The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 26

In The Name Of The Father, a film about the Guildford Four, was premiered in Dublin this week. FINTAN O'TOOLE reports on the fine line between art and life CAROLINE SULLIVAN sees Boy George return to the limelight at the Apollo The Boy wonder A theatre of war Peter Postlethwaite, left, as Giuseppe Conlon and Daniel right, as Gerard Conlon in Jim Sheridan's new film In The Name Of The Father no-warning bombing of a pub in 1974, and it took 15 years for the verdicts to be overturned. Sheridan's film, his third after My Left Foot and The Field, focuses on Gerard and Giuseppe Conlon, and is as much an exploration of the relationship between father and son as it is an indictment of injustice. That such a giim episode in the intimate, almost familial relationship of Ireland and England should be dramatised against the backdrop of a historic attempt to resolve the family feud was both appropriate and disconcerting. The film itself contains one of the most subtle and yet forceful reflections on violence that have come out of the Troubles.

As the IRA teeters on the brink of history, In The Name Of The Father has at its heart a brilliant sequence which encapsulates both the attraction of the IRA for its own community and the ultimate disgust that follows. In prison, Day-Lewis's Conlon meets the IRA man who actually perpetrated the atrocity for which he has been jailed. Bitter as he is, he is drawn to the IRA man's toughness, his relentless pursuit of war on all fronts against the system. But an act of terrible violence, superbly filmed by Sheridan, forces him to face the consequences of his own hatred. In what is virtually a parable OUTSIDE, beyond the funereal line of black limousines and the eager crush of gapers, a small group stood with a banner saying "Free The Ballymurphy Inside, in monkey suits and cool elegance, an audience gathered to watch a story that, until recently, was the stuff of such banners.

Movie premieres always involve a kind of double-take, with the flesh and blood stars watching themselves on screen, but Thursday night's world premiere in Dublin of Jim Sheridan's In The Name Of The Father, about the wrongful imprisonments of the Guildford Four, was haunted by a much deeper and more disturbing confusion of art and life. There were the screen images of Gerard Conlon and Paul Hill, the actors who played them (Daniel Day-Lewis and John Lynch) sitting in the audience, and behind them, the real Gerard Conlon and Paul Hill. And there were those echoes of a real world of violence continuing outside. An accident of timing placed the premiere of a film about victims of the Northern Ireland Troubles the day after the Downing Street summit and its artful declaration designed to end the dreadful narrative of which the film's plot is a part. The Guildford Four and the' Maguire Seven were convicted of offences related to the IRA's shocking reminder to swanning around Dublin Castle with rock stars and supermodels (Dublin's newest ascendency, the members of U2 and the model Naomi Campbell), with film stars and movie moguls, is to measure the yawning distance between Belfast and Dublin, between cruelty and camp.

The Belfast of Gerard Conlon and Paul Hill, the world the film reflects, cannot yet afford to make its historic shrines into movie sets. At the end of the screening, Jim Sheridan went to the front of the cinema and began a long litany of names. As he called them, they would emerge from the audience and take their places beside him, shifting from being members of the audience to being themselves on show. The producers, the big stars Day-Lewis, Emma Thompson, Lynch, Pete Postlethwaite, Bono, Sinead O'Connor made their way one by one to face the audience at the front. It was Hollywood come to Dublin, an American-style ritual of self- the dividing line between life and art, but the line was none the less thin.

For a Dublin audience, some of the film's pretences could not but be powerfully resonant. Though the action is set in Belfast and England, most of the shooting was done in Dublin. Thus, West Belfast of the early seventies is actually Sheriff Street, a rundown complex of flats inhabited by some of Dublin's most deprived people, situated a few hundred yards from the Savoy Cinema where the premiere was screened. That the crew filming there brought 12 burnt-out cars to add realism to the riot scenes, but left with 15, is in its own way a comment on the perils of fiction. Likewise, the "English" prison in which Gerard and Giuseppe Conlon play out the screen story is instantly recognisable to a Dublin audience as the most symbolic and resonant place in the entire martyrology of Irish nationalism, Kilmain-ham Jail, which held generations of Irish rebels and in IN THE last few months.

Boy George has metamorphosed from semi-forgotten eighties artefact to respected elder statesqueen of pop. A compilation album, At Worst The Best Of, did well in the charts, and in November, Omnibus devoted a documentary to him. Why the renewed interest? It must be to do with the early eighties revivalette that recently saw Visage and Fran-kie Goes To Hollywood back in the charts. As the biggest star of that era, Boy George would be worth reappraising even if he hadn't been the fellow who introduced cross-dressing to a prime-time audience. A nearly full Hammersmith Apollo simmered with an excitement that approached that of a decade ago.

Well before George appeared, the aisles were full of startlingly young girls who must have thought that Take That were playing a secret gig. They had given short shrift to the support act, Cornershop. This Anglo-Asian punk unit has recently mastered several chords. But there's still a difference between knowing chords and being able to put them together in a pleasing fashion. Boy George hasn't changed much.

He may dress relatively quietly these days he wore a blue, checked sports jacket, red trousers, saucy little beret and a Buddhist symbol on his forehead but he's the same old menace to society as ever. As he shimmered on to the percussive, funky Love's What I Am, his first words were, "Hello, Pausing before launching into the next number, the brisk swingbeat groove After The Love Has Gone, he gestured at the huge Union Jack backdrop. "It's pink, white and blue the British Nelly Party." Ooh. George. Further along, revving up a lover's rock version of the old hit Do You Really Want To Hurt Me, he remarked.

"This is a song about being emotionally whipped and it's not about Jon" a reference to his long-ago affair with Culture Club's drummer, Jon Moss. No, he's still the same. What has changed is his musical direction from cod reggae to softly burbling funk. Each of the six-member backing band was the best money could buy. The result was the Boy's most musically satisfying show ever.

It was George's night and it would have been a hard heart that wasn't won over by his preamble to Knockin' On Heaven's Door: "I want to dedicate this to my boyfriend, Michael, and all my friends who were in therapy with me." Sweet. MEIRION BOWEN finds both the LPO and the Philharmonia in top form this week Fit as a fiddle Macbeth is an impossible masterpiece and it shows in Adrian Noble's new production, says MICHAEL BILLINGTON Toil and trouble of the last 25 years of violence, Sheridan captures something precise and profound about the dimension of the present mo- which is a polite way of saying that Adrian Noble should not feel dispirited if his new production at the Barbican, starring Derek Jacobi and Cheryl Campbell, falls short of expectation. It's in good company. In 40 years of theatregoing, I've seen only three unequivocally successful productions. My first Macbeth, as a schoolboy, was Oiivier's in 1955: a performance of genius that moved congratulation.

But as the ritual went on, and the borders of fiction and reality were crossed, its mood changed. A little old nun who was one of the first campaigners for the Guildford Four was called and shuffled slowly to the front in her drab black habit the antithesis of stardom. Paul Hill, Paddy Armstrong, Gerard Conlon, his mother Sarah, followed one by one. As they stood there you could match the actor to the role, the image to the pained reality. And then, playing this game of matching the faces, came the realisation that there was no match for Pete Postlethwaite, whose wonderfully powerful presence as Giuseppe Conlon had dominated the screen for much of the previous two hours, and whose death in prison had been enacted most movingly.

In that haunting moment of felt absence, the tinsel of illusion fell away and art humbly acknowledged its ultimate inadequacy in the face of life and death. Without imposing any individual view, Jansons elicited from the players a reading of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony that did full justice to its many innovations its harmonic ad-venturousness, its marriage of sonata and fugue, its distinctive scoring. The massage oil applied in Berlin or Vienna was missing: this performance had bite, sending one away not soothed, but stirred and shaken. aamiiH 4Pf LAMB famously said tot the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. Actually you could make a much better case for Macbeth.

It is a magnificent theatrical poem. But how do you cope with its broken-backed structure, the virtual disappearance of Lady half-way through, the witches, the potential tedium of the England scene? It has defeated most of its interpreters throughout history; ment in history. There is a sense in which this piece of fiction is as immediate as the headlines on the same day's papers. So long as the Northern Ireland Troubles continue, there is always this propensity for the border between life and art to be blurred in any fictional representation of them. The first major theatrical exploration of interrogation of suspected IRA members, Martin Lyncn's play The Interrogation Of Ambrose Fogarty, produced a classic double-take on its opening night in Belfast in 1982.

One of the fictional suspects was based on a well-known local man and the play made use of his characteristic habit of repeating phrases still here, still The man was in the audience. About halfway through the play, he recognised himself, stood up, pointed at the stage and said "See him, see him, that's me, that's me." Thursday night's premiere was too cool an occasion for a repeat of this direct breach of from a haunted preoccupation with murder to an unbearable sense of solitude. Trevor Nunn's famous 1976 Other Place production, with McKellen and Dcncli, also worked because it stripped the play down to its bare poetic essentials. And Yu-kio Ninagawa's Japanese version at Edinburgh in 1985, the National in 1987 with its cascading cherry blossom and plangent Faure and Samuel Bar- I ii POOOCD which the leaders of the 1916 Rising were executed. What made the experience almost surreal was that the supper party after the film was held in Dublin Castle, the historic seat of British administration in Ireland, evoking a whole other set of images and meanings.

To move from screen images of Kilmainham Jail to a literal This fiction is as immediate as the headlines in the same day's papers occupation of Dublin Castle is to go from raw, painful history to an ironic, playful present. To see images of living people, people who were live and present in the audience, in what you know is Kilmainham Jail, is to be reminded that what should be history is still happening. But to go from that Derek Jacobi as Macbeth for Banquo and Malcolm with suspiciously ostentatious enthusiasm. Jacobi's Macbeth seems to live entirely in the present; Oiivier's gave you the sense that he had committed the act of murder many times in his imagination. There are good things in Jacobi's performance.

The later scenes have the right soulful despair. "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" is an urgent personal plea for psychiatric help and in "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" Jacobi bangs each word home like a nail in a coffin. But at the moment the performance mirrors the flaw in the production: it's full of short-term effects but lacking in long-range planning. Cheryl Campbell's Lady is, in many ways, more effective. She gives us a voluptuous do-minatrix who makes you understand why Goethe said the play should be called Iady Macbeth.

"Leave all the rest to me," Campbell cries, in the imperious tones of one used to supervising everything from the Inverness plumbing to the little business of assassination. For the rest, Michael Siberry's Macduff is rich-voiced and Christopher Ravenscroft's Banquo denotes quiet integrity. But shouldn't Duncan look less like a Scottish version of Baron Hardup and shouldn't the Porter actually be funny? If, however, this production is to have a long life, certain things need to he done. Scrap the interval which kills the play's momentum. Rethink the design.

And nlav to Jacobi's strength as an actor which is a marred nobility of sold. There's nrrTTTTTriTT ui I ber score turned the play into an aerungly bcautuul meditation on the transience of earthly things. What the play needs, if it is to work, are two forceful actors, a controlling idea and continuous action; all of which Noble himself had in his first RSC production in 1986. That treated the Macbeths Jonathan Pryce and Sincad Cusack as a childless Strindbergian couple for whom power became a substitute for parenthood. When Lady taunted her husband with cowardice, he slapped her on the face: a shrewd bit of business Noble has retained.

But, in the earlier production, the couple went on to clasp each other with fierce protcctiveness when she mentioned the loss of their child: you felt you were watching an intimate domestic drama with immense political repercussions. In contrast, this new produc tion lacks any sense of grand design. It even lacks good design since Ian MacNeil has signally failed to find a coherent visual metaphor for the play. MacNeil, as we know from his marvellous work at the Gate and on An Inspector Calls and Machinal, is a mover and shaker he loves stages that rise and fall. But here we get a bit of everything: a levered platform that goes up and down, a huge steel staircase for the castle that suggests the Macbeths have lately called in a modish Swedish architect, an abstract, verdant backdoth for the England scene.

And to cover the set changes we even have Macbeth coming before a curtain for "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly" (and quietly too, he might have added) as if he were Johnny Carson about to do his nightly monologue. But the first job of a designer is surely to create a consistent world in which the events of the play could happen. That sense of an over-arching vision is what I missed. Jacobi is a superb actor a magnifi cent Hamlet, a definitive Cyrano whose natural forte is spiritual uracc: a quality you could apply to Macbeth if you treated him as a tallcn Luciter are bright still though the brightest tell. But.

instead ot using his God-given asset, Jacobi nlays the crucial early scenes on a note of rugged im petuosity: he rushes in lull ot the exhilaration of battle, seems totallv overtaken by the witch es' predictions ME more," he cries) and leads the applause si IF ANY evidence were needed that contrary to Arts Council thinking both the Philharmonia and the London Philharmonic could be considered super-orchestras, their concerts this week at the Festival Hall were timely. Conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov encouraged the Philharmonia to live dangerously in Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony on Monday night. The result was not just technically astonishing, but revealed the white-heat inspiration underlying the work. The risks were abundant, not least the sudden, unexpected silence inserted before the final eruption of the main theme of the first movement; here Svetlanov's ability to carry the whole team with him was extraordinary, but with the leader, Christopher Warren-Green, transmitting just as much passion to the rest of the orchestra, the unanimity and conviction of the playing was absolute. With such an idiosyncratic, spontaneously passionate conductor at the helm, one might have expected the cracks to show in the proceeding account of Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto, especially as the soloist, Vladimir Ovchinikov, seemed temperamentally so different more objective and calculating in his approach.

But they harmonised well, making the components in this patchwork score sit perfectly together. Under Mariss Jansons, the LPO exhibited the right degree of technical polish and restraint for a programme of Viennese classics on Wednes day night. Schubert's Overture in the Italian Style came icross as not merely imitation Rossini, but authentic Schubert its lyricism and effervescent humour very much his own. If Beethoven's Piano Concerto No saw some lapses of ensem ble and was more solid and routine than inspiring, it was mainly because the soloist, Mikhail Rudy, rarely generated much excitement: his playing was admirably exact and well timed, but said relatively little about the piece. imore.

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