The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 21

ARTS GUARDIAN 21 A pure song and dance Derek Malcolm on the strong British cast in this year's Oscar nominations The first Emperor THE GUARDIAN Thursday February 18 1988 LOOKS as if cinematic II art is going to triumph 1 1 box-office science at duced by Britain's Jeremy Thomas at considerable cost and after years of negotiations with the Chinese. It has also been many years since not a single American director has been nominated. In W. J. Weatherby A review of Iris Murdoch's latest novel, The Book and the Brotherhood, in the New York Times Book Review went even further.

The story was stated to be set in contemporary England, of the most depressing; and pathetic places on the face of the earth." The latest theatrical vehicle for British stars in the US is a Glenia JacksonChristopher Plnmnier Macbeth, due to open on Broadway in April. Ameri- -can gossip columnists have gleefully reported alleged.tem-peramental outbursts and firings, It begins to seem that, as with the Japanese, the British wiQ only recover their old popularity when they have a few flops. SLICES OF LIFE? Jim Broadbent and Linda Bassett at the Cottesloe PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFERY Michael Bi II ington finds universality missing in Fugard's new play AJLthe Oscar ceremonies next month. Bernardo Bertolucci's British-produced and financed The Last Emperor, about the last 'ruler of the Walled City who became a gardener after the Chinese Revolution, has received a total of nine nominations, including one for best films. And there is not a single American film-maker nomi- nated as Best Director, proving that the nationalistic fervour of the Academy members has finally abated this year.

The other films which have scooped up multi-nominations are fairly obvious Academy choices Broadcast News (7), Fatal Attraction (6), and Empire Of The Sun (6). John Boor-man's Hope And Glory and Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom are the leading British contenders here with the Boor-man film in the van for Best Film, Best Director and Best ScreenPlay nominations. Cry Freedom has to be content with nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Denzil Washington and Steve Biko), Best Score and Best Songs. The real surprise is the sue cess of the Bertolucci epic, though it is at or near the top of the Box Office League in nearly every European country at the moment, so could hardly be called an art film. It was pro- British John Boorman Sty society ation that is too extreme, too aberrant, too peculiar, to work as a general allegory.

Mr Fugard's point seems to be that we are all susceptible to some form of private degradation; but a man who leaps into a pig-pen in abandonment of his 'humanity seems more a sad psychotic than a potent symbol. The obvious comparison is with Beckett who also deals with human imprisonment; but where Winnie in Happy Days, buried up to her neck in earth, embodies unflinching stoicism in adversity, Mr Fugard's hero represents a feverishly neurotic guilt. Beckett offers ariir-reducible image: Fugard a tormented special case. Inevitably, being Mr Fugard, there are moments of redeeming optimism. The scene of the midnight walk is good: a reminder of the beauty of the familiar.

And the piece is given theatrical life by the energy of the performers. Jim Broad-bent's Pavel has a wild, driven, knotted despair as he cries, "Like the pigs in here, all I do is giveness may be misplaced and, to cap it all, he learns that he has been posthumously decorated a Hero of the People. So he is doomed to a life with the pigs. Mr Fugard shows how his spirit rebels against the squalor of the sty: he seeks to codify his existence by enumerating every fly he has squashed and he savagely kills a pig who has eaten a beautiful butterfly. His hunger for freedom also takes the form of a midnight walk in which he dons maroon stockings and his wife's dress and finds himself intoxicated by the scent of wild roses and the beauty of the stars.

But it is only by arraigning himself before an imagined military court and by releasing the pigs from captivity that he is able to reenter the world. Mr Fugard rings the changes on what seems a defiantly static situation. He also invests the action with touches of Gogolian comedy such as Pavel's enforced assumption of the role of a dead military hero. But the play left me cold; and the prime Bum Bum JEROME ROBBINS, who will be 70 later this year, looks back on a long life in his latest ballet, Ives' Songs. The premiere by the New York City Ballet has been greeted with raves from American dance critics.

Typical was Anna Kisseleoff in the New York Times who enthused that Ives' Songs "is a work of the poetic imagination: it is pure Robbins at his The brilliant, multi-talented Robbins and the late Charles Ives, a dedicated avant-garde composer with a bitter elitist vision who died in 1954 at the age of 79, seemed to have little in common, but as this blend of Robbins's choreography and Ives's songs shows, the two artists share a view of individual American life. In what is essentially a mem ory ballet, Robbins shows Ives wandering through the past from the innocence of a Mark Twain childhood, a Norman Rockwell teenage, and on to the first intimidations of death. Deceptively simple dances are performed by a large number of unknown dancers, which is typical of Robbins; the 18 songs are sung with great expressiveness by Timothy Nolen. It is Proustian in its remem brance of the past as if Robbins is nostalgically recollecting nis own life but, as Anna Kisselgoff suggests, it could also be Kob- bins subconscious trmute to the late Antony Tudor, who died last year and whose ballets greatly influenced Kobmns. Checkmate ACTORS EQUITY ASSOCIATION has decided not to allow Tommy Korberg, the Swedish actor who originated the role of the Soviet grandmaster in the British musical Chess, to play it on Broadway.

The Association ruled that Kor berg was neither a performer of international stature nor pos sessed of unique ability. So David Carroll will play the role when Chess opens at New York's Imperial Theatre on April 28. When failure will succeed Iris Murdoch A SLIGHT backlash seems to have developed against the British success in the Amencan arts. Of course the trend has a long way to go before it catches ud with the jokes about the Japanese but the American media nas plenty oi current examples. If actors aren't joking that you need an English accent to get work, then writers of musicals are suggesting the best way to get produced on Broadway is to showcase first in London.

Tom Wolfe, the hip journalist famous for catching the latest trend, makes an Englishman one of the prime targets for his satirical barbs in his first novel, Bonfire of the Vanities. in Brazil reason is that it presents a situ Brando's back Marlon Srando MARLON BRANDO, now 63, is to make a new film Jericno later this year that he has written himself. It will be his first big leading role in 18 years. Described as a contemporary thriller set in Washington DC, Mexico, Panama and Colombia, it will be directed by Donald Cammell and produced by Andre Blay and Elliot Kastner, who produced The Missouri Breaks with Brando. Brando appeared in such films as Superman in 1978 and Apocalypse Now (1979) but then seemed to retire to his South Seas island and put on a great deal of weight.

It was suggested he raai given up films, just as years ago he gave up the stage. Between the lines AMERICAN writers can never make up their minds about the value of literary awards. They condemn such prizes as too political, then complain when they don't receive them. The latest controversy is a perfect example. The late Janes Baldwin never received a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize and now Toni Morrison has been passed over for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Forty-eight black writers and critics promptly signed a statement deploring this "oversight and harmful Walter Goodman in the New York Times replied: "Anybody who spends time in what passes as the literary community knows that lobbying is part of the awards game." If the awards were kept perspective, Goodman argued, Toni Morrison's admirers migntnot have felt impelled to go public in a way that can only be self-defeating, for if her latest novel, Beloved, is awarded the next Pulitzer Prize, "read ers must wonder whether claque pressure had something to do with It is also not merely a racial natter. Hemingway was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for For Whom The Bell Tolls and then it was withdrawn. The 48 protestors either take awards too seriously or are concerned with their political rather than their literary significance. the list this year are Bertolucci, two British hlm-makers, Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction) and John Boorman. The others are the Canadian Norman Jewi-son for Moonstruck and the Swede, Lasse Hallstrom, who made My Life As A Dog.

France looks to be favourite in the Best Foreign Film Category, but it is not the expected nomination of Claude Berri's Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, but Louis Malle's Ven ice prize-winner Au Revoir Les Enfants. Other nominations in this category include no less than three Scandinavian movies Denmark's Babette's Feast, Sweden's My Life as a Dog, and Norway's Pathfinder. There will again be a controversy about Steven Spielberg, thought to have been consistently ignored for any main award. Though his Empire Of The Sun gets six nominations, it is not included in the Best Film category and Spielberg is left out as Best Director. Bertolucci's film is a slight favourite over Broadcast News for the Oscar.

But you never know these days. Hope And Glory, the British critic's choice this year, could edge in between the two if it gets a bit of luck. tmi nominations Best mm Broadcast New; Fatal Attraction; Hope And Glory; The Last Emperor; Moonstruck. Brat Director: Adrian Lvne (Fatal At traction); John Boorman (Hope And Glory); Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor); Lasse Hallstrom (My Lite As A Dog); Norman Jewlson (Moonstruck). Brat Acton Michael Douglas (Wall Street): William Hurt (Broadcast News); Mar-cello Mastroianni (Dark Eyes): Jack Nicholson (Ironweed): Robin Williams (Good Morning Vietnam).

Best Actressi Cher (Moonstruck); Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction); Holly Hunter (Broadcast News); Sally KfrWand (Anna): Meryl Streep (Ironweed). along the route you had a particularly good time, your coffin will be tossed in the air three times. "We believe in parades. Parades when you come in with the midwife and parades when you go out with the undertaker." Carnival is the parade in between. In the last few minutes of the programme, the police arrived on horses, in cars, on motorbikes.

The water-waggon washed all the gay debris away. And a priest, with a bowl of ash, intoned: "Remember, man, though art but dust and unto dust thou shalt return." "What are you going to do tomorrow?" said the reporter in Trinidad. said a reveller, "I pass out." I was passing the Lloyd's building in the City last year, the one that wears its intestines on the outside, when every head in the bus snapped round. It was not Richard Rogers' masterpiece, people tend to look away from that. Half-way down and hanging on tight was the Queen Mother.

All her feathers were blowing backwards but she waved bravely. She looked like a pale-blue budgie lost in a boiler-house. Richard Rogers has been brought into the Arup team who are to redesign Paternos ter Square beside St Paul's. The assessors were very taken by his idea for burying people in a hole in the ground so they can see St Paul's better. "We know this is going to create a problem with Prince Charles," said one of the assessors of the new design in The Battle of Paternoster Square (BBC 2), an illuminating account of the problem.

Prince Charles recently gave a dinner audience of architects and City planners serious indigestion by comparing them to their detriment to the Luftwaffe. Paternoster Square, a Sixties creation of wind-swept concourse and starveling trees in concrete saucers, was used in the opening sequence of The Power Game, a Sixties drama series. Patrick Wymark strode in, the wind whipping his hair. Barbara Murray, wearing Courreges and a look of some hauteur, hung on to her hat. Rosemary Leach, the faithful secretary and mistress, shivered at a decent distance.

The Power Game was about a bull-necked little bulldozer of a businessman. Locations are often chosen with considerable sensitivity. HEALTH FARM MALTA A beautifully converted hunting lodge with superb SMINAantAMIATIKHUUCrapOOI. ni uim SALONS DBS03iSfTCI)U. I5EJ MUtD RJSTAUMNTMrMS Byronic.Guy Williams's Timpn at the Leicester Haymarket A THOLFUGARD describes A Place With The Pigs at the Cottesloe as "a personal parable." But the essence of a parable is that it gives an everday story a universal application; and one of the problems I had with this uncomfortable, llfrminute play (no interval) was that I could not find in it the metaphor for mankind Mr Fugard clearly intended.

The day's genesis lay in a news story about a Soviet Army deserter from the Second World War who spent 41 years hiding in a pigsty; and, over four scenes and with some ingenuity, Mr Fugard sketches in a possible scenario. His hero, Pavel, stirred by memories of his flower-encrusted slippers, -10 years previously fled the trenches to return home. Now. after a decade of self- imposed banishment, he plans to surrender as a village war-memorial is about to be unveiled. But his wife has torn up his uniform, he fears thai his innocent trust in human for- Festival Hall Edward Greenfield Mutter PhiBharmonia STILL only 24, the violinist, Anne-Sophie Mutter already has more than a decade of experience behind her as a star vir tuoso.

Even when she first arrived, brought out by Herbert von Karajan no less, her maturity, artistic as well as technical, was phenomenal. Now with seeming ease she has breasted any transitional problems of a child prodigy to emerge as an artist who to register her natu ral command doesn nave to adopt aggressive manners. What one notices first hear ing her live, in relation to her many records, is that the sound is even sweeter and purer but not so large as one expects. She makes an asset of this in the way she will often deliberately scale the dynamics down, as in her ethereally beautiful account of the Aria of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto. Though the composer's marking is mezzo forte, she conveyed in the hush and poise of her playing an extra Bachian intensity.

Her delicacy in Mozart's A major Violin Concerto, K. 219, also matched the chamber quality which the octogenarian conductor, Paul Sacher, drew from the Philharmonia Orchestra. Yet Mutter's positive strength came out in her magnetic control of the difficult transitions and interpolations in Mozart's highly individual structure. The last item in a long programme was the one which came closest to Sacher's heart. It was in 1936 that as conductor of the Basel Chamber Orchestra he commissioned Bartok to write a work for him, resulting in one of his supreme masterpieces, the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.

Sacher conducted the first performance in January 1937, and his approach to the music remains as fresh as ever, with the emotion of Bartok as well as the bite brought out, the sense of fun as well as the spiki-ness. And, as in the rest of the programme, Sacher, who has generally preferred to conduct There is even a touch of wry Broadbent humour as, preparing to face the world, he dons a dress and fastidiously asks, "Have you got a little brooch or something?" Linda Bassett also plays the wife with a fine exasperated affection and a peasant pragmatism that reminds you' that the wife's toil subsidises the husband's agony. Mr Fugard's production is adroit (particularly the sound-design, all grunts and squeals, by David Budries) and there is something touching about Pavel's final homesickness for humanity. But I was reminded of Dr Johnson less for his observation that 'The pigs are a race unjustly calumniated" than for his sane apercu that "Nothing odd will do long." What LMr Fugard has tried to do is discover an enduring metaphor for wracking, self-torturing guilt. But the chosen example of a Red Army deserter grovelling in the mire illuminates the particular without achieving the universal." As a parable, it is too personal to work.

history shows that the system has not really changed." But one day, he feels sure, she will be understood to belong to the mainstream of modern art. Being responsible for the ini tiation and, in part at least, for the selection and display of this exhibition, I cannot pretend to be properly objective. But the work speaks for itself as it may be seen developing trom the ex pressive, sometimes nightmarish, crudities of the limbering-up years in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire in the early Sixties (her older colleagues, William Crazier and the Roberts Colqahoun and Mac-Bryde must have helped to charge Douthwaite's batteries but they did not visibly influence her work if anyone did it was surely Duluffet) to the sharply percipient expressions of recent experiences in India and South America. There is a sense in which every Douthwaite painting is a performance, and. like an ac tress supremely in command of nercratt uutwno retains tne gift of empathy with her chosen role, sue continues to invent or discover apt painters' parallels for her sensations and affinities.

Early on, the notorious American female bandits like Belle Starr and Pauline Cush-man were seen as big, bold per-sonae and little more. With the Amy Johnson series a new insight into heroics began to reveal both sides of the coin, the exalted success-woman and the dreamer headed for disaster in a fatal, proto-sexual confrontation between fragile aeroplane ami the voluptuous curve of a hillside. Fraught as they often are with rage and anguish, these blacker emotions in Douthwaite's paintings are frequently counterbalanced bv a kind of flaunting courage as well as infectious lroraour. And the urgent subjectivity of the content is counterbalanced by the masterly technique. Douthwaite: Paintings And Drawings 1951-1988.

Third Eye centre, ueasgow, to Marcn n. with abuse Time Out Times a II Illrl ni eat, sleep and defecate. speare, it wasn't too obvious in this production, directed by Simon Usher at the Leicester Haymarket Studio, which seemed to be largely a vehicle for some wildly romantic acting by Guy Williams as Timon. The little girls in the first-night audience were engrossed by his Byronic performance; I was more engaged by the droll, wordly-wise philospher from Anthony Douse. There were distracting touches of pretentious direction which didn't seem to me to add anything to a rather tediously wordy text.

Glasgow Cordelia Oliver Douthwaite PAT Douthwaite's major Retrospective at the Third Eye Centre makes a belated but highly effective appearance this month: belated because this Glasgow-bred but widely-travelled painter has been seriously underrated for far too long; effective because, to quote from Douglas Hall's preface to the accompanying illustrated book, "Douthwaite is a real and living example of the sort of artist who creates the legends of modern art, a modern representative of the peintres maudits. "The arts establishment prides itself that such artists could never go unrecognised today, but Douthwaite's past 'TLvenot recently seen theatre tkr Om www MA Nancy Banks-Smith LIVE programme is never a mistake though it is often a Arena au un A Mardi Gras (BBC 1 2) was four hours of carnival live from New Orleans, Trinidad and Rio. Together with Miss Bum Bum were the first to take' your clothes off') and Robert Close are often called the most beautiful woman in Rio offered Ronnie Biggs who, one must regret-fully'say, looked in the best of health and spirits after 18 years in Brazil. Miss Bum Bum said somewhat piously that she took her clothes off naturally, not like some who did it for publicity, and Mr Close said enigmatically that beauty was sexless. MrBjggs, more merrily, said: "I am not allowed to work and, gratefully, I'm not allowed to marry.

But you know what Brazil is like, there's always a way." And he winked. Carnival is like diamonds, goodness has nothing to do with it. "The streets have been full of people being sick." This uncommonly candid comment came from John Walters, a disc jockey, who was interviewing Paul Prudhomme, the fattest chef in the world. Astonishing that Paul seems to do it all on shrimps. "You'll eat anything that moves," said Walters, who is strong on honesty.

"We love all sorts of little bugs," said Prudhomme, munching something unlikely with whiskers. The other reporter was Tom Watt, of EastEnders, who was enthused but confused: "I can't tell men from women or up from down." Candour and confusion are part of the carnival scene. Roaring Lion, Lord Kitchener and Mighty Sparrow, all calypso kings, sang sweetly together and talked about calypso. "Without it, people in the country would know very little about what is taking place," said Roaring Lion. "The singer is a man of straw, he has nothing to lose so he can come out and attack anyone and anything," said Lord Kitchener.

Mighty Sparrow said that when he was destitute in London he tried singing calypso in a pub but a customer took his mike away and said he was singing nonsense. "I just stood there amazed and the next thing I knew I was fired." 1 was particularly taken by the jazz funeral. "When the body hits the door of the church, we play a funeral dirge real sorrowful but, on the way back, everybody's happy because he's going to his just reward. And so, of course, are the band. For $1,600 you get embalmed, a mule, a jazz band and a cheerful crowd who come along for the ride.

Anywhere chamber orchestras, concentrated on refining and clarifying textures. Leicester Robin Thornber Timon of Athens HERE'S this bloke, an Athenian lord in a smart grey suit, who spends all his time hunting and throwing parties for his fawning friends and dabbling in a bit of arts sponsorship. But he also spends all his money, ignoring the advice of his hard-pressed, sensible steward and a cynical philosopher who happens to be hanging around, observing philosophically. But when he's broke and asks his mates for 50 ducats or so until Friday they all seem to have pressing engagements not surprisingly, considering his second mortgage. Even I could have told him they wouldn't cough up once the good times were gone.

And I'm nobody's investment consultant. So then he goes and spends act two sulking in the woods, announcing he really doesn't like people at all. and won't come out to play even wnen tney asK mm to oe doss oi the city in its gang wars with his old mate Alcibiades. Well I'm not surmised. I never liked him from the start poseur and playboy that he was, obviously living it up off the backs of his peasants even before the credit rah out.

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