS 35 New York is buzzing over the latest screen performance I Grand passion of the green blob by Britain Anthony Hopkins, Weathcrby reports Emter Hammibal the Caojniibal THE GUARDIAN Friday February 15 1991 i say 'Cut' and I'd say, This is a ings is permitted. The interview has surprising and horrifying consequences. Vincent Canby, film critic of The New York Times, wrote yesterday that The Silence Of The Lambs was a "swift, witty and watch the young local body builder eating his way through platefuls of protein and lick her lips: "succulent steaks, juicy chops, drooling pies, building him up, plumping him out, making him huge, glossy, inexhaustible. Aaah." Oddly enough the YMCA seems neither particularly young nor mate and nobody mentioned Christianty though Miss Perriam suggested a Las Vegas style chapel for spur-of-the moment marriages. It does seem, though, a welcoming place for old age pensioners Arthur got rid of his chest Two of these, the Major and Mrs Robinson were much the best value in Welcome to Surbiton (40 Minutes, BBC2).

In his bright blue suit, the Major briskly leaves his old folks' home, his pin-ups and the picture of a lady he once knew in Paree, fed up with this place, it's just like a bloody and heads for the YMCA. Paris seems to have had a profound effect on the Major who tends to cry "Sante" and "Bravo, Messieur" and join in the chorus of There's a Small Hotel. "Pretty women and music and a sense of duty have kept me going." Mrs Robinson is a widow. "We were coming back from Yugoslavia and he had a heart new suspense thriller" and was "pop nun maKing oi a mgn It could "well be the first big hit of the Hannibal, said Canby, "as grandly played by Mr Hopkins, is a most seductive psycopath. Anthony Hopkins describes Dr Lecter as "a dark angel of Hopkins as Hannibal: 'great fun' death" and had "great fun" playing him.

"For an actor it is a great chance to play a game, to flirt with something that's so diabolical, knowing it's only a fiction. During that scene where i was tearing the guys face off" he does this with his teeth "we had a rubber bone, and I had one end and director Jonathan Demme had the other. And Jonathan would a I EET Dr Hannibal Lecter, HoUywood's latest of evil. Hanni bal the Cannibal, as the psycho pathic serial killer is Known, makes such Hollywood figures of horror as Dracula, Norman Bates in Psycho or even Stephen King's author-torturer in Misery seem quite tame. The Silence Of The Lambs in which he appears opened in America only yesterday St Valentine's Day but the murderous character whose favourite meal is human flesh and blood with chianti is already a favourite topic.

Not even Godfather III received such a word of mouth build-up. This is partly because the film is based on an already famous best-selling chiller by Thomas Harris and partly because British actor Anthony Hopkins, better known for his screen roles in Magic, The Bounty and The Good Father, brings such conviction to the role. Psychiatrist Dr Hannibal Lecter is intellectually brilliant, articulate, and culturally impressive with perfect manners. He is also completely immoral and an evil genius held in solitary confinement after an attack on a nurse who lost part of her face "We managed to save one of her eyes," FBI agent Jodie Foster is told. On the principle that it takes one to catch one, she consults him about another serial killer known as Buffalo Bill, who is still at large.

Hannibal the Cannibal is put in a straitjacket and kept behind inch-thick bulletproof glass before any direct contact with other human be Culture Val Arnold-Forster MY FRIEND the history teacher worries about her future. She perked up considerably with the National Curriculum; now she is back to wondering if she should not retrain for primary. What really cheered her up was listening to last week's Analysis (Radio 4, Thursdays and Sundays), a discussion between three eminent historians. Led by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, into discussing the value of history teaching, the three men were careful not to over-sell their subject The Regius professor was especially cautious: he talked of the danger of collective amnesia, also of history being a delicate subject, so delicate that, apparently, they are considering not teaching it at all in Kenya. The man from Sheffield did not want to construct a social theory, and thought of the study of history as a civilising (and enjoyable) activity.

The man from Ruskin was firmer: to be ignorant of the Mi Nancy Banks-Smith RED DWARF (BBC2), now in its fourth orbit, told the touching love story of Kryton, a mechanoid who looks like a giant, half-chewed, rubber-tipped pencil and Camille, a green blob who looks like something that's dropped out of the Sphinx's nose. As this is how their colleagues describe them, you can see that what the crew lack in charm they make up in candour. But Kryton is, of course, ad mirable and love is wonderful and it was St Valentine's Day. Red Dwarf is like Star Trek, not so much beamed up as sent up. This insanitary craft is crewed by Scouser, a Twit and a black cat, who was transmuted by space rays into, well, a black cat really.

As Kryton said to Camille, when bringing her aboard. "You'll like them. Well, some of them. Well, one of them. Maybe." camille is, in tact, a chame leon blob, capable of turning into each man's heart's desire.

A luxury model android with a slide-back sunroof head tor Kryton, a scouser for the Scouser. a Sloane for the twit and, in the case of the cat, a mirror image of himself. But Kryton, who would be the noblest Roman of them all if he had the sandals for it, loves Camille for herself alone. Furthermore he has watched Casablanca. Several times.

He knows what is expected of a romantic lover. He also knows the script. He says "We both know you belong to Hector" (Hector is another blob). "We'll always have Parrot's" (Parrot's is the Red Dwarfs night club. Do I have to tell you "I'm no good at being noble, kid, but it's pretty obvious that the problems of two blobs and a droid don amount to a hill of beans in this crazy cosmos." Heavens, it was affecting.

And funny. I particularly liked "Something tells me you're not really a doctor." "What gave it away? The fact that I have gone fully 10 seconds without patronising you?" Now which of the writers, Grant or Naylor, has been to the doctor's lately? Wendy Pernam, author of Sin City, lives in Surbiton where sin takes a decorous turn. "Oh, look, this is the road where I researched those trans-vestites for one of my novels. They had these social evenings every Thursday," or "She handed them this set ot towels, hers were pale lilac and his were midnight blue. Apparently thev were meant to go and have a bath.

Well, they'd had a bath. I mean, you wouldn't turn up for a wife swapping filthy dirty, would you?" The hum spot oi surbiton, according to Miss Perriam, is the YMCA where she can sit Kathryn Hunter a figure of demonstrable evil PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFEHY and cock ups Too slickly executed hell oi a way to make a living, isn't irr The Silence Of The Lambs has already caused such a sen sation among horror-loving American film-goers that Orion Pictures is coping it will neip the company to gain a breathing space in which to solve its pressing financial problems and avoid a buy-out On Wednesday it led all studios with 19 nominations for Oscars for four films it has fi nanced or distributed: Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves, Woody Allen's Alice, Open Doors and Cyrano de Bereerac. But a big box-office blockbuster would be even more useful to the company and the Silence Of The Lambs has all the ear marks of such a success for the struggling studio. The box-office prospects have overshadowed tne Dig question raised by the film of how much physical horror cinemagoers are willing to see depicted even if rubber bones are substi tuted for the real thing. Thomas Harris, a tormer newspaperman who also wrote another best-selling thriller, Black September, that was made into a movie, has signed a mula-miuion dollar contract with a New York publisher pre sumably to louow tne nuttier horrific adventures of Hannibal Cannibal.

A student of serial killers and psychopaths, the author refuses to give any in terviews concerning his studies or obsessions, Hannibal Lecter, after all, can be pleasant com pany even in tne imagination. Tne silence ur i ne Lambs is released in Britain on May 31. intelligent one; the conspiracy theory was the one that attracted the less educated. Certainly, conspiracy theorists are unappealing. That Scottish Muslim fanatic pro vided an unpleasant rant about worldwide Jewish economic and mutual power.

Odd that he, who personifies the nastiest stereotype of both Scotland and islam, snouid believe in tne wicked Jewish stereotype. Odd, too, that antt-seminc tracts sell well in Japan, where there are virtually no Jews. Conspiracies do exist, of course. Not only Irangate, but also, according to devout cock-up man Joe Haines, the Tory Cabinet ministers who withdrew their support from Mrs T. One journalist distinguished between conspiracy theorists who simplify events and conspiracy researchers who look for complexity.

And indeed investigative journalism thrives on conspiracy. But it was John Spurling's splendid epic portrait of the British Empire, broadcast some years back, that was the most convincing argument for cock-up analysis. An enjoyable, lively programme, though a pity that it did not deal with the events leading to the Gulf wan cock up or conspiracy, and if so, whose? Kaaio 5's venture into Historical studies, A Century Remembered, mirrored the hotchpotch nature of this channel with a mixture of memories and comments from the beginning of the century. The Boer War, of course, but also Queen Victoria's diary, the clothes of the time, early motoring, and the royal funeral. It is the first part of a series covering each decade of the century each year so we shall not get to the twenties until 1992.

Pleas ant listening, all the better when it sounds like original archive material the lady describing her Wimbledon sports wear had a period voice impos sible to copy rather than the work of actors. History, so I am always told. is not merely a matter of dates, etcetera. Out of all that historical listening, I can recall only two Memorable Facts: a third of all Cambridge undergraduates in the twenties were reading history, and khaki came in with the Boer war; ana one memorable description: the turn-of-the- century motor-car that "shook like a jelly and rattled like a reaning But who nowadays remembers reapers? Kryton would be the noblest Roman of them all if he had the sandals for it attack in the airplane and died. It was a bit naughty of him wasn't it? The lady at the undertakers' said 'Could I have the address where he and I said 'Halfway to heaven.

I should think. We collected him from the undertakers and took him to the fish and chip shop in Molesey, which was his favourite fish and chip shop, and then we put his ashes by the winning post at Sandown. That's what he wanted. He said can hear them, if I can't see them'." She also swears at him every morning. It was a bit naughty of him to leave her in mid-air.

I must mention Dizzy Heights (BBC1), a children's programme with puppets, because they delivered the cassette to my office on stilts, in the snow and, with catastrophic timing, just as the Prime Minis ter was being shot at with mortars. The first show is about being snowed up, which makes a nice change. Most TV programmes would leave you to suppose it was summer. Radio Times, giving you the gist of it, begins "Winter draws on" and this is sheer naughtiness. The BBC used to have a Green Book listing all the things they must not say, and foremost among these forbidden phrases was Winter Draws On.

crusted crutches, to be a figure of demonstrable evil. And, where this production dwells on the collective brutality of Schill's killing, it has none of the horror of Brook's version where the murderers simultaneously lit up cigarettes in the dark once their task was accomplished. The greatest effects are often achieved by the simplest means. Although I find this production overloaded and over-long, I would not deny the company's prodigious physical skill. They are also individually impressive as well as collectively cohesive.

Simon McBurney's Schill has a moving sense of reluctant complicity in his own destruction and Ms Hunter's Clara, for all my doubts about her pre-emptive moral strike, combines autocratic grandeur with a whim of iron. Al though TheatredeCom-plicite received an ecstatic ovation I feel that in The Visit style dominates content and that Durrenmatt's vision of the sheer ordinariness of evil is finally overlaid by ensemble expertise. Sold successfully. Sold by Sotheby's past of the country in which one lived was to be culturally deprived, a second-class citizen. They went on to discuss the Gulf war in the light of history and to range over all sorts of topics.

They had very different views, but their discussion was always civilised and knowledgeable: they appreciated one another's arguments and even appeared to reconsider their ideas during the course of the discussion; a convincing advert tor tne study ot nistory. These days the value-for- money merchants are snapping at the heels of the BBC: give up on Radio privatise Kaaio keep Radio 2 for nostalgia; stop Radio 3 broadcasting anything but popular classics; turn Radio 4 into rolling news mus inter views. Programmes like Analy sis would never survive in that climate. And, yes, Analysis can be boring ana pompous, nut, especially when Peter Hennessy is in charge, it provides some of the best serious current-affairs journalism. Another programme about history, Cock Up Or Conspiracy (Radio 3, Wednesday), had the writer Gunna Pettersson talking to a variety of journal ists and historians.

The cock-up theory, we were told, was the 1744 human actions: Schill knows his number is up once he sees his fellow-citizens so deep in hock they have no alternative but to kill him. The power of Durrenmatt's play lies in the way ordinary people are transformed by economic necessity into murderers. But this production, directed by Annabel Arden with Simon McBurney, suggests from the start that the townsfolk are Gogolian grotesques: we first see them, with their gap-toothed smiles and angular bodies, collectively juddering as express-trains rattle through their station. We seem to be in the presence of a troupe of accomplished mime-artists rather than middle-European bourgeois. What I miss in this production is the chilling economy that informed Peter Brook's 1958 original.

When Lynne Fontanne's cool and elegant Clara demanded Schill's life it came as a moral shock as if a Dior model had turned murderess. But brilliant though Kathryn Hunter is in the role, she seems from her first entrance, dark-glassed and hobbling on gold-en- humiliation a triumph of actress over matter. Disbelief still has to be well and truly suspended. The playwright is so keen to cut the theatrical ground from our feet, showing us again and again that nothing is quite what it seems, that the play gradually becomes a series of theatrical conjuring tricks. And since there is a sense that Wheeler scarcely knows very much about psychotherapy.

Deceptions becomes a play in which he tries to deceive us and fails. The play's final twist, when it tirns out that Adrian has been affecting a family and personal revenge, reaches the height of ingenuity, but it is also preposterous. Yet Jamie Glover as Adrian, who looks very much at home on stage even though in a part that beggars belief, and Miss Carteret play their erotic scenes with high conviction in Mark Ray-ment's production. And so intent is Mr Glover in keeping sex on his mind that he refers to an entire life spent in "dissemination" when he means dissimulation." Until March 17. able when everything is on such a high plateau.

A certain amount of raunch was provided by the Memphis Horns, who honked and growled their way through songs that sounded too much like the tracks on Otis Redding albums yon skipped over to get to the stuff where he chewed barbed wire. Cray was at his best when he shut up and played his guitar, which he does spectacularly enough to turn all criticism into mere carping. In truth, Cray served up the kind of banquet that gets Michelin inspectors sprinkling stars like salt on an icy road. It wasn't his fault that this palate yearned for egg and chips. Michael Billington on The Visit WHAT is style? A simple way of saying complex things, according to Cocteau.

But watching Theatre de Compli-cite's production of Durren-matt'8 The Visit, acclaimed at the Almeida and now at the Lyttelton, one notices how style can also turn Into a complex way of saving simple things. The ensemble technioue is brilliant but one comes oat hymning the company rather than talking about the play. Durrenmatt's fable is, in fact, stark, chilling and reso nant A legendary plutocrat, Clara zacnanassian, oners the citizens of her hometown a billion pounds in exchange for the life of the grocer, Alfred Schill, who as a young man seduced and jilted her. Obviously the play demon strates the corrosive effects of greed. But it also suggests that justice is purchasable, that democracy is corrupt ible and, intriguingly, that the credit system motivates King's Head Nicholas de Jongh Deceptions WHOEVER heard of a psycho analyst working from an "office somewhere in Mayfair" where the tarts are and apparently seeing clients or patients clean off the streets rather than by referral? I only mention this triviality to draw attention to the bogusness of Paul Wheeler's new play.

Wheeler is dealing with the motives for deception, and his play depends upon the conceit that an attractive middle-aged analyst does not see through a young man, Adrian Wain-wright, who arrives on her couch, protesting impotence and, subsequently, a tendency to lie compulsively. Anna Carteret's calm and collected iniddle-aged analyst so loses her cool that she ends up in a position into which no doctor should reach. Miss Carteret, always believable when playing grand, icy authoritarians, communicates a sense of flustered the reptile house of the London Zoo. Cray, though, looks and plays like a man who prefers a chilled glass of Chablis and a meaningful relationship to a gallon jug of Thunderbird and a swift wang dang doodle. The result is a show high on musical values but low on fun.

He's taken out all the classy bits from the blues and seamlessly stitched them together: turned the soup kitchen into haute cuisine. Along the way he's cot out the drunken attempt to play Born In Chicago in 12 time but, more importantly, the searing solo that rises so gloriously out of the shambles. He undoubtedly plays just as well but it's not so notice-. if Blues without bite Mark Gertler's Portrait of Natalie Denny was sold by Sotheby's in May 1990 for 42,000 -a world-record price for the artist Modern British Irish Paintings (Drawings Sale: 1st MAY 1991 In the past twelve months, Sotheby's has achieved world-record prices for works by 20th-century British and Irish artists such as Sir George Clausen, Roger Fry, Eric Gill, J. Dickson Innes, William Orpen, Stanley Spencer and Christopher Wood.

If you have any pictures by these or other modern British and Irish artists and would like to include them in our 1st May sale, the closing date for entries is 1st March. All enquiries: Susannah Pollen 071-4085388 34-35 New Bond Street, London W1A2AA The world's leading fine art auction house SOTHEBY3 HANDMADE HLMSi-mmASFEN FUM S0CIHYmumAMN MHTBImCOU) DOG SOUP HANDY QUAID RANK WHAIEY CHRISTINE HARNOS Mike Oldfield on Robert Cray SO much praise has been heaped on the young bnt apparently sturdy shoulders of bluesman Rob ert Cray it seems almost superfluous to mention the im-neccable musicianship sheathed in a glistening sheen oi tasteluiness. Bnt herein lies the prob lem: a lot of what makes the blues so great Is its impecca ble bad taste. A cursory ex amination of the average set of lyrics reveals a sackful oneer-lna braggadocio, smutty innuendo and a species of crawling king snake not found in mTHOMAS fOPEancnAlAN Mil I HmMMiiuiiMNMm mammmm FOUNDED.