The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 14

ARTS GUARDIAN 14 Thursday February 4 1988 Michael Dillington hails an enthralling O'Neill revival at the Young Vie Hugh Hebert on TV's Wars oS the Word and the two newest Ronnies Into Vanessa Redgrave. astonishing Antony recently proved, Mr Dalton is an actor who has steadily matured with the years. Vanessa Redgrave is simply astonishing as his peasant-wife. In terms of lines, the part is not large. But Ms Redgrave has the sagging, unharnessed breasts, the red, raw-boned hands, the chafed heels resting on scuffed old shoes of the woman whose toil sustains her husband's dreams.

Above all, she unforgettably suggests a woman who is still passionately in love with this husk of a man. When he plans a dinner celebrating the Talavera anniversary and says of a guest that he will be placed at his righthand, Ms Redgrave pats the table in affirmation as if it were the right hand of God himself. But possibly the hardest role is that of Sara Melody in that she is both genuinely in love with her young poet and pragmatic enough to see him as a means of escape. Rudi Davies captures this mixture of sincerity and cunning excellently and needs only more vocal attack under the peasant brogue. Amanda Boxer meanwhile endows a genteel Yankee mum with a nice line in ostrich feathers and Jamesian irony.

WE THINK of Eugene O'Neill as an American dramatist. But there was also a lot of the black Irish humourist in him. And watching David Thackcr's magnificent revival of A Touch Of The Poet at the Young Vic, it is impossible not to recall Juno And The Paycock. There is the same braggart-hero living in a world of fantasy, the same sustaining wife who gets on with the work and even the same rat-like chum secretly despising the pufled-up protagonist. O'Neill was clearly high on O'Casey.

At the same time this play now getting its first performance in London was part of O'Neill's projected epic cycle of American life covering 200 years from the Revolutionary Wars to the Depression. theme was to be the failure of the American Dream. America's main idea, O'Neill wrote, "is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it." Written between 1939 and 1942 and first produced in 1957, A Touch Of The Poet is one of the two plays from the cycle to have survived; and its main theme is how, in a land of possession and greed, people retreat into pipe-dreams or, more in Thoreau than in anger, a life of rustic simplicity. O'Neill's hero, Cornelius Melody, is an emigre Irishman who runs a dilapidated tavern outside Boston (the year is 1828) arid who lives off his memories of being a major in Wellington's army fighting Napoleon. He prides himself on being a Byronic gentleman: in fact, his father was a shebeen-keeper who got rich through money-lending.

But the aptly-named Con Melody (he is a blarneying liar) despises his peasant-wife, Nora, and his daughter Sara, who is in love with a young Yankee gent whom she is nursing back to health after his return to nature. It may not be one of O'Neill's masterpieces. But it has a rich comic-melodramatic texture and it adumbrates the themes he was to return to in The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey. On the one hand, O'Neill argues, we need our illusions; and, although Con wakes up to reality when he is engaged in a bruising battle with the police that ruins the scarlet uniform he wore at the battle of Talavera, you feel he has lost some vital part of himself. But, confining the action to a single day, O'Neill also creates a memorable picture of a family locked together in love and hate.

People attack O'Neill for his verbosity; but that is all part of his cumulative theatrical It also finds release in moments of real emotion as in Sara's passionate after her father's transformation, of, "I must have his crazy pride in me." That hint of quasi-incestuous intensity is the one elment missing in Mr Thacker's production. Otherwise it is an achievement fit to rank with his Ghosts, superbly catching both the Irish comedv and the American pain at the heart of O'Neill. It is also sumptuously acted. Released from Bondage, Timothy Dalton brings to Con Melody exactly "the look of wrecked distinction" O'Neill demanded. There is a wonderful comic vanity about the way he crooks his left knee to gaze admiringly at himself in the mirror while quoting Childe Harold.

But Mr Dalton also shows us the lacerating self-disgust that lies behind the Byronic posturing and when he cries, "I'm but a ghost haunting a ruin," it is with the ferocity of recognition. As his Critics were invited to review this production when it transfers to the Haymarket on March 10. But an evening of this calibre cannot be kept a dark secret for so long. It is quite simply enthralling. Viewed in the round, it draws you inexorably into its world and sends you out of the theatre rejoicing in a real play that views human desperation with compassion and a peculiarly Irish ironic gleam.

A Touch Of The Poet at the Young Vic (01 928 6363) until February 20 and then plays at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, before transferring to the Haymarket. class consciousness, a preparation for Chartism. Maybe. Hetherington, a leading light of the reform movement, wanted votes without property qualifications, secret ballots, annual Parliaments. What these underground papers did show was that repressive action against the media nearly always backfires.

When sales slackened, Hetherington allowed himself to be caught and slapped in the dock with more publicity in the officially Stamped press than he could ever have afforded. If you had asked me last week what I thought of The Management (C4), the new vehicle for the Two Rons, Hale and Pace, I'd have said that it was ahead of most recent comedy series just on originality, a mildly surreal line of humour and some good jabbing jokes. The Two Rons have inherited a club where they are now installed as managers cum bouncers. Last week they evicted Paul Raymond, this week Barbara Windsor was guesting as Aunt Vicky, whose Streatham establishment has been closed by gents with big boots. This week's jokes, I have to say queasily, centred in a stomach-turning, high stakes whelk-eating contest and the antics of a talented regurgitator, Stevie Starr.

He turned up in a programme about off-beat variety acts on, of all burping occasions, Boxing Day. He can swallow and re-produce coins, eggs in their shells, Rubik cubes, and drinks in their glasses. He also turned up, inevitably, on The Last Resort, and while loth to cloud a promising career, I'm afraid he is sooner or later liable to turn up or throw up on a food programme. I just hope I'm not reviewing that night. BACK IN the 1830s your favoured paper might have come to you about the size of a modern tax demand, printed secretly in some chapel or crypt, smuggled to ypu by coffin or tea chest, and sold to you illegally for a penny.

With titles like The Gauntlet, The Working Man's Friend, and The Poor Man's Guardian those who read the posh press called them The Unstamped, and saw them as rabble rousers to the Unwashed. They were The Unstamped because the Government of the day had slapped a fourpenny one on every copy of a newspaper published, and these illegal almost-free sheets were the samizdat of their time. A pretty raucous time in the press when The Thunderer itself could describe the Morning Chronicle as "a squirt of filthy Wars of the Word (Timewatch, BBC-2) concentrated on The Poor Man's Guardian, which despite its undercover existence and an editor, Henry Hetherington, who spent much of his time on the run, managed to sell 16,000 copies per issue. Each copy, they reckon, was read by 20-30 people. What they got from it was not exactly news.

One of the defences tried against prosecution was exactly that The Unstamped were not newspapers. They were just papers, a distinction made on the radio the other day by Mike Gabbert, an editor who counts scoops in boobs, and vice versa. What The Unstamped offered, if we're to believe the quotes used in Peter France's programme, was the kind of invective arid Establishment drubbing 'you now get in the clumsier bits of Private Eye and Spitting Image. This programme suggested that this helped to create a working Edward Greenfield on the ENO's approach to Puccini's 'little woman JLawflsr IBTffitifteif'Sllsr Robin Thomber on a fine stage version of On The Black Hill ttflne woeM urgent and passionate Puccinian. Thanks to him this lovely score's thrust of emotion, with ravishing sounds from the strings above all, comes over at full power, often to contradict, what one is seeing.

It remains interesting to have a conflation of Puccini's four editions of the score, but this composer was no compromiser in making changes, and more and more I am convinced his last thoughts were best. As it is at the Coliseum, one seriously misses Pinkerton's aria in the final scene, and the insertion of tiny sequences restored, such as those for Little Sorrow and Kate Pinkerton, merely hold things up, pointful as they are. Little Sorrow in this production remains the most Japanese element on stage, an authentic oriental toddler who acts charmingly. But how perverse can you be, when, loud and clear, Butterfly refers to her child's blue eyes golden hair: that rightly raises a titter. There as elsewhere words are commendably clear.

Janice Cairns produces some lovely as well as powerful sounds, finely controlled, though this is not really distinctive enough a soprano for Butterfly, quite apart from the problems over a girlish manner in Act 1. Edward Barham as a bluff, bearded Pinkerton, after an uncertain start, similarly opened up powerfully, but it was left to two original members of the cast, Norman Bailey as a moving and refined Sharpless, and, Anne-Marie Owens as a warmly maternal Suzuki, to produce the most memorable singing. One good point about the Lazaridis sets is that singers all do their solos well forward to get voices carrying splendidly. "dancing" is shouldering aside the people next to them. As usual, politics and pop established lines of demarcation and spat at each other.

The Petrols were on less than glittering form, thrashing through a functional set of tunes ancient and modern with doggedness but no panache. Perhaps the crowd put them off. Vocalist Steve Mack urged everybody to deter glass throwers, while a clutch of new songs sounded unfinished and conspicuously under-rehearsed. Material from last year's Babble album fared best, especially the -crushing riffery of Big Decision (the electric guitar as weighted cosh) and Swamp (acompanied by a plug for the demo outside the US Embassy yesterday). Creeping To The Cross was dedicated to Manchester's renaissance man, James Anderton.

The Petrols are like refugees from 1979, fired by polemical rage and fuelled by punk's livid afterglow. They've proved there are still ears to listen, but they didn't show up for this rent-a-conscience occasion. LEEDS Robert Clark Tom SutcliSSe on authentic Orphee at Govent Garden IT tto foe tense AUTHENTICITY is a vexing question. Baroque opera performance, like spelling and musical pitch, was not standardised, however much Italians set the fashion. So to do Gluck's Orphee et Euridice, the influential French 1774 version of his masterpiece, a la Lina Lalandi with feathers and flowing silks, and elegant poses of the arm and leg may be both out of period and contrary to the innovative spirit that governed Gluck's now classic achievement, which has never been out of the operatic repertory and which inspired Berlioz.

Both the producer and the choreographer of this English Bach Festival performance at Covent Garden admit as much in the programme. Garrick's theatrical revolution of natural expressiveness and feeling was what Gluck wanted, Tom Hawkes writes. And Belinda Quirey cites Astaire as an equivalent of baroque noble dancing. Sp what do they offer? Much the same as for Lalandi's Handel and Rameau. Before the French revolution, they say, nothing changed much though to view 1789 as such a watershed culturally is outmoded.

Astaire's commitment and energetic footwork really would be.interesting in Gluck. Still, it is lovely to see Derek West's fluttering costumes and Terence Emery's gracious sets, especially Elysium, all confidently stylish. Elegant pastel baroquerio is a popular modern fashion, as the large Sunday night audience showed. The baroque orchestra, not blemish-free, was relentlessly discreet. The choir sang with tender and dignified quietness, The dancing was pre-ballet, that sort of beautifully phrased walking with odd skips and curling swivelling forearms and hands, that Belinda Quirey, Ronald William Howell and Kay Lawrence have re-established as the authentic norm.

One of the male dancers had watchable star quality. The Furies had a small repertoire of leaps and rolls. Charles Farncombe's conducting was old-fashioned authentic, no nonsense and quickly driven, which limits the effectiveness of Gluck's astonishing and simple melodies. Maria Bovino sang Amour with charm and spirit. Marilyn Hill Smith's Euridice, in spectacular dresses, was on good form.

The disappointment was Andreas Jaggi's wimpish Orphee, carefully articulated but emotionally detached, the voice in two parts, its top raw and unappealing. Jaggi's British debut had all the correct leaning posos and stylised gestures, but lacked flexible tone and fresh phrasing. It was hard to believe he felt the love and gner. rnysicauy Dut not spin-1 tually moving. HAYWARD 4 February Lucian Freud PAINTINGS Roger Fenton Silhouettes of old Japan at the Coliseum.

A BIG girl this Butterfly at the English National Opera: maybe it is a by-product of sustained Thatcherism in British society that even archetypal Puccinian "little woman" has to be presented as a formidable governessy figure in Western blouse and skirt, with not a hint of Japanese in the facial make-up. Janice Cairns, who sang the role four years ago when this Graham Vick production was new, has returned," big of voice as well as imposing of figure, and the perversities of Vick's rethinking strike home just as sharply as before in this revival under John Lloyd Davies. Not that the mechanics of Stefanos Lazaridis's bare, black-based designs with sliding shosi panels on the upper level speeding back and forth as though on the Tokaido line seem quite under control yet. All credit to the production for eliminating a second interval by returning to Puccini's original two-act scheme, but more than 45 minutes for the one that remains is seriously destructive of tension. It would be a great gain if Vick's clever wheeze of having a Cinemascope aperture for an upper stage were quietly dropped.

Having concrete visions and interpretations thrust at you in flashed-up silhouette at Puccini's key moments is both distracting and destructive. So the one great moment of fulfilment for Butterfly in Act 2, when she realises Pin-kerton's ship has returned to Nagasaki, is totally ruined by suddenly having a silhouette behind of Pinkerton embracing his new wife. Vick's determination in his underlining of points to de-romanticise the fragile little story is as unrelenting as ever, but happily Lionel Friend, who now conducts the piece, is an TOWN COUNTRY Adam Sweeting That Petrol Emotion BLOOD Money, said the red-dripping poster hanging vividly at the back of the stage. Stop Reagan's Contra War Against Nicaragua. With perfect timing, the nine o'clock news had featured President Ron's last-ditch effort to drag his dead-dog Nicaraguan policy through Congress, plus Tom King trying to calm Irish doubts about British justice.

One of That Petrol Emotion remarked that there's a war going on in Ireland too, the kind of blinding platitude that passes for genius in pop. Thus was the ground prepared for fraught debate and emotional repercussions, but typically, the Town Country was crammed with dickheads hell-bent on throwing glasses at the stage and whose idea of GALLERY 17 April 1W rni CKNTKK. THIS, rather than West End trouser-farce, is what Theatr Clwyd should be doing. Fine, sharp, powerful writing, com-pellingly, sympathetically staged, and most of all tellingly relevant to the concerns of a Welsh identity. I hadn't read Bruce Chatwin's book, On The Black Hill, (although it won the 1982 Whitbread award for a first novel) but after seeing Charles Way's stage adaptation I want to go out and buy it tomorrow.

It's a richly satisfying account of rural life in the Marcher country straddling the RadnorHereford border during the first half of this century. Lying somewhere between Cider With Rosie and The Hired Man, it paints a fond but unsentimental picture of a world that is almost gone but still recognisably real. And in chronicling the history of one quirky family, it celebrates the values timeless and probably fairly universal of the people who live on and off and for the land. Amos Jones got his tenancy by marrying Mary, a missionary's daughter touched by travel and refinement, and that opened a draughty window on the closed world of the Black Hill. Their twin sons suppress their dreams of escaping the predetermined pattern Benjamin's slightly feminine traits like baking cakes, Lewis's fantasies of flying but the younger daughter, Rebecca, leaves tainted with a townie cloud of pregnancy by an Irish Catholic.

The impressionistic saga of rooted certainties knocked by land feuds within the village and torn by strange notions from outside like classical learning and the Kaiser's war is brought to vibrant, vivid life by Jamie Garven's BOOK gjg FAIR at the RANDOLPH HOTEL OXFORD FRI FEB 5th 12-7 pm SAT FEB 6th-10-5 pm Antiquarian Secondhand Books. Maps Prints for Sale Organised by the PBFA. PO Box 66, Cambridge, CB1 3PD Box Office 01-8363161 Credit Cards 01-240 5258 If mm. i Chatwin: certainties shaken superbly powered, meticulously focused production, economically fluid but catching the pace and colours of rural life. The playing is so consistently strong that it seems unkind to single out Terry Jackson's tense, terse father, Susan McGoun's gently suffering mother, and Andy Rivers and Sion Tudor Owen as the twins, sharing their parents' guilt for 40 years.

AH the performances were more than good, in depth and in detail, catching a stillness and self-possession that's rare these days. And the whole company joined in the music, composed and directed by Philip Thomas, which with Keith Hemming's sensitive lighting on Kim Kenny's rustic set made the show so warmly evocative. First staged a couple of years ago by the Cardiff-based company, Made In Wales, it is revived and re-worked here in a co-production with Clwyd at their studio in Mold, going on to the Waterman's arts centre in Brentford (February 16-March 5) and the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff (March 8-26). It's worth travelling some way to see. And there's a film version, with screenplay by Andrew Grieve, at Mold in May.

APIAV ABOUT CHESTER HIMES ilUCCC DON HUE OIIIECTEDBV mruuuuiovD OCSIGftEOBV EUEIUIMS MY play uses stylised African ritual and contemporary dance techniques to draw parallels between past and present. Don Kinch is highly regarded as a pioneer of black theatre. But this is ragged and inconsistent. The tribal dance is charged with meaning and has intitial impact but it can't carry the play. There was no denying the commitment and the dedication of Staunch Poets and Players at the Rep Studio, which was reflected in the intensity of their performances throughout.

Janey Gardiner's set, with its suggestion of barbed wire and dereliction, spoke volumes about survival. There was colour in the carnival and rare flashes of humour. And the message, though blurred, is timely: legislation such as this creeps in insiduously and has implications for all human rights. But overall, Devil Going To Dance lacked the force that might have sent me out in a crusading spirit. CARDIFF Robin Lyons First House THERE are few more talented members of the jazz big band, Loose Tubes, than keyboard artist and composer, Django Bates, and it was no surprise Picture by Douglas Jeffery that his visit to the Four Bars Inn with the quartet, First House, attracted enough people to bring excitement to the at mosphere, and condensation to the walls.

First House lacks that anar chic sense of comedy, and the gift for surprise that are a hallmark of Bates's work with Loose Tubes and Human Chain, Its style derives from the jazz of the Sixties. Most numbers start with an angular ornate, often densely arpeggiated theme, and then relax into a repeated, sometimes rock-influenced riff. Tiie effect of this sudden change from the wild and frenetic to the measured and relaxed is remarkably reas suring. It creates a sense of proportion and control that is a pertect environment tor tne saxophone solos of Ken Studds. Studds's tone was sweet with out beng sentimental.

He had perfect control, and carefully built up his solos from staccato fragmented phrases to fluid streams of notes. Every note seemed considered, and his subtle use of dynamics brought a mellow feeling of relaxation to his ballads. Studds is no roustabout though; that sort of excitement was created in flashes of brilliance from Bates with sudden shifts of rhythm on the keyboard that had drummer Mar tin France guessing, bouts of virtuosity in his own solos, and some growling Basie-like punctuation on the tenor horn. TONIGHT ill qi.ju to Ml weightless misty spirallings, as if the scene is viewed from a fast-moving car. A wet brush on wet paper produces a washed-out fuzziness.

Emotions are more precisely grounded than this. There is no hint of the staggering variation of detail found on any walkabout in the English countryside. The titles, Mysterious, Drift, Flight, give the atomosphere. It is in the large works on canvas that Tirr displays some of his accumulated skills. Un-primed hessian, old fishing nets, lengths of ragged rope, are used in some to anchor the bright and airy colours to a particular roughness.

In others, slatted geometric reliefs stretch the canvas off the wall so it has a sculptural presence in itself. The brushwork has an angular thrust close to Hitchins or late Bomberg, hard-edged divisions giving the things some bite. Tirr is here no rural mystic. In these he asserts his human will and artistic identity. Past Into Present, paintings by Willy Tirr.

University Gallery, Leeds, until February 18. BIRMINGHAM Pat Ashworth Devil Going To Dance A NEW play by Don Kinch, Black Theatre animateur for West Midlands Arts Association and founder of Staunch Poets and Players, promised to be a stimulating, thought-provoking experience, dealing as it does with the issue of the British Nationality Act. The Act deprives Commonwealth citizens of automatic rights of citizenship and Kinch envisages it driving black people underground into the same kind of wretched ghettos that the slave trade produced in 18th century Britain. The nnnDnn Willy Tirf WITH the continuing figurative trend ambiguous landscapes have become something of the order of the day for ex-abstract painters. It takes only a little alteration here and there to a painterly improvisation for it to suggest some wild vista, an ectoplasmic screen open to the projection of the artist's moods.

Willy Tirr is no fashion-conscious newcomer to this terrain. Yet this show demonstrates that even for one with his experience this kind of thing is hard to bring off. Landscape can become an escapist playground, the organic falling off into the generalised. His watercolours consist of fflH "ENO has another winner mtms On itS hands" Punch "thrillingly theatrical and deeply moving" Guardian Ingllih National Opera London Coliseum St Martin's lane London WC2 ADMISSION EV RKOUCTK )NS .51) KKCORDI I) INFORMATION Itl 2fl 0127.