The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 16

THE GUARDIAN Saturday March 5 1988 Where Iiave all onir playwriglhits gome? 16 ARTS GUARDIAW For three decades much of the best and politically most vibrant British writing was for the theatre. Now that some of our greatest talents have found richer pickings in other fields, Michael Blllington asks: to right, Harold Pinter, John Osborne, Trevor Griffiths, John Arden, Hanif Kureishi pungent observations about an actor's style. "Gambon," for instance, "excels at portraying men whose big stature is not matched with a corresponding largeness of personality for want of a developed moral imagination." He applies this to Gambon's Galileo and Antony. It was also the clue to his matchless Eddie Carbone. But, reading this book, I was struck by the thought that we had lived, without fully realising it, through something of a silver age in British drama: a period when dramatists were allowed to write on a generous scale and when plays offered both analysis and demonstration of how society worked.

I also counted at least a dozen plays aching for revival. It is good to learn that the RSC plans to put Howard Bren-ton's The Churchill Play on to the main Barbican stage this autumn. Another candidate for revival would be Trevor Grif-fiths's Occupations, dealing with the takeover of the Fiat factories at Turin in 1920 and, more profoundly, with the self-effacement required by political action. A young Royal Court director's recent remark that he had never actually seen a play by David Storey suggests it the popular genres and in the end you cut off a vital oxygen-supply from many of our more adventurous playwrights. I don't wish to sound too apocalyptic.

We have a richer supply of living dramatists than most European countries. In the next few months there is new work in the offing from Barker, Stoppard, Brenton, Ayckbourn, Cooney and Friel. The Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, the Edinburgh Traverse and Stratford's Other Place all have seasons of new work lined up. My point is that new writing is perforce getting smaller in scale, has lost much of the political vibrancy it had in the 70s and is becoming, for too many dramatists, an occasional occupation which they squeeze in between film and television projects which are the real earners. In America they have a saying that in the theatre a dramatist can make a killing but he can't earn a living.

I dread that becoming true here. For the past 30 years much of the best new writing in Britain has been for the theatre. It is one of things we have become famous for; and it is one symptom of our current funding problems that this reputation should now be in peril. New British Drama in Per Fanshen (now being revived by the NT Education Department) to epic plays capable of commanding large audiences. How many dramatists who have emerged in the last Ave years look set to follow this path? In one sense, young dramatists have never had it so good: with sundry venues hungry for new writing, it can rarely have likelier that a new play that is half-way good will find a stage.

The danger is that current theatre economics will produce an endless network of small-scale plays. On the one hand large theatres (such as the Barbican or the bigger regional houses) can ill afford to take a risk on an untried new play. On the other hand dramatists know that a five-character, one-set studio play stands infinitely more chance of production than an epic piece on the state of Britain. Mr Cave's book, which begins roughly at the point where I started reviewing plays on these pages, fills one with nostalgia and even guilt The guilt stems from the fact that I and many of my colleagues have often been dismissive of popular genres like farce and the whodunnit. Some examples, of course, have been very bad.

But reading this book I realised how many of our best writers, from Bennett to Frayn, have taken the form of farce and pushed it to its limits. Banish WHOLLY healthy theatre depends on two things: a constant supply of new that articu lates a society's deepest concerns and the endless retrieval of great works from other ages. We are getting steadily better at opening the pipeline to the past. What worries me, at the moment, is thai while new plays proliferate, they all too rarely take the moral temperature of Britain in the late 80s. We can point right now to Serious Money, A Small Family Business and Stephen Bill's excellent Curtains.

But three is not exactly a crowd. I was reminded of this while reading a fascinating new book by Richard Allen Cave: New British Drama In Performance On The London Stage, 1970-1985. Mr Cave focuses on eight dramatists Pinter, Ayck-bourn, Stoppard, Beckett, Storey, Hare, Griffiths and Bond while skilfully lassoo-ing several others. He dissects their work with academic thoroughness but, more importantly, realises that plays only come fully to life on the stage. He constantly relates plays to actors, comparing, say, Dench and Tutin in A Kind Of Alaska: where the former was a caged adolescent, the latter gave us a cavern-eyed woman trapped in the idioms and rhythms of a teenager.

Mr Cave also offers A Not waiting in the cal significance. I was struck not only by the brief lives plays seem to have but by the truncated quality of many dramatists' careers. There is no immutable law that says playwrights have to produce work from the cradle to the grave. But one is bound to wonder why so many good writers seem alienated from our present theatre. John Osborne writes autobiographies in Shropshire.

John Arden seems to have lost his zest for theatre after the trauma of The Island Of The Mighty. Harold Pinter, temporarily one hopes, feels he has said what he has to say theatrically. Trevor Griffiths has sought a wider audience through films and television. Edward Bond intimated Michael Billington Enteror in Tis frty at the Olivier No heart culture The Proclaimers: Clarity through bottle-bottom glasses markets and the elevation of greed to a national principle. But what troubles me is that the theatre seems to be a staging-post rather than a destination.

With the prospect of myriad-channel television and the expansion of cable and satellite (all crying out for dramatic material) I see an even greater danger that the theatre will train the talent which will then flourish elsewhere. You can hardly blame writers for wanting to play the field. But it is significant that someone like Hanif Kureishi, who learned his craft in the theatre, now feels that the cinema with Sammy and Rosy Get Laid is the natural place to offer his latest jeremiad about modern Britain. The case of Jim Hitchmough is equally much because the blazing vocals ennunciate the wittiest, heartfelt and perfectly concise songs around. Everything seen with perfect clarity through two pairs of bottle-bottom glasses.

Make no mistake these laddies can write: point proven with an opening song, Sky Takes The Soul, which is an achingly beautiful tirade about faith. Filling the Usher Hall, Edinburgh's venue for classics and opera, is now easy for the two men with guitars. A triumphant homecoming with all the family down from West Fife, along with a fervent audience all in love with the twins who have said something in their songs for them; the world addressed from a true, unabashed Scottish stance. If the dreams come from the landscape then the frowns of the Proclaimers come from the closed coal seams of their home. The songs are small, ferocious things.

The bitter anthem of Letter From America Quite come off I misiwl ho. cause it tries to do too many things at once. Sold as a mystery, it's a quest play which loses its way. The central character is a Detective Inspector in the West Mercia police (Iain Rattray) who's faced with two problems between one cup of coffee and the next: the unidentifiable body of a girl has been found on the railway line, squashed by a mail express; and his own daughter has gone missing from her polytechnic in London. Rather imnlaneihlir thought, for an absent father who hasn't seen his daughter for months, he abandons the omciai investigation to his dep- utv anrl hoaric fn avi uvUUui where he knocks people about ill the rtfllv a hneaae hat anrl aTv7 I IIUJLViK) 1N) among the dossers on the Embankment in the search for his daughter.

recently that he feels he has no base in tne modern theatre. Each case is different. But one is bound to ask why so many fine dramatists feel no urgent incentive to write plays for the British theatre. Mr Cave's book leaves one feeling that in the 15 years it covers theatre in Britain mattered deeply: that it was the natural arena for debate, discussion and dissent. To some extent that is still true.

The National has a good record in staging big public plays: most recently Pravda articulated a concern with the supine liberal reaction to the rape of our media by owerweening tycoons. In the last year Serious Money and Speculators have pinned down the irrational emotionalism of the money- the double specs and the raw harmonies charge and switch from low to high registers, hard, fiery songs flare up and die down, a Scots puritanical air about them in their Marks' shirts and straight jeans. They may even make fun of themselves by turn, using the extraordinary trick of playing the game until it hurts and seriously touching the heart. The accents hit everyone. Like Scottish cajun shouters their east Scotland patois is turned up high and not buried by the quasi-American tone that infests so much of the West Coast Scottish pop vocalists.

It is abrasive, uncompromising and powerful and they sing about accent attitudes with telling wit and venom in Take The Away, the perfect opener of their first album. But the Rolling R's are not the be and end all of the Proclaimers. Regarding them with jokey affection is one thing but then you miss so Rep is wonderful for dancing; its width shows everything to best advantage and Michael Clark's Swamp, which began the programme, has never looked so good. Rambert is truly on the crest of the wave. Rhapsody In Blue is at the Leicester Haymarket March 10-12; Mayflower Theatre, Southampton, March 16-19; Royal College of Music, Manchester, April 28-30; The Playhouse, Nottingham, May 3-5; Theatr Clwyd, May 31-June 2.

Then it comes to London, to Sadler's Wells. Worcester Robin Thornber Identity Unknown EUAN SMITH'S new play is an interesting idea that hasn't instructive. He wrote a very good ornithological comedy, Watching, which moved rapidly from Liverpool Playhouse to the Bush and then became the basis of a popular television sit-' com. The theatre is becoming a talent-nursery: television and film the place where writers earn their daily bread. The other obvious fact is that fewer and fewer writers have the capacity or even the will to articulate their ideas on big stages.

Reading Mr Cave's book, it becomes possible to trace the organic development of a writer like David Hare. He not only moves from Portable Theatre, via Hampstead, the Court and Nottingham Playhouse, to the Olivier. He also moves from elegant fantasies to a work of genuine dialectic like summed up so much of the history of leaving, a magnificent, disdainful look over the shoulder at the left-behind auld country and an expression of unrelenting love for it all at once. The choruses are done with a sad vehemence that has the audience hoisted along with them. Out of an immensely impressive handful of new songs, What Can You Do stands out, even on first hearing it is one of the most beautiful political songs yet written, a terrible anguish sung in the softest of harmonies.

To the last ringing echoes this was a glorious testament to the romantic realism of the best Scottish talent. These are Celtic soul brothers out of Burns, through Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Elvis moving all the way back to the northern homeland. Nobody could have predicted the Proclaimers and nobody could have expected them to be so undeniably great. together the girl he's hardly spoken to for years, Smith uses a string of cornily colourful characters a punk student, a liberal lecturer, two warmhearted tarts, and a whole soup run of down-and-outs to reflect the personality of DI Ian Paterson, unloved, unloving, and unlovable as he single-mindedly tramples on everyone in sight. It makes a point about a type of tight repressive a point made more amusingly in Iain Heggie's recent piece, American Bagpipes but it does so in a way that's nearly as ham-fisted as its protagonist.

Maybe another filtering intelligence could have tightened up the script, but this production at the Worcester Swan was directed by Euan Smith (with Chris White) and the company seemed to have entered into the spirit of his adventure without seriously questioning what they were doing. Bob Flynn in Edinburgh on a joyful homecoming for The Proclaimers Celtic soul brothers' triumph is time for a revival of Home or The Contractor, the best work- play ever, in which the erection and dismantling of a wedding marquee takes on a metaphori- ise It is a programme that needs to be seen alongside the stark analysis in yesterday's Guardian that ferries still sailing are no safer in their fundamental design than the Herald, and that she herself was no better than the European Gateway which sank outside Harwich in 1982. Philip Geddes's film does not dredge those murky waters. The only crew member interviewed had spent five hours on the hulk of the Herald that apalling night helping passengers to safety. One of the most stricken survivors, George Lamy, who had lost his wife, his daughter, his grandson and his mother in the disaster said: "I can't blame a particular person.

Townsend Thoresen people worked alongside me. Townsend Thoresen people got killed. How can I blame them? But I wish I could blame somebody." But those people beside him were the crew, victims like himself. Townsend Thoresen. the company was somewhere else that night, tucked up in its boardroom.

In the absence of blame the old nostrums have a good cry, talk it out, gather with those who have suffered the same deadly experience all seemed to work together. Kent Social Services department set up a Herald Assistance unit to provide support for the rescued and the bereaved. The living who somehow could not make themselves part of that communal release from grief and sur vivor guilt seemed the most haunted. Aftermath may be part of the healing process. other countries, Norway, the US, Australia, Yugoslavia have trained teams to move into disaster areas, to help organise, to initiate the kind of practical and psychological support the survivors and the rescuers need urgently.

Britain has no such team yet. Securicor? BUPA? Or Townsend Thoresen? Maybe they will put the job out to tender. Every now and again Arena (BBC-2) comes up with a film of brain-stunning tedium. An An-dalucian Journey, about flamenco, was one of them. I'm prejudiced against the caterwaul as art form, but Jana Bo- kova has made good films in tne past, and it may be that tne second part of this one.

show ing tonight, will have the sort of excitement the idea on paper promised. But the first part shown last night had all the grip of your uncle's package-tour video. Birmingham Mary Clarke Rambert RICHARD ALSTON'S new work for the Rambert Dance Comnanv. Rhansoriv In Blue. had its first performance at the rurmmgnam Repertory Theatre on Thnrsrlav nnrl.

riecorvArllv has sold out the theatre for all three performances there. It is a work of nnallrwpri nloasnro beautifully structured, immaculately costumed and immaculately danced. Alston drew his inspiration from Gershwin's own solo Diano Vfirsinn nfthn nWn at. traded by the pace and vitality, and he has tireceded it with two preludes for piano of 1926 to serve as overture and opening sequence. The opening se- auetiee is for turn rrirfo in hlnrlt suits, white shirts, black ties, formance On The London Stage, mo-lass oy Kicnara Alien cave (Colin Smythe, 16).

finds passion lacking played on a revolving Roger Glossop set that offers us some memorable vistas of galleried corridors and ecclesiastical wingdings. Clive Francis is a superb Vasques: his walk is a stealthy prowl over hot coals and he sniffs out corruption with the malignant relish of a private investigator. Richard Cordery also does full justice to the bungling Friar handing out stern lectures to the incest-mongers while making assignations with a bit of crumpet in the confessional. And Russell Dixon is exuberantly funny as the comic suitor, Bergetto, bracing himself to leap off a foot-high step as if it were an Olympic diving-board. My main doubts concern the young lovers.

The aim clearly is to present them as gauche, moonstruck and adolescent at the start and, at the end, matured through suffering. But there is an element of intellectual sophistry about Giovanni which I find no trace of in Rupert Graves's nice, preppy, clean-cut lad in a bottle-green suit: only with the murder of his sister and his subsequent entry, when he came in clutching her heart in his hand rather than presenting it as if it were an unorthodox kebab, did he strike a note of deep passion. Suzan Sylvester's Annabella has innocence and charm and makes the first declaration of love shyly touching but I hold this should be a story about two lovers swept along by an irresistible force rather than about a young couple with severe dating problems. Ayckbourn stages the play proficiently giving us, as in A View From The Bridge, the sense of a total society. The marriage of Annabella and Sor-anzo (Michael Simkins, suitably tormented) gives the impression of something rushed and furtive in a mouldy crypt.

The climactic banquet, with its multiple deaths, snows innocent bystanders caught up in brutal chaos. And, after the ball is over and moral judgements pronounced, you are reminded that someone has to come along and sweep up the corpses. But it is a circumspect, deliberate production ot a headlong play and one that is a little too tasteful to convey the dangerous ec stasy of incest. soloist William Conway and the conductor seemed finely responsive to the piece, and produced a performance of depth and intelligence. At 32, Saraste seems to have found a remarkable maturity as an interpreter.

He opened the concert with an athletic, joyful account of a work which can easily be made rackety and banal, the 17-year-old Bizet's Major Symphony. In this reading, the slow movement's extended string music was invested with an almost ecstatic warmth and lyricism, and the oboe solo was charmingly and eloquently delivered. The characterful and controlled woodwind and brass playing for which the SCO is renowned was the glory of the Beethoven Eroica that finished the evening. Seraste's tempi were generally brisk, but they always allowed for clarity of phrasing and fine detail: a performance in a million. Hugh Hebert TTV ISASTERS are like 11 Ti wars, you always end II up fighting them with the resources you needed for the last one or the next.

Resources for the mayhem of here and now are something or somewhere else. Just a year after the Herald Of Free Enterprise capsized, drowning 193 passengers and crew, Aftermath (TVS) looked not at what might have saved the ship or the dead but at what might still save the survivors. And not just those who were hauled out of the black waters offZeebrugge. Many of the rescue workers and police involved later needed some kind of psychological support as much as the survivors. In the way of people tempered in fire and water, they felt they were members of an exclusive club.

The crew who survived half of them did not) felt like that, the passengers felt like that, the Dover clergyman who spent so much time comforting the bereaved felt like it too. To examine them too closely is intrusion, and Peter Williams was both direct and discreet as interviewer. Not to examine them is to forget and foreclose on the possibility of averting another Zee-brugge, another aftermath. BLOOM SBURY 37 M29 LAST PERF TONIGHT at1.30pm&7.30pm MEDEA Thu.lO.SaM2Marat7.30pm UCL Dance Society ANNUAL DANCE SHOW DRILL HALL 637B270 until 12 Mar Tue-Sat at 8 pm GAY SWEATSHOP THIS ISLAND'S MINE "this play Is a complete dBHal. go and see Immediately CL HALF MOON 7804000 213 Mile End Rd, El (50ydt Stepney Tuba) EVERY BLACK DAY by Don Hale LAST PERF TONIGHT at 7.30 pm Man 3-50 Tue-Tnu 5-50 Fit Set 6-50 HAMPSTEAD T22S301 THE FILM SOCIETY a new play by Jon Robin Bate dlr by Michael Attenborough VnbeslbMactdimmaaboulSoiXh Africa alrce Master Harold the Bop Ep LOST SMMM 450 Fulham Rd, SW6 (Tuba: Futiam TIC TOC In HOOLIGANS total brilliance shouldnlbemlssed" CL Edinburgh Fringe First until 26 Mar at 7.45 pm ORANGE TREE, Richmond M03S33 from IB Mar at 7.30 pm ABSOLUTE HELL by Rodney Addend WORLD PREMIERE RICHMOND MOOOM The Green, Richmond.

Surrey PRIESTLEY'S -0 AN QERSOUS CORNER LAST PERFS TONIGHT. at5pm8.15Pm kSHAW 67 (8) BARRY FOSTER, FRANK GRIMES THE QUARTERED MAN the CIA In Central America written directed by Dona) freed rwir i wun r.w Theatre Royal Stratford Eaet 540310 KINO OF ENGLAND byBarrieKealfe with Rudolph Walker "handlea He wat role ma)e5calty with eNrnmertng oonv UfABBUIUIfiB urWI2MaratapjNYtO'S THE DUST Jam our FREE maWnalJLjf Dept THEATRE DESPATCH, PO BOX 633.SE77HE MfflSm W'HY has Alan Ayckboum chosen to direct John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's A Whore? I assumed, jokingly, it might be because he saw it as a pre-quel to A Small Family Busi ness with a tamily at odds against a background of Italian corruption. But watching his cool, hyper-efficient but somewhat passionless production at the Olivier, I got no sense of an ungovernable obsession: what I saw was a quattrocento, Romec-and-Juliet style story of star-cross'd love delivered with detached professionalism. For the first time I even found myself doubting the quality of Ford's play. It deals famously with the incestuous relationship of Giovanni and Annabella.

But there is no sense of taboos defiantly broken or of inhibitions flamboyantly shed. Ford simply shows their relationship as tender, loving, pathetic and inescapably doomed: as Giovanni says, not, I know my lust but 'tis my fate that leads me on." Everyone praises Ford for his lack of sensationalism, give or take the moment when Giovanni enters with his sister's heart impaled on a dagger. But I wish the play were a little more feverish and had something of Webster's hectic morbidity and ability to link the cosmic and the commonplace. Ford was a better story-teller than his Jacobean predecessors but a chaste poet: only two characters employ a language that gives the play a spine-tingling excitement. One is the Friar who delivers a chilling, admonitory speech to Annabella in which he envisions a Dante-esque Inferno full of unending deaths: "There are gluttons fed with toads and adders; there is burning oil poured down the drunkard's throat." But the language also springs to life with the Spanish avenger, Vasques, whose master weds the pregnant Annabella and who throughout employs a rich, rancid prose: "To know what ferret it was that haunted your cony-berry, there's the cunning," he tells his master with rather more vigour than social tact.

It is, in fact the secondary characters who come off best in Ayckbourn's production, Edinburgh Neil Mackay SCO Saraste ON THURSDAY at the Queen's Hall the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under its young Finnish principal conductor, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, presented a programme which didn't look very promising on paper, but in the event turned out to be satisfying and thought-provoking. Its centrepiece was the Ballade For Cello And Chamber Orchestra by Frank Martin, one of the great series of works composed by the now largely neglected Swiss master after his stylistic breakthrough in the early 1940s. This music is astonishing in its subtlety of dark-hued harmonic colour and quietly disturbing orchestration and has a nocturnal, Tri8tanesque poetry. Both the THIS is, possibly, the story. Imagine, somewhere in the mists of a small Fife school, a granite-cold teacher with a mouth like a shut handbag and the steel ruler held over two faltering red-haired twins who practise their scales and are having the importance of enunciation while singing rapped into them.

The twins grew up and they still stretch their mouths with glaring movements, blazing with intense singing. They call themselves The Proclaimers. That is pure assumption, a guess at the past of two brothers, Craig and Charlie Reid, who are a pop phenomenon, deliverers of genuine proclamations from their Scots souls which are not only sharply effective but also commercially viable. The stage show is a very spare presentation, a pair of acoustic guitars, a tambourine, a harmonica and a collection of strident songs roared out. That's it, nothing else.

The light bounces off soft shoes and a man in a white tuxedo; their dancing, which reappears throughout the work, is quick, strong, vivid. Contrasting with this trio in the Rhapsody he uses three couples. The girls are elegance itself in long dresses of soft blue chiffon, silver trimmed, and ballroom shoes with heels. The men are in white tie and tails, but there's nothing pseudo-American or tap about it. The dance language for the three couples is marvellously inventive in its use of purely classical ballet steps allied to the kind of exhibition dance that made ballroom dancing so beautiful in the 1920s.

If the sophisticated costuming, by Victor Edelstein, hints at the 1920s, it in no way places Rhapsody in a specific period. It's simply a lovely danced response to the music, timeless in its use of different dance stvles and absolutely for 1988. The stage of the Birmingham As the off-duty cop pieces.