The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 28

28 ARTS GUARDIAN THE GUARDIAN Thursday July 20 1989 Move over, Michelangelo said Elisabeth Frink, the sculptress who's remained imperviously cool Playing the Dame Adam Sweeting Komische Oper's extraordinary counter-tenor, Jochen Kowalski, as Orfeo in Kupfer's underworld, a drug-crazed West wear-exhibiting rock star) had been positioned to its best advantage outside the Gothic skyscraper. What Levi was after was evidence for his thesis that currently the artist is cut adrift from the institutions and moral frameworks which traditionally offered him or her support. Once, the church would act as an umbrella for any number of sculptors or painters, while princely patronage kept people like the various Bachs and Mozart in periwigs. Elisabeth Frink noted that artists in the Far East have maintained their links with their own culture and superstition without falling victim to western-style "ego-centricity." Perhaps she meant money, with which the HK Land Corporation had lured her halfway round the globe. Western artists may also find themselves being embarrassingly talked-up by their friends.

The Dame's pal Peter Shaffer had been hauled into Levi's purview on the pretext that he, like she, appreciates the curious power of horse-imagery. Really though, this just seemed to be an excuse for the playwright to wax laudatory about the Dame and the "enormous and obsessive reverence in her work for natural life." She in turn assured us that she quite understood what Shaffer was getting at in Equus (horse in agony crucifixion. Easy.) Luckily, both sculptress and sculptures remained imperviously cool. The programme's most indelible scenes did not feature a background drone of academe, but offered the dramatically physical spectacle of her workshop in South London, where she and her team battle against half-ton lumps of bronze with roaring blowtorches. Her ominous marching warriors and massive heads are built to brawl with the ele ments rather than sit in libraries or museums.

Loving Hazel (ScreenPlay, BBC 2) was the first TV film by Les Smith, and its title referred to the tug-of-love daughter of divorcing couple, Mike and Tracy. We followed Mike's sad progress from irrational optimism to legally-enforced separation from his daughter to anguished loss of control. Tracy, meanwhile, took up with the thug-like Dave, who surprisingly proved no match for Mike's flying fists. Mike was a man without very many redeeming features except his love for Hazel, but Hugh Quarshie's strong performance forced you to cough up considerable sympathy. Gemma Darlington was continually surprising as the squab-bled-over eight-year-old.

Still, there wasn't a lot here in the way of scintillating dramatic invention, and outside the central characters there didn't seem to be anything happening in the rest of the world. The action appeared to be set in the Midlands, in a place where everybody said "her" when they meant "she." Perhaps Smith's plan was to create an emblematic Everywhere in which the truth could be arrived at by poetic means, unhampered by sub-plots, details or secondary characters. This would explain why Mike's girlfriend Lizzy liked to lapse into blank verse. "I want back the man whose laughter shook the slates off me roof," she complained. Later, she went further.

"I'm throwin' the salt days behind us, chuckin' 'em over me shoulder," she vouchsafed, as Aswad throbbed away in the background. "Digging a grave for sour days." Mike disappeared in a stolen car soon afterwards, and who can blame him? Underworld politics 'II WOULD make sculp ture as good as Michelangelo, Elisabeth Frink decided at an early age. "wny not? Quite. Nor has Dame Elisabeth made a bad job of it, as Capturing The Spirit (Art, Faith And Vision, 4) illustrated. Talking about art, or Art, invariably ends in some sort of impasse, but Dame Elisabeth offered observations of a practical sort on the way she approaches her work.

Her upper-class military background was Catholic, but she doesn't think you have to be religious to create work with a spiritual dimension. Hence, she is able to collect objects and images from sundry cultures and appreciate their 'spirit' without necessarily knowing anything about their context. She has a particularly fine set of rams from India, ruminating impressively outside her kitchen door. This was all grist to Professor Peter Levi's mill. As host of the Art, Faith And Vision series, Levi has cast himself as an academic Whicker, zinging across the globe in pursuit of flashes of intellectual truth.

Culture-bites, possibly. He observed, chin in hand, as the Dame jetted out to Hong Kong to design and build a brace of bronze water buffalo for the Hong Kong Land Corporation. He materialised alongside the silver-haired sculptress outside Salisbury Cathedral, and the pair of them discussed whether or not Frink's Madonna figure (the original.of course, rather than the under Harry Kupfer has shaken opera-goers as much with his political punch as his chrome and perspex sets. Now he brings East Berlin's legendary Ko-mische Oper to London. He tells Hugh Canning about his work Michael Billington on a revolutionary piece of street theatre Breeze of change He has staged only two further productions in Britain since 1978, a harsh and pessimistic Fidelio for WNO resonant with memories of recent German tyranny, and a fin-de-siecle Pelleas and Melisande in 19B1 for English National Opera of uncommon theatrical and psychological clarity.

In the meantime, Kupfer has, almost single-handed, renewed and revitalised the Komische Oper's repertoire and established himself as one of the most controversial directors in the heavily subsidised West German theatres which pay dearly and apparently enthusiastically for his high-tech sets his favourite materials are perspex, chrome and black leather and intensive rehearsal periods. At home in East Berlin, he has theoretically unlimited time at his disposal with a permanent resident ensemble, but in the West he will usually settle for six or seven weeks. For his Bayreuth production of the Ring cycle which begins its second run next Friday he started rehearsing a year ahead of the opening. Kupfer leaves nothing to chance. While he is adding the finishing touches to the Ring, his own company arrives in London for its first British appearances at Covent Garden, bringing not only two of Kupfer's most recent productions, Smetana's The Bartered Bride and Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, but the last surviving production of the Komische Oper's founder-director, Walter Felsenstein.

His famous realisation of Offenbach's operetta, Bluebeard, first performed in the early 1960s and has had hundreds of repetitions, so it is something of PHOTOGRAPH: AF1WID LAGENPUSCH ist's freedoms and responsibilities in society. A frisson goes through the Komische Oper's auditorium when Orfeo, in the person of the company's extraordinary counter-tenor, Jochen Kowalski, takes out a GDR passport a highly prized commodity to enter the Underworld which, in this production, is the drug-crazed West. Kupfer makes his commentary with, as it were, a double-edged sword. When he does this sort of thing in the West his Hamburg production of Handel's Belshazzar, set in a Nazi concentration camp, for example, or the new Bayreuth Ring he is accused of plying political propaganda and provocation, but he repudiates his critics with passion. "Everything is political! Life is political! In every play where people come into contact with each other, it is political.

So what they write in the newspapers in nonsense! In every piece I direct there are human conflicts, but that does not mean they are propaganda. I think we demonstrated in Hamburg that Belshazzar is a piece of epic music-theatre, not simply a concert piece. "Handel was dealing with contemporary English problems and people understood his intentions. He reacted to every war, every battle and every victory of the Hanoverians. There is a strong element of provocation in his work.

It is, of course, political theatre. "The theme of Gluck's Orfeo is the dilemma of the artist in society, how he copes or fails to cope with life and death and how he has the possibility to portray the deepest human conflicts and sufferings. We have staged it as a modern piece, naturally, and in pictures which are close to us today." The Komische Oper's season at the Royal Opera House opens on July 31 with Walter Felsen stein 's production of Bluebeard (repeats on August 7, ft 12). Kupfer's production of The Bartered Bride is on August 3, 4, 9, 10, and of Orpheus and Euridice on August 6, 11. All performances are sung in German.

in London Assurance letters of Mozart on interpretation. Marc Minkowski, conducting, launched the overture with spirit. But the energy dissipated rapidly as the long hot evening went on. The orchestra began to show its flaws, with out-of-tune trombones (no doubt historically very authentic) and recorders and a flabbi-ness in the playing. Minkowski had no commanding vision of the music's shape, and lacked the conducting technique to mould the inner paragraphs effectively.

The singing (especially the small chorus) was often feeble in volume and in attack: one needed the aural equivalent of binoculars to get close to the sound. There were strong elements in the casting. Neil Howlett doubling the high priest of Apollo and the heroic Herculea, WHEN Harry Kupfer first came to direct an opera for the Welsh National Opera in 1978, he was little more than a name, if that, to British audiences and critics. His production of Richard Strauss's Elektra had been staged originally for the Netherlands Opera but the reviews had scarcely prepared the WNO's public for the shock of the first night in Cardiff. In place of Agamemnon's Palace at Mycaenae, the action of Strauss's psycho-drama was played out in a modernist abattoir, the floor covered with plastic sheeting, strewn with rotting carcasses, drenched with blood.

The imagery of slaughter, stench and decay which permeates Hoffmann-stal's text was made graphically manifest. In this House of Horror milieu, Kupfer directed his actors the poor unfortunates had to sing too with an unrelenting physical energy which left most observers as breathless as the players. Some, on the other hand, were repulsed by the lurid brutality of it all more or less the reaction of the first Klytemnestra when confronted with Strauss's score and blasts of booing, almost unheard of in Wales, punctuated the tumultuous applause. And that, by and large, has been Harry Kupfer's lot. It didn't help that he came from the German Democratic Republic and thus earned the tag, "Marxist producer" the name-callers, incidentally, never explained convincingly what a "Marxist" interpretation of Elektra actually entailed.

Chichester Mick Martin London Assurance LONDON ASSURANCE was one of the first of Boucicault's 200-odd plays, and it bears many of the hallmarks of an apprentice piece. The two main plot strands Charles Court-ly's pursuit of the girl engaged to his father, and Sir Harcourt Courtly's own pursuit of the unforgettably named Lady Gay Spanker are imperfectly woven together. The characterisation is engaging rather than consistent; the comedy splutters rather than flows, and the piece falls some way short of the flamboyance, audacity and sheer zest that characterise the best of the author's later work. The current Cichester Festival revival is something of a sudden apprenticeship also for Sam Mendes, artistic director of the new Minerva Studio, and just three years out of Cambridge, who receives the chance to make his main stage debut following the unexpected withdrawal of Robin Phillips. it is not clear how far advanced plans for the production Even with Kupfer's necessarily quicker methods, the work never stops after opening night.

He says his productions often have more rehearsal after they have opened, to work in new casts and to prevent routine creeping in. In this respect the Komische Oper is unique and it is evident in his complex, almost choreographic blocking of both principals and chorus to create the illusion of a community of spontaneous individuals, particularly in The Mas-tersingers of Nuremberg and the recent Bartered Bride. Those who only know his productions of Elektra and Fidelio will probably be surprised at his comparitively conventional staging of Smetana's nationalist masterpiece, though in fact he flouts the German tradition of presenting the piece as a folksy and banal operetta, just as most recent British productions have done. "It is a piece which needs to be taken seriously. I try to show how the conventions of people's lives can destroy true love.

Jenik is a pig. Marenka is never his true partner, he tests her, treats her brutally, he plays with her emotions." Kupfer applies his highly expressive, ahenatory techniques to apparently familiar works deliberately to engender a sharp response in his audiences. In earlier days, when he was a guest producer at East Berlin's prestige house, the German State Opera and principal producer in Dresden, his productions of Tannhauser, Parsifal and Salome were often thought to conceal social or ideological critisism of the Communist regime. The courtyard of Herod's palace bore a striking resemblence to Frie-drichstrasse station with gantries patrolled by armed guards and he dressed the pathological Tetrarch in red, gold and black, the colours of both Germanies' flags. His controversial production of Gluck's Orfeo, playing to packed houses of enthusiastic, youthful East Berliners, makes potentially uncomfortable comment on the nature of the art Paul Eddington as Sir Harcourt the fame of David Garrick, it is hard to believe that such classically pared-down drama with the emphasis on the emotional crux a disaster, a gesture of self-sacrifice, a divine intervention would not have provoked at the time a more subtle theatrical realisation.

The EBF chorus did not proceed elegantly; the stage picture was seldom beautiful; the carefully researched moves and gestures did not knit together. Even the response of characters to dramatic development in what they were saying did not markedly register. I don't believe an impulse to make theatrical experience truthful and convincing is modern. Whatever have been the changes of style and technique, the intention of performance has surely remained the same as is ctear when wo read, say, the Kupfer: 'Everything is political' a museum-piece by now. In East Berlin after the war the Komische Oper began with Die Fledermaus at the old Metropol Theatre Felsenstein was attempting to do for operas what Brecht did with plays.

As a young director, just out of university, Kupfer attended some of the fastidious Felsenstein's rehearsals. "I remember watching him at work on Paisiello's Barber of Seville and it was one of the most riveting productions he ever made He was one of the most thorough, exact and precise, as well as one of the most imaginative directors. He was a fanatic for detail. He would sometimes work for weeks on one scene!" Under Felsenstein, the Komische Oper became a continuous workshop. First Nights were never announced until the rehearsals were almost over and Felsenstein was satisfied.

His last production before his death in 1975, Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, took almost six months preparation, an unthinkable luxury in Western theatres. Harcourt, but eventually an effective foil to the Spanker flourish. In support Benedict Taylor is suitably suave, but little else, as Courtly Junior, while Sarah Woodward traces the awakening of love and guile in Grace Harkaway with nicely judged conviction. John Rogan, John Warner and Bille Brown also make significant comic contributions to an evening that gets better as it goes along, and smoulders pleasantly enough, without ever really catching fire. At the Chichester Festival Theatre, (0243-781312) until September 29.

Covent Garden Tom Sutcliffe Alceste LINA Lalandi's annual outing to Covent Garden with the sadly reduced English Bach Festival this year was Gluck's marvellous reform opera Alceste, in its final French version of 1776. There was special interest in the sets, which Terence Emery based on Be-langer's original designs. As usual with EBF opera here, the orchestra used period instruments, the costumes were authentic (from contemporary French designs), and the dancing (choreographed by Stephen Preston) tried to reproduce the style of the era an aim effectively and, I would guess, pretty successfully achieved. The trouble with these events is they are often underpowered musically, and the supposedly authentic staging inhibits Tom Hawke, Miss Lalandi's current producer, from attempting meaningful or refined direction of the acting in any modern sense. Knowing Gluck's interest in the theatrical tradition represented across Barons by AFTER the storming of the Bastille in 1789, a local demolition-man called Ci- toyen Palloy seized his chance.

He recruited a crew of 800 workers, cordoned off the prison and then tore the Bastille down stone by stone, selling it off to tourists who were up from the provinces. He was, as the New Yorker recently pointed out, the first deconstructionist. I was reminded of the irony of Palloy 's story he was, in fact, a patriotic entrepreneur who believed that anyone with a piece of the Bastille nad an investment in the Revolution while watching an extraordinary event currently taking place outside the National Theatre as part of LIFT. Mounted by a group named Station House Opera, founded in 1980, it is called The Bastille Dances: and it is best described as a piece of sculptural theatre in which 18 performers continuously dismantle and re-assemble 8,000 breeze-blocks. Something is always going PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFERV whose intervention in the third act solves all with a dash through the gates of Hell to rescue Alceste, was in specially rich voice and sang very stylishly.

I liked the resonant and well projected contributions of Janine Roebuck (Une coryphee), and Jamie MacDougall (Evandre) showed stylish address too. Richard Campbell was much better as Apollo, swinging from the flies in a chariot, than as the oracle, buried upstage. Gille Ragon as Admete, the husband for whose recovery Alceste decides to sacrifice herself, proved very disappointing, muffled in timbre and lacking in precision or heroic attack. Claire Primrose's problem as Alceste in the first act was her lack of rhythmic vitality. She has an unfortunately nasal focus to her tone in the upper on round the clock, but the peak performance time comes at 9 o'clock each evening.

What is it all about? On one level, it is a reminder, since many of the performers are dressed as artisans and sansculottes and since tableaux of familiar events emerge out of the breeze-blocks, that the French Revolution was a form of street theatre. But it can also be taken as a metaphor, heroic or cynical depending on your point of view, of the process of the French Revolution, a coherent structure is knocked down and then re-assembled into a variety of shapes ranging from sky-aspiring triumphal arches to domestic tables and chairs in a manner that may seem either a model of social engineering or a piece of fruitless labour according to taste. Is it really theatre? Since it is directed (by Julian May-nard Smith), aesthetically controlled, lit and costumed, the answer has to be register, and has slight range of colour, but when confidence improved she was able to make a firm and sweet impression in the big numbers of the other two acts, dignified and moderately accomplished. It was bad luck for her to have to perform one of the least persuasive (or authentic) ideas of the production: extinguishing candles at the end of act with her bare hand on the flame, except that the electricity didn't reliably switch off. Alceste is a star role, but this wasn't much of a star performance.

The eight dancers were really the main pleasure in a wide variety of expressive diversions with blindfolds and wooden swords and sashes and much nifty stepping and jumping. The opera generally picked up when the singing stopped. Young Vic Jay Rayner Grease HANDLED by a professional and, inevitably, over-aged cast, Grease can quite easily become a camp, almost kitsch romp. True, though the teenage heartache at its core may be all too real at the time, Grease is not a musical to be taken seriously. It was already pastiche when first it was written.

But send it up too much and the light and frothy becomes simply vacuous. In the teenage hands of the Young Vic Youth Theatre, however, it leaped on to the stage with the boundless enthusiasm of a young, but a veritable maelstrom of energy. Oddly enough with the present vogue for all things American de rigeur 501s, bandana chic and Rayban shades Grease seemed less a piece of nostalgia than perhaps ft might have It is also spectacular, witty, monotonous and surprising in turns. What I like about it is that it turns theatre into a free public event: something that appeals simultaneously to drunks, children, itinerant theatre-goers and dedicated students of performance art. It is also executed with great discipline and leaves the mind free to speculate on the meaning of what one is seeing.

Watching new structures being built out of old, I was reminded that the French Revolution both produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and, even at the time, its own carefully marketed myth: both Lafayette and Citoyen Palloy. I was also left with the conclusion that any piece of theatre that allows one to watch other people work while one strolls by the Thames with a drink in one's hand has to have a lot going for it. The Bastille Dances takes place outside the National Theatre until July 22. done a few years ago. They kept the pressure up from beginning to end, not just filling the stage but the rest of the auditorium and, on occasion, the audience as well, dragging us in to join the fun.

It is almost impossible for an audience, faced by a company obviously having so much fun, not to enjoy it themselves. But with this enthusiasm, the Youth Theatre also served up a large side order of control that kept the pace in check and its large cast in order. Grease has for a long time been a favourite with both youth theatres and school drama groups, not least because it boasts no less than 17 fair-sized parts, more than enough to satisfy an eager company who all want a piece of the action. Keeping those characters in line demands a large amount of rigorois and well-choreographed ensemble work, a challenge they met admirably. The strutting machismo of the Burger Pal-ce Boys was carefully balanced by the preening of the Pink Ladies and a tour de force rendition of Greased Lightning with a beast of a car actually built on stage by the whole company proved there were no slackers in this cast.

Certainly there were a few ropey and distinctly disparate American accents echoing around the auditorium, and a few singing voices may have wavered in the higher reaches, but on this occasion the whole was more than the sum of the parts. From an amateur company who have put this professionally polished production together in their spare time, such lapses can be forgiven. This production, the first by the company in the theatre's main house, marks the end of the Young Vic Youth Theatre's first year. It is truly a celebration in every mow of the wont were when Mendes took it over, nor whether this is the sort of play Mendes would actually choose to direct, given a free hand. It is with some hesitation then that one offers the observation that his response to having greatness thrust towards him is characterised by competence rather than genuine sparkle.

The production is slick, neat and stylish, and includes some good comic business. But there are several false notes (such as the elaborately contrived V-sign joke), a certain lack of spontaneity, and indications that Mendes is unsure quite where to pitch his direction. In particular the director seems unwilling to risk the sort of sustained brashness the play requires. And while some of the cast are giving us full-blooded melodrama, others are closer to a kind of tallied realism. It is Angela Thorne as Lady Spanker, who finds the most workable path between the two.

Her splendid, authoritative, and beautifully timed performance exploits the underlying absurdity of the play rather than seeking to disguise it, and exudes an air of good natured devilment that draws the audience into the action. Ms Thome also brings out the best in Paul Eddington, initially a strangely colourless Sir 8.00pm ill I I I I I I I I i HrilnllMfiTn SATURDAY TCHAIKOVSKY EVENING London Concert Orchestra Prog i nc Piano Concerto No. 1 Suite from Swan Lake and 1812 Overture (with cannon and mortar effects) Seat Prices 6.50.