The Guardian du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 20

THE GUARDIAN Saturday August 26 1989 A tiger tamed ROCK: The stalwarts of angst are back on the road again in California Ideological sounds 20 ARTS GUARDIAN Mark Cooper in Los Angeles Michael Billington finds that opera singer turned actor Willard White has yet to unleash his full power in the RSC's fine new Othello Swift turns on him with a savage fury and impeccable logic let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile, We lose it not so long as we can that suddenly makes the war preparations seem irrelevant. But everything in the first two acts clicks perfectly into place. The shy, conspiratorial smile Imogen Stubbs's Desde-mona shoots at Othello on her first entrance instantly tells us they have been bracing themselves for this moment of public exposure. Ian McKellen immediately establishes Iago as the barrack-room traditionalist who believes in "the ancient gradations" of rank. And Cyprus is clearly defined as a simmering colonial outpost where the women fuss over the barley-water while the men get on with the post-war admin.

Anchoring the events in a precise world gives the action a rare plausibility. But, at some point, we wait for Othello's wracking anguish and what F. R. Leavis called his "heroic self-dramatisation" to break out; and in Mr White's performance this never quite happens. He is superb in the opening scenes: a majestic war-lord who convincingly fetches his life and being "from men of royal height" (not "siege" as usual).

He is very moving at the close when he pathetically ransacks Desdemona's dressing-table and allows his great rich bass to sing the blues. But in the central scenes of the play you wait impatiently County, Young thanked his audience for keeping him sane over the years. Orange County is a suitably reactionary area for Young to parade his new tales of urban crime, desperate drug deals and fundamentalist zealotry.The gentleman in the next seat offered me a joint before explaining that we could only stand up between songs "because this is Orange County, Young emerged into the spotlight plucking the opening riff of Out Of The Blue on his well-amped acoustic and dressed like a scruffy 60s refugee. During the course of the evening, he alternated between satisfying the nostalgia of his older fans with the tunes After the Gold Rush and Heart of Gold and presenting some songs from his forthcoming album, Rockin' In The Free World, many of which return to the bleak paranoia of his Tonight's The Night collection. On the 20th anniversary of the Woodstock Weekend, Young determinedly detached himself from the rampant nostalgia of the baby boom generation by reprising Roll Another Number from that album in which he stumbles away from that Helicopter Day.

Joined for two songs by Ben Keith on dobro and Frank Sam-pedro on mandolin, Young quickly proved that his delivery has lost none of its emotional fervour nor his desire to connect with the times. While much of the audience sought to pull him back to the early 70s, Young was clearly happiest when evoking the marauding spirit of Sam Peckinpah and mixing compassion with random bouts of fury. Rockin' In The Free World is a double-edged anthem that stirs up the hatred of the Middle East and mixes it with portraits of the homeless of Free America. The album represents a considerable return to form and it is typical of Young that he should choose to preview its release with an acoustic tour, given the high voltage thrashing of many of the performances on the record. Willard White and Imogen Stubbs PHOTOGHAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFERY down to the little baccy-tin for half-smoked cheroots and the obsessive way he tidies his barrack-room blankets.

What Mr McKellen brilliantly establishes is the contrast between the public and the private face. In Cyprus, Mr McKellen is the military joker who relishes his role as the camp entertainer, but, in one swift move, he turns his back on Desdemona and the rest to reveal his superhuman contempt for these laughing fools. This Iago is no demi-devil: he is instead an old sweat warped and corroded by fantasies of power and by a destructive jealousy far greater than Othello's. Mr McKellen not only makes you understand Iago: he also induces a compassion for this pitiable creature. And he is quite extraordinary in the final scene when he leans across the death-loaded bed and slowly says to Othello "What you know, you the implication is that he has simply articulated the Moor's own buried insecurities.

This is great acting. Imogen Stubbs's Desdemona is also exactly right: a girl whose youthful impetuosity (she emits a squeal of excitement when realising they are heading for Cyprus "tonight" as if it's her first trip abroad) separates her from the Moor far more than the colour of her skin. Zoe Wanamaker also lends Emilia a perceptibly trou- BOTH Neil Young and The The's Matt Johnson pride themselves on their stubborn icon-oclasm while alternating between troubled introspection and social commentary. At the start of the 70s, Young was briefly the voice of the counterculture, lamenting "Mother Nature on the run" from a seemingly horizontal position while occasionally working himself up for blistering attacks on the forces of reaction like Matt Johnson is altogether artier in his approach and retains a streak of English self-righteousness in his diatribes that recalls other clumsy rock philosophers such as Roy Harper and Roger Walters. If Young has become increasingly uncertain of the role of his generation! Matt Johnson Clearly aspires to become the voice oi an era mat ne is struggling to invent.

His recent hit, The Beat(en) Generation, was a folksy commentary on Thatcher's depressed children but the album Mind Bomb aspires to a global overview. Last week both artists set out on American tours from Cali fornia, Matt Johnson fronting a band including guitarist Johnny Marr formerly of the Smiths Young sticking to acoustic instruments with a little help from his friends. Both artists are clearly fascinated with the passions and rhetoric of Middle Eastern fundamentalism, largely because both are drawn to self certainty as it topples into hysteria. The The opened their US ver sus The World tour at the Roxy on Sunset Strip and their set inevitably suiiered irom hrst night stiffness. Johnson pre sented himself in a black bolero hat and alternated between strumming a guitar and striding up and down the stage with a microphone, wagging a threatening finger.

His loud and technically proficient band did their best to match the complexity of The The's albums but were inevitably restricted by the accompanying backing tapes. Johnson's voice rarely rises above a deep growl and simply lacks the variety to carry his denser material live. As tor Marr, he hasn lost his melodic invention but the tapes and his determination to escape his trade mark jangle lett mm oddly suDdued. un songs such as Armageddon Days, the band began to gener ate the kind of fury which suits Johnson's bleak world view but, for the most part, this was a powerful performance unleavened by either wit or enough melody. in the open air setting ot Costa Mesa's Pacific Amphitheatre in the heart of Orange rolling slaves OTHELLO has lately become the odd man out among Shakespeare's tragedies.

Current racial sensitivity makes it virtually impossible to have a white actor blacking up as the hero (though the last truly earth-shaking Moor was Olivier a quarter of a century ago). We also seem uncertain whether to treat the play as a large public tragedy or an intimate private drama. Trevor Nunn's new production at Stratford's Other Place (which seems to make more farewells than Kirsten Flag-stad) addresses both these problems head-on. It casts a black opera-singer, Willard White, as the Moor. It also treats the play as a study in claustrophobic desperation.

Running at four hours, it has the microscopic attention to detail that is Nunn's trademark. But the paradox is that, while it handles the public scenes brilliantly, it ultimately misses the sound we long for in tragedy: the agonised cry of a cornered human soul. Like John Barton in 1971, Mr Nunn sets the action in a 19th-century world. This pays particularly rich dividends in the opening act where Mr Nunn uncovers a tragedy-withina-tragedy: that of the deserted father. Brabantio.

Clive Swift plays him as a frock-coated politician who allows private grief to erupt into a midnight cabinet-meeting, all brandy and cigar-smoke. And when the Duke counsels stoicism, Mr Mane event Desmond Christy MANY people seem to love animals more than they do human beings. George Adamson, murdered last weekend in Kenya, may have been one of them. In Lord Of The Lions (Yorkshire), he looked at the corpses of some elephants slaughtered for their ivory by poachers and told us "As far as I'm concerned one elephant is worth the lives of at least 100 human beings." Lord Of The Lions, even though Sandy Gall was doing the questioning, didn't seem to disagree. We didn't actually see clips from Born Free, the Oscar winning film made from Joy Adamson's book, but we were in the same emotional territory of nice white folk saving the lions from bad black poachers.

I like lions (lions like Christians) and they are especially nice when they are cubs or made out of felt. But isn't it about time we stopped making programmes which want to pretend that politics can be kept out of conservation like cricketers want it kept out of sport. Maybe because this was a tribute to Adamson (and became an obituary), Sandy Gall didn't want to ask any awkward questions. Perhaps Adamson, who at 83 probably felt he didn't have to answer silly questions, was not the easiest person to interview. We got close to some answers.

Why had trees down by the river been set on fire? Somali herdsmen seem to have done it in the belief that the Tetse-fly, which attacks their animals, breed in the trees. If they carry on setting fire to the trees and over-grazing the land there will only be scorched earth withering into desert. What terrible people the Somalis are, shoot" ing elephants (and lions which attack their livestock), and burning forests. Well, are they? It's all very well for the Duke of Edinburgh to tut-tut about dead wildlife things would no doubt be different if he had to feed his family from a hut on the equator. There isn't much point in loving lions if you don't help the people who live around them.

Adamson knew this better than most of us he was for example involved in schemes to find better homes for Turkhana tribes people and their livestock but this programme didn't really do justice to him. It got too wrapped up on the cuddly lion cubs. But it did show us what a kind man Adamson was. His wife, Joy, was "not very good with African labour" and was murdered after discharging a servant. Now George Adamson is dead, after tackling some armed bandits with a revolver.

After an hour in his company we discovered how remarkable he was but didn't really get to know him very well. He was more interested in the lions. Running on empty words Waiting for the thunderbolt: tear her all to pieces" is delivered with chair-bound temperance. Mr White has a fine Othello locked within him; but at the moment he lacks that tiger-like bestiality which Henry James found in the great Salvini. Ultimately, this has an effect on Ian McKellen's Iago: in the central scenes he is, to vary the animal metaphor, like a matador in search of an angry bull.

But, that said, this is the most complex and fascinating Iago since that of the late Emrys James. With his ramrod-back, swinging arms and clipped Northern consonants. Mr McKellen is the absolute embodiment of the professional soldier: every detail is correct high Taking a back seat Tama someone said, what a change for Ismo who was "known for films in which well-conducted ladies and gentlemen simply did not get down and boogie." Raucous Ismo's films were not. Henry James's The Bostonians, Forster's A Room With A View, these works were "as raucous as a furled umbrella" yet. But maybe they had another Annie Hall here.

Remember, Ismo said, how all the girls broke out in funny-hats, neck-ties and baggy-pants after Woody AUen's movie. Remember the Ralph Lauren safari look that emerged after Out Of Africa. Even his own Room With A View, he said, spawned a sort of Edwardian look in London, France and Italy. What about the film? What about the book which was full of some marvellous stories but also some very dirty ones, the kind of stories that make vou think that it Tama was born in England instead of New York she'd be the editor of a Sunday newspaper? The Merchant-Ivory switch from Brit-Lit to Brat-Lit was somehow out of synch, someone said. "It's like one of those eye-widening flights from common sense When someone like Renata Tebaldi iards who had congregated for a cultural reminder of home.

Paco Pena's Flamenco Dance Company is now in its 19th year and, like other Spanish troupes such as Cumbre Fla-menca, finds a readymade audience in this country. Pena has dominated the flamenco music scene for over 20 years; a supremely gifted guitarist who believes that flamenco, as practised by the large touring companies, is in danger of succumbing to commercial ideals. Unfortunately, the title of his own show Spanish Fiesta invites similar criticism. Were, for example, the portly businessmen clicking their heels and stamping a path through the Barbican foyer after the bled conscience as if secretly aware of her husband's dark destructiveness. And Sean Bak er's Cassio, turning up in white civvies to enlist Desdemona support and clutching a box of fruits, suggests he is more than half in love with her.

The production, set by Bob Crowley in a world of sun-bleached wooden walls and sand-strewn floors, is shot through with that kind of ferocious attention to detail. Everything is meticulous, careful, pre-planned. The one thing lacking is the sense of unpredictable danger that should make the hairs rise on the nape of your neck and plunge you into the stark, primitive world of tragedy. PHOTOGRAPH: KANE RUTHERFORD are, indeed, New Yorkers. So all this nonsense about them "selling that is turning their backs on M-Forster and Henry James, is just nonsense.

Ismo, Jimbo and Ruthie were just giving the art houses in America the same sort of English stuff the folks got used to watching on TV Brideshead, Upstairs, Downstairs on the really obscure channels. Well, so Ismo, Jimbo and Ruthie are slaves of New York themselves, but aren't we all? The ghastly Warhol will be all over the Hayward Gallery this autumn unless some patriot blows it up with gunpowder. New York, the capital of the world ever since 1945 Jan Morris says. Even before that; Wodehouse said London once had a famous hum. But then, Wodehouse said, sometime in the 1920s the hum left London and went to New York.

'Slaves' is a picture of "fin de siecle New a grotty place, full of foreboding just like everywhere else. I rather liked that view. It was true to the spirit of Ms Tama's bijou of tortured lower-class artistic sensibilities. No hum, of course. And that's probably what the New York critics really objected to.

Still, they've always got Gotham City. drama that plods a political rather than a personal agenda. Thirty staff run to keep up with events at the back of a fhat'll-do-nicely service enterprise while 1,500 unseen customers gather beyond swing doors. A contemporary scene, but James Bolam, the director who acted in the original 1959 production, left the waitresses in seamed stockings because it would be impossible, in times grown accustomed to the rhetoric of job creation, to have updated a text so anxious about the alienation of hard labour. The excellent cast (Pippa Fur-longer and Simon Nelson are names for the Nineties) used the full width of a broad stage when a yawning proletariat for the thunderbolt to explode and for any real sign of mental torment: even a line like i ll The AFTER reading through many thousands of words of press cuttings on Slaves Of New York, the film.

After reading Slaves Of New York, the book. After reading thousands of words of interviews with Tama Janowitz, author and filmscript-writer, and after seeing the film at the Curzon West End one afternoon this week, what I like best of all is the way Tama Janowitz calls Ismail Merchant, of Merchant-Ivory, I'don't think I could ever dislike her after that. Anyway, everyone in England has been whingeing about the tremendous hype the Merchant-Ivory film of Slaves Of New York has been getting in London. Do they, I wonder, know the half of it? Do they know about Slaves Of New York Now A Major Merchant Venture? In New York they have, as they say in America, "gone boutique with the movie." And it is not simply some ditsy girls, like something out of the film. It's nothing less than Bloomingdale's.

Ismo, apparently, is an old chum of Mr Marvin Traub, the chairman of Blooming-dale's. Ismo brought Marvin to see 'Slaves' and Marvin brought seven Blooming-dale's executives and they liked the "kicky costumes" that had been "created" for Slaves they were "very layered, very decorative" and had, they thought, "just a lot going on visually." Ismo had been looking for maybe one special 'Slaves room in Marvin's store. He got a whole boutique on the first floor, and all of Blooming-dale's display windows on Third Avenue. That was, someone said, a marvellous "retail But it wasn't all. Bloomingdale's decided to do the same thing with its "Chicago What a change this was, Barbican Sophie Constartti Paco Pena WORLDWIDE popular interest in flamenco music and dance is one of the more positive phenomena to have emerged from three decades of package holidays to the Costa del Sol.

Thus it came as no surprise that the Torremolinos regulars and Marbella time-sharers were out in force. But among those who had come to rekindle the magic of an uniorgettaDie summer were seated aficionados of flamenco. fans of Paco Pena and Span- Stanley Reynolds Neil Young: in form the night, none of which added anything to the studio versions. Things picked up a little when David Lindley, whose band El-Rayo-X had supported with a bland collection of what passes here for reggae songs, joined Browne on For A Dancer and Call It Alone but plummeted rapidly with Cocaine. With crack and drug abuse torturing American cities, Browne still thinks it's funny.

Despite the obligatory public health warning, this chirpy little number deserves to be dumped. Throughout the evening there were hints that the self-appointed Conscience of California spokesman for people who, having done more than any group on earth to destroy the planet, now get shirty about African peasants using aerosols had Something Important To Say. It came at the end of The Word Justice a burble that included references to state-sponsored terrorism, the CIA and conspiracies. It didn't make a lot of sense. This tosh 'should have come at the beginning of the song, apologised Jackson, employing that famous "Aw, shucks" grin of his.

No, it shouldn't have been said at all. If you need to explain, the lyrics are no bloody good. And that's the problem with Jackson Browne. These days. Kenneth Tynan praised The Kitchen as the first play to dramatise work and so to complain that a depiction of toil overrides character may miss the point.

Now that routine snotti-ness has replaced social conscience, and it's all right to throw restaurant tantrums proving you know the difference between salad cream and mayonnaise, perhaps the NYT is doing a service in reviving older values. The Kitchen never ran for long in Britain but was a hit in Warsaw and Budapest. Did audiences there understand why sometimes you have to wait for your food? Until September 2. Box office (01)387 9629. Janowitz in Edinburgh decides to get down and sing boogie-woogie." And that was "not a pretty picture." Bnt forget about that.

Let's talk retail. It certainly wasn't all Ismo fever. James Ivory got into the act as well. Ivory "struck a deal" with Kathy Ruttenberg to open a gallery, to be called The Gallery "with a tie-in to the The Gallery's inaugural show featured "artists whose work appeared in the film Slaves Of New York." It seemed strange, for wasn't the book, was not the film, about these rather pathetic people who wanted to be artists but were not, in fact, any good whatsoever? Was that not the point of it all? Yes, well, of course, but One of the new myths of our time gets itself exploded leafing through all the "real gen" on Slaves, book, film and retail adventure. The late great Andy Warhol, the story goes, Tama's friend and fellow fun person, loved Slaves when he read the stories in the New Yorker.

He bought the film rights. But he died. Had he not, what a marvellous New York film his Slaves would have been. Instead of it falling into the hands of "Englishmen." I don't suppose six out of ten people standing "on line" performance displaying reverence for the art form or simply mimicking its cliches? However, in a programme of selected flamenco styles so-leares, fandangos, and alegrias the three guitarists, two singers and core group of six dancers under Pena's direction gave meticulous, authoritative performances flawed only by the tendency to physical histrionics of a senior female dancer. In contrast to her uneasy blend of hedonism and sorrow, the two male soloists demonstrated the complexities of flamenco in unadulterated, technically superb postures of dancing; drawing attention to the brilliance of mercurial footwork and eruptive turns, the rigours of synco- outside a cinema, waiting to go in to see Slaves Of New York would know that Ismail Merchant and James Ivory have no real connection with England.

Merchant was born in Bombay and came to America to get to New York University. James Ivory is even less English. He was born in Oregon, which was never even a colony, studied architecture at the University of Southern California and made his first film as a USC Film School graduate student. In 1962 Merchant saw a 30-minute documentary Ivory had made on Indian miniature painting and they became partners, the film world's longest standing partnership. The real 'English' angle comes through Ruth Prawer Jhabvala who is actually Polish, went to school in England and married an Indian architect.

The three of them, Mrs Jhabvala, Merchant and Ivory, live in separate flats in a large brownstone house on New York. Merchant and Ivory have made 20 films and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written the scripts of 14 of them. Slaves is by no means their first footstep into making a New York film. They made Roseland and Jane Austen in New York. They pation between dancer and musician, and the corseted yet tempestuous language of the art form.

Last night tonight. Bloomsbury Theatre Paul Fisher The Kitchen BRANAGH and Co have had us looking back in amazement at a time when John Osborne's misogyny passed as social comment. In another less publicised Fifties revival the National Youth Theatre has resurrected Arnold Wcsker's The Kitchen, an even flatter Michael Oldfield THE radio ads promised giant video screens and in a country where any city with less than 20 cable TV channels is in the Third World that's an attraction. Other people might assume this meant the stage was out of sight. But tne video screens dion arrive and they weren't necessary.

The Pavilion at Concord, a city an hour's drive out of San Francisco, is a spectacular out door amphitheatre, partly rooted, surrounded by mist-shrouded mountains and with excellent sight lines. i ne view made little ditter- ence to Jackson Browne, grind ing towards the end of a US tour. While not quite running on empty, he should urgently examine the petrol guage. The snow is suck, profes sional and craftsmanlike. But while craftsmen are handy at building furniture, they don't have much use in rock.

Inspira tion is what needed and Browne doesn't have it any more. He droned through For America, Tender is the Night, Enough for the Night and possibly several other songs about began work. As the day progressed, action focused centre stage with waitresses circling the kitchen range yelling their orders in a wonderfully choreographed vortex of punishing economic activity. It is a great set-piece undermined in the second half when spectacle is superseded by soapbox dialogue. Peter, a neurotic chef whose character is overwhelmed by Wesker's message that he "can't dream in a flips out.

Morango, the restaurant owner, who "gives work and pays well and lets them eat what they repeats Wesker's final message: "What is there more?" Well, the kind of characters to let you draw your own conclusions..