The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 27

THE GUARDIAN Friday June 2 1989 ARTS GUARDIAN 27 Merchant of irony The Wave, the Viper, and the setting of Red Sun Tally-ho, Palio Michael Billington on the HallHoffman Merchant of Venice which opened last night Nancy Banks-Smith Rhinoceros clan, whose very hair looked mediaeval, said: "If they offer 80 million lire to our 15 million, he sells himself, doesn't he? He may say: 'I fell off, the horse bolted, it was frightened, there was a camera But the contrada members aren't deceived. They give him a good beating straight away and the next day they go after him to find out more." By which time, I imagine, the jockey would be legging it lively back to Sardinia with the horse shouting: "Wait for me." You could smell the heat and the horses, feel the cool of the churches. Viper, coal-black with a wicked eye, skittered his hooves on the polished floor of the church as the priest blessed him. On the morning of the race the beautiful, baked square was empty except for stone horses gaping and pigeons practising flapping their wings. The night before, the clans had celebrated with banquets in the dark evening streets and the leader of the Tower clan had made a speech which reminded you that the Welsh are only Mediterraneans in the rain.

"I have a dream. A horse breaks free, grows and becomes immeasurable, immense, a shining Red Sun. A sun which obliterates, eliminates and cancels out the boundaries of reality. A sun which illuminates the immense landscape of imagination, a dream come true." He meant Red Sun might win. His captain of horse, speaking next, said, and I translate loosely, that there was nothing for it but to nobble the opposition.

He meant Red Sun would not win but he would take damn good care Viper did not either. Under the sun is the skulduggery. The horses taking right-angled turns round the square skidded into the padded stone. Three times round the roaring crowd, stirring it like a spoon. Benito, the favourite, won and Viper, the second favourite, came second because that is the way to bet.

Somewhere on the track a jockey black and red was being beaten black and blue. I never saw Red Sun at all. The producer's name was Darby. cates the play firmly in a Renaissance world. Chris Dyer's pillared set evokes a quinquecento Italy, the Christians are seen as mildly unpleasant rather than downright barbarous, and as much stress is placed on Belmont as on Venice.

Indeed the most radical feature of this production is that it makes Portia rather than Shylock the centre of the play. These days the whole casket-episode is normally seen as something of an embarrassment: a kind of 16th century Take Your Pick. Hall, however, turns the separate bids for Portia's hand into an elaborate ritual. Morocco, Aragon and Bassanio are each preceded by masked attendants and appropriate ethnic music; the caskets are held aloft for inspection by black-veiled ladies; and Portia awaits her selection in solemn dignity with her back to us. Instead of treating Portia as someone tainted by Venetian racism, Geraldine James also plays her, excellently, as a woman of strength and poise.

There is a deep gravity about her inquiry of Bassanio, "Is it your dear friend that is thus in trouble?" Her assumption of male disguise becomes something more than a bawdy joke. And in the trial scene "The quality of mercy" is addressed to Shylock not as a rebuke but as a piece of sweet reason. Something of the play's darker side inevitably goes missing, as does the feeling that it is money as much as passion that spins the plot. But the gain is that the values represented by Portia (generosity and grace) emerge as dominant. And.

uncharacteristically in West End Shakespare, there is a cast that bats almost all the way down. Leigh Lawson's Antonio is less the usual latent homosexual than a figure of inexplicable sadness. Nathaniel Parker's Bassanio is not so much a fortune-hunting opportunist as simply a callow, romantic youth. And Michael Siberry's Gratiano is not so much as offensive loudmouth as a figure whose coarse jokes produce a faintly embarrassed silence. In the end, I don't find it as challenging a production as the Alexander one which pinned down the timeless ugliness of racial hatred.

But it is fleet, agile, and well-spoken and reminds us that there is more than a grain of truth in Gran-ville-Barker's view of the play as a romantic fairy-tale. it salens mh 2 JUNE -5 JULY '89 SOVIET JOURNEY ASEHItS 01 15 CONCERTS Of THE MUSIC AND SOVIET CITIES AND REPUBLICS HELENE OELAVAULT IN LA REPUBLICANS' 1789 1383 JEAN BARRAQUE A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE UTE LEMPER SINGS KURT WEUL GOLEM AN OPERA BY JOHN CASKEN THEWORLO PREMIERE ALMEIDA THEATRE 359 4404 16 17 JUNE AT lO PM A 18 JUNE AT 8 PM The merchant's tale: Dustin Hoffman (Shylock), Leigh Lawson James (Portia) at the Pheonix (Antonio) and Geraldine photograph douglas jeffery SINGS KURT WEILL LONDON OE8UT first thing to be Hall's production of The Merchant of Venice at the Phoe nix is that it is anything but a star-vehicle for Dustin Hoffman. Indeed Mr Hoffman offers a modest, low-key. small-scale Shylock in a production that, unfashionably, treats the play more as a romantic comedy than a near-tragedy. Mr Hoffman's Shylock is not in the heroic tradition of Redgrave or Toole.

In his simple gaberdine and black yarmulka. he cuts a humble figure and his forte is quiet irony. He crosses his eyes in despair when Bas-sanio misses his joke about the water-rats and the pirates; and, even when Antonio spits directly in his face in the course of borrowing 3000 ducats, he smiles patiently and silkily retaliates by brushing imagin-ery specks of dust off Antonio's velvet coat. "Sufferance is the badge of all our trouble." is the keynote of Mr Hoffman's performance. This is a Shylock who is used to hiding his feelings under a benign social mask.

But although Mr Hoffman's humorous approach pays handsome dividends not least in his little smile of triumph to the Duke in the early in the trial scene it also means a loss of the tragic dimension. What goes missing is what Hazlitt, writing of Kean, called "the hard, impenetrable, dark groundwork of the character of Shylock." There is pathos when Mr Hoffman says he would not have given his ring for "a wilderness of monkeys" but there is little exultation in Antonio's downfall, insufficient sense of a "lodged hate" against his old adversary and, strangely, little sense of horror at the injunction he turn Christian. Mr Hoffman receives the news of his enforced conversion stoically but when he says "I am content" you almost feel he means it. In short, this is a perfectly sound performance full of buoyancy and elasticity of spirit: what it lacks is any strong sense of the character's inveterate malignity. This is clearly, however, part of Peter Hall's overall intention to redress the current balance which tends to treat the play as a study in racial persecution.

Where Bill Alexander's recent RSC production brought to mind images of South Africa in its stress on the way racial oppression breeds violent revenge, Hall's production lo Old Red Lion Michael Billington Judgement Day A REMARKABLE event is taking place at the Old Red Lion in Islington: the British premiere of Odon von Horvath's Judgement Day. It is a chilling exploration of moral guilt that anticipates, by two decades, the stark power of Durrenmatt's The Visit: indeed it was written by the Austro-Hungarian Horvath in 1936 just two years before his bizarre death in the Champs Elysee when he struck by a falling branch from a chestnut tree. Judgement Day (translated by Martin and Renata Esslin) is a disquieting fable written in seven Bilder or tableaux. starts in a small-town railway station. The crisis stems from the fact that station-master Hu-detz, momentarily diverted by a kiss from Anna the innkeeper's daughter, fails to switch signals causing a train-crash in which 18 people die.

At the subsequent investigation. Anna perjures herself and is believed: Hudetz's embittered wife, who oversaw the whole incident, tells the truth and is reviled. After four months in custody. Hudetz is released and given a hero's welcome. But THIRD CINtllO Scottish Arts Council TRAINEESHIP IN EXHIBITION ORGANISATION The Scottish Arts Council in conjunction with the Third Eye Centre.

Glasgow, is offering a bursary in exhibition organisation and gallery work. The programme, which will be based at the Third Eye Centre, will provide, through work experience, training in the preparation and presentation ol exhibitions. The traineeshtp will cover an eighteen month period commencing September, 1989. The bursary will be 7.000 non-taxable plus expenses. Applicants should preferably be graduates wishing to begin, or in the early stages a career in art gallery work.

They must be Scottish by birth, education or current residence. For further details and an application form, to be returned by June 16. 19S9. pleaso contact: The Administrator, Third Eye Centre, 303-354 Sauchlehail Street, Glasgow G2 3JD. Tel: 041-332 7521.

THE race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, according to Ecclesiastes. But, Ring Lardner said sombrely, that is the way to bet. Lardner was the best judge of horseflesh at the Algonquin Table. Four Days In Summer (BBC2) was about the Palio horse race in Siena, a romantic, dangerous, fiery affair. Three times round the town square, no saddles, no holds barred.

The BBC's publicity says this series, Under The Sun (coinci-dentally a phrase from Ecclesiastes, the duff tipster), is about people at the cutting edge of a rapidly changing world. Heaven knows what that means. Siena, whose houses lie crusty and worn in the Tuscan hills like bread thrown down in a basket, does not seem to have heard of the rapidly changing world. The Palio has been run there for nearly 1,000 years. The passionate loyalties and enmities of the Middle Ages are still fresh and fed by the race.

Siena is divided into 17 clans or contradas, each with its own church and flag, its own emblem and its own ancient enemy. The porcupine is the enemy of the wolf, the eagle of the panther. For the race their supporters wear doublet and hose and wave the banners of the clan to the beat of kettledrums. Passionate and partisan, the whole place could go on without rehearsal as a backdrop for Romeo And Juliet. "For a time one is in love or jealous, happy or unhappy, but the Palio is a passion only exhausted by death," the leader of one clan said.

Death does not end it: in the graveyard of Siena their emblems, a goose and a giraffe, stand guard over graves. Four Days followed the fortunes in the Palio of the Wave and the Tower clans, who hate each other because they have hated each other for 1,000 years. The horses are a matter of luck, being drawn by lot. The Wave drew the second favourite, Viper, the Tower a pretty outsider with a copper bottom and floating mane. Red Sun.

The jockeys, Sardinian and deeply distrusted, are bought. Sometimes more than once. A jockey can earn 100,000 if he wins and even more if he loses. As the jolly old priest of the you think a Roundhead garrison in Plymouth would be a grim setting for a wedding, you could be surprised by the Mediterranean exuberance of de Chirico's crudely drawn sets and his cheerful furniture and costumes. Indeed, when Elvira's Roundhead lover, Sir Richard Forth, appears in a yellow hat and odd socks and in a style not noticeably different from that of his Cavalier rival, Lord Arthur Talbot, you could wonder if the whole thing isn't being sent up.

But you could also question the ease and elegance of Bellini's vocal line in cirumstances which are politically and religiously oppressive, personally distressing, and generally dangerous. On the whole, the quality of both the visual and musical elements is so high it is best to accept the whole thing as a display of Italian bravura and not ask too many questions. Conductors, of course, are used to being upstaged by the production team. Bruno Barto-letti modestly accepts a secondary role here and seems to have little more ambition than to keep the music moving in a smoothly articulated continuity. With Dimitri Kavrakos as a soothingly avuncular Sir George, Paolo Coni as a firm and dark-sounding Sir Richard, and Gloria Scalchi as an appr-priately mature Henrietta, the Maggio Musicale has assembled a cast which can at least ensure that Bellini is not completely outshone by them.

now open at the above address or I Roundheads on the Med ALMEIDA THEATRE AlMtlDA STREET tONOON Nl ITA o.nti Ol 359 4404 30. 32. 33. 34 JUNE AT 7.45PM Of too atm iitvi IN 'LA REPUBLICAINE' 1749 19S9 SONGS OF THE REVOLUTION Lilian Baylis Theatre 'adursweils rosebert avenue eci oxopficeOI 278 8916 Anna's guilt cannot be suppressed and she arranges a rendezvous with Hudetz under the railway viaduct that is both fateful and fatal. Like Durrenmatt in The Visit, Horvath skilfully harpoons the venomous collective gullibility of the townsfolk: they turn their hatred from Hudetz's savagely jealous wife to the stationmaster himself with promiscuous fury.

But Horvath is also obsessed by the individual conscience and by Hudetz's overwheling hunger for judgement. On the political level (as Ian Huish points out in the Me-thuen edition), Hudetz symbolises Horvath's own guilt about failing to signal the political catastrophe that overwhelmed Germany in 1933. But the play also aspires in a supernatural final scene to religious allegory with Hudetz and a ghostly Anna offering a replay oftheFallofMan. I find the play goes slightly off the rails towards the end: Horvath invests the characters with too much metaphorical cargo. But otherwise this is a masterly play in which shrewd psychology (the tragedy really stems from the upright station-master's callous neglect of his wife) effortlessly meshes with biting social and political comment.

Stephen Daldry's production for Filthy Lucre also has inventive panache. Claudia Mayer's setting is a back wall composed of bourgeois detritus and pocked with sinister peepholes. The acting also veers plausibly between Realism and Expressionism. Stephen Boxer and Matilda Zeigleras Hudetz and Anna respectively suggest civic conscientiousness and teasing recall the details of the concerto so brilliantly and wholeheartedly played by John Bingham with Andrew Davis and the BBC SO. But if the materia, is not very memorable it is certainly convincing enough in performance and, even though Brahms does intrude here and there notably in the slow movement and in the main theme of the finale Stanford offers more than pale echoes of that composer.

Stylistically, the Second Piano Concerto stands somewhere between Brahms and Rachmaninov, with piano writing of both the size and the sensual quality those comparisons suggest. It is all very skillfully put together, a somewhat awkward motto theme proving to be more flexible than seems likely when it is introduced by horns at the beginning, and passages of lyrical spontaneity are neatly integrated into the large-scale structural scheme. One answer suggested by the concert the first of three to be contributed by the BBC SO to the Nottingham Festival's examination of British art round the turn of the century is that this country has been so eager to award itself a great composer that it has promoted Elgar at the expense of others of his generation. It is true that Elgar's First Symphony and even the Froissart Overture are more distinctive in personality than anything by Stanford particularly when played with such fluency and idiomatic understanding as they were on this occasion but that is is no good reason for decades of continuing underestimation of music which had the misfortune to be written at much the same time and in the same place by a different composer. Perhaps John Bingham's inspired advocacy of Stanford's Second Piano Concerto will help to change the situation.

Gerald Larner in Florence WHAT could have been expected of Giorgio de Chirico when he was so daringly commissioned to design Bellini's I Puritani for the first Maggio Musicale in 1933? It could have been his deep architectural perspectives, his metaphysical interiors, his surreal dreamscapes or perhaps they just hoped for a fresh point of view on the Italian operatic tradition. Unfortunately, there is no clue in the exhibition of de Chirico's Italian theatre designs on show at the Uffizi and timed to coincide with the performances of I Puritani in the Teatro Communale, where the artist's sets and costumes have been faithfully recreated for the 52nd Maggio Musicale. Florence got de Chirico at his best in 1933 for I Puritani, and if it was a new view of Italian opera they wanted they certainly got it. The public of the time might not have recognised in the sets and costumes the artist they knew in his paintings but they would surely have recognised something of the brilliant colouring of Bakst and the Ballets Russes and, apparently, they resented it wholeheartedly. A modern audience, sensitive to the atmosphere of the opera and blind to the dazzle of contrasting primaries in stripes and swirls and dots and diamonds on a bright white ground, could resent it too.

If playfulness worm-eaten by conscience. Alec Wallis as the Prosecutor, meanwhile, hits the right note of diabolic irony while the townsfolk actually look like beefy Germanic burghers. My one cavil is that the production has a totally needless interval: otherwise, this is as gripping an evening as you will find in London. Judgement Day is at the Old Red Lion. 418 St John Street.

EC1 (01-837-7816) until June 24. NottinghamRadio 3 Gerald Lamer BBC SO Davis WE COULD scarcely believe our ears. Did Sir Charles Vil-liers Stanford the dry academic, the prim disciple of Brahms really write that pa-sionately heroic piano concerto? According to the Nottingham Festival programme he did, and the Radio Times listing of the live broadcast from the Royal Hall confirms it. Which raises more questions. How could our image of the composer have become so distorted? How is that in a country which can boast so few piano concertos in the grand manner the next was the one written by Stanford's pupil, Arthur Bliss, 28 years later could Stanford's Second have been so thoroughly neglected.

And where else could the successor to such a work, Stanford's Third, remain ignored and unpublished? On reflection, it is not easy to Proframmc2: June 13-17 ot7 30 t.ffl.TI'AAj r3 031 557 2727. LIlllHHllUlilMlllH l.m,IJ.tiiaiirJJtWU,.)!JJA'Hiili!UijMTO QruhbggM de jW, fa iifigS7 gjjroiK guarjffll FireLffi mwrDmf Crieili eripuiHp sly a a Prof rammc Juneti-tOai 7.20 3rd SEPT. For free, full-colour BROCHURE write (enclosing T9p stamp) to: Department Edinburgh International Festival, SAT 12th AUC-SUN 21 Market Street, Edinburgh EH1 1BW. BOOK NOW Box Office is telephone 031-225 5756. ACCOMMODATION Probably the best bed and breakfast the world from only EIO.

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