The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 28

THE GUARDIAN Friday April 8 1988 Ian Judge has brought a glamour to the new Opera North production of Tosca, reports Gerald Lamer lira allmure Pockets? fall of dreams 28 ARTS GUARDIAN AN JUDGE is known to the Opera North audience as one of the company's low-budget specialists, the animateur of a Hugh Hebert Howland's church interior transforms easily into a room in the Palazzo Farnese, it does not make a convincing roof of the Castel Sanf Angelo or anywhere else. What we had taken to be a frieze on the church ceiling changes effectively under blue lighting to a predawn sky but there is nowhere for a desperate soprano to jump from. When Cavaradossi is shot he has his back to us and the rifles are trained on us, which is an effective piece of theatre. Tosca, however, has to open a you can see that she is wearing the authentic red wig and, although this is one of the Bernhardt Tosca associations Judge chooses to ignore, it would not be totally surprising to find that she is equipped with only one leg. If she had been she might have avoided being upstaged by the Scarpia of Sergei Leiferkus, who emerges as the real star of the show.

Judge has devised an equally superb entry for him, sleek and fastidious in oatmeal raincoat and light brown shoes. The voice does not have Faust and of a Macbeth which looked like the earnest products of an improvisation workshop. Now at last, for their new Tosca, they have given him some money. It was not a lot of money in operatic terms, a mere 60,000, but it has allowed him to commission a set (from Gerard Howland) and costumes (from Ann Curtis) which postulate a certain time and place. Although there is no painstaking reconstruction of Sanf Andrea or the Palazzo Farnese, the place is obviously Rome not in 1800, where the libretto has it, but in 1900, when the opera was first performed.

The motivation for the updating, unlike the fascist setting so successfully adopted by Anthony Besch several years before Jonathan Miller tried it, is evidently not political. Judge's purpose is to exploit the glamorous associations of Sardou's original play with Sarah Bernhardt and, with them, to emphasise the star quality of the central figure. So Opera North's Tosca Mary Jane Johnson, the Texan soprano who was once their Girl of the Golden West makes her first entry gorgeously dressed a la belle epo-que. When she removes her hat PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFERY Paul Rogers exuding querulous Irritation. done badly or not at all.

The lad gets in from winning the Smokers' Cough Grand Prix and is told that the next day they are going to go through the video "of seven horrible But even Doyle was finally stunned by Hendry's achievement. He made the truncheon gesture of triumph He knows that Hendry could already earn at least 600,000 in a year. Oh, and be world champion in a little while. Doyle sees it as a father-son relationship. "I've got to kick him when I feel he needs kicked." Dave Johnson knows that too, but it isn't easy when a lad is a boundlessly active 13-year-old at a special school and with behaviour problem's.

Harry Weisbloom's Who Will Love Billy? (40 Minutes, BBC-2) was about a relatively new development in the practice of adoption. Johnson is 43, unemployed and unmarried and not so long ago would never have, been considered as a possible adoptive father for Billy. The local authority social worker and the adoption agency had carried out discreet inquiries that satisfied them that Dave was not homosexual, that in many ways he might very welt be the kind of father Billy needs, with the time to devote to the boy. Nor in the old style adoption would Billy have been the subject of a self-advertising video. It did not work out.

Billy's hyperactivity, doubts about Dave's health made them call it off. But there is nothing pathetic about either Dave or Billy and Weisbloom's film was never sentimental about their attempts to establish a relationship that would allow the adoption to go ahead. The boy's demands are endless, not just in energy and patience and tolerance, but in terms of gifts. So the question of whether a single man is a suitable adoptive the shrink the dark colour conventionally associated with the part but it is flexible, penetrating and, like the Chief of Police himself, imperturbable. No one else in the cast has that kind of authority, not even Mary Jane Johnson who shares with John Treleavan, her Ca-varadossi, a certain vocal flab-biness.

Neither of them being match-fit, so to speak, and therefore unequal to the well turned-out and welt-tuned Scarpia, they do excite sympathy tor tneir vulnerability, un the other hand, both of them have trouble controlling their voices, particularly in the top register in the early stages of the perfor mance and, though the muscles loosen up for their big moments in the second and third acts, neither achieves hero status in the end. Another problem with the last act is that, although Gerard TIME OUT ANAGERS make fine distinctions when they are not at one end or the other of a flying kick. "Managing Stephen is not primarily about money," Ian Doyle has said in the past. "It's about Stephen becoming world champion." And distinctions don't come finer than that. Mike Alexander's Stephen Hendry Doing the Business (BBC 1) was about Hendry getting a permanent stoop over the green baize and pocketing the rainbow balls like a conjuror.

The business was being done by Doyle. In the nature of being 18 years old, and dedicated to snooker as soon as he could see over a table top, Hendry either does not have a lot to say for himself, or is Doyle bound not to say it. Doyle is craggy-faced and might have strayed in from The Untouchables. In any other sport except darts which alone surpasses snooker in sheer inertness you would wonder how anyone could make a film in which the star is not the champion but the manager. The same thing happened not so long ago in a documentary about Steve Davis.

You get the feeling that the cue-men and punters and audience of millions are no more than accessories to a power play going on under the table. Maybe that is the game's major inheritance from its dingy past in smoky cellars. Snooker as supersport is about exploiting colour in television, and the discovery that it is the natural late night, glass-in-the-hand spectator game. Only the gentle snook and click of cue and ball, the quick burst of applause at a well-sunk pot. Sport to booze and snooze to.

The essence of last night's programme was that profitable symbiosis of player and manager and beyond that the super-manager that is television itself. We saw Hendry being coached for his apres-tourna-ment TV interviews, getting his teeth fixed and his clothes tailored for camera-cuddling elegance. The programme's tension was not in the hall with its intense lights and its cheap mock-arena sets. The tension was all in the back room where Doyle and Hendry's family lined the walls like patients in a dentist's lobby, listening for the scream. Doyle allowed no victory to blot out the memory of things "IMPRESSIV possibly the best filmed book since Brooks9 Lord of the Flies:" all.

The distant past and the most recent conversation are forgotten, far off things. But Miller never reveals whether these failures are different in kind, either tactics to keep painful memory at bay or to avoid present reality. That reality is represented by the plea from her old friend, Leo, to moderate the frequency of her visits to him. And it is a message which she seems quite incapable of comprehending, In the space of 40 minutes the play manages to be both allusive, desultory and evasive. Leonora's defective memory and nonchalant aimlessness could be either a symptom of senility or unhappiness, but Miller neither explains or illuminates.

Jack Gold's production, with Sue PLummer's spacious evocation of New England, is hampered by Betsy Blair, looking 22 years too young to be Leonora and behaving with misplaced sprightliness, while Paul Rogers exudes only querulous irritation. In the second play, Paul Rogers, all wry-faced, manages manfully and movingly to run a gamut from bewilderment to revelatory disgust, while John Bennett counterpoints this emotional display with elegant displays of cynicism. cated an awareness of larger musical paragraphs, sometimes inserting extra crescendi or accents to achieve such longer term aims. Norrington also sought to ob serve exactly Beethoven's me-tronnome indications. Most drastically affected was the adagio of the Fourth Symphony, whose greatly accelerated tempo avoided completely the comatose character the music often acquires, nurturing instead a serene melodic flow.

i The realisation of this move ment had not yet quite settled. however: intriguingly, the play ers re-asserted a slower tempo as it progressed. Also quite hec tic was the scherzo ol the Frith Symphony, but the horns never tell behind and the double basses of the trio articulated their semi quavers with admi rable precision. Together with Melvyn Tan, who played the solo part of Bee thoven's Third Piano Concerto on a fortepiano, Norrington and the LUf presented a drilerent image of the work from usual. The lightness and clanty of the instrumental line prevented the piece trom acquiring an inflated grandiosity beyond the scope of its musical material.

Moreover the fortepiano blended in beautifully with the orchestra, Tan bringing out the capricious numour ol the music as well as its inward fore to assume that if he remembers the fellow's name an arrest can be made. A glib and phoney sequence of psychoanalysis is initiated by a delving detective, each recollection conveniently inspiring another clue to the man's name and credentials. Lightly buried memories are unearthed, revealing Clara as a lapsed lesbian and Kroll as a man who would prefer his daughter making love to a murderer than another woman, until the father's own account of his wartime bravery induces his memory to unearth the final clues. But there is no convicing connection between his inability to remember the crucial name and the nature of his repressed memories. We may perhaps deduce that Kroll believes his own reckless bravery in war has been inherited by his daughter and that her lesbianism is even a symptom of his own failure as a father.

Indeed the play is so adorned with constant vignettes of Albert's derelictions and guilts, that any diagnosis is possible. The first play, I Can't Remember Anything, by contrast deals with an old widow, Leonora, who manages to remember virtually nothing at ble sense of cohesion. In the earlier movements, most of Beethoven's original wind solos were retained on the instruments of his choice. Prefacing Beethoven were eight numbers from a suite of transcriptions for wind octet by Joseph Tribensee trom Mozart's Don Giovanni, demonstrating at first hand the link between Mozart's vocal and instrumental writing. La ci darem, for instance, sounded as delicious with bassoon and oboe duetting together as in the opera with baritone and soprano.

The Beethoven concert by the London Classical Players the same evening was certainly remote from the Karajan su-pergloss. For the audience that packed the Queen Elizabeth Hall even more than on Radio Three this encounter with historical authenticity went beyond just listening to a musicological account of the scores. Applause between movements normally frowned upon was benignly encouraged by the conductor Roger Norrington. li Nomngton and his team spared nothing to make this a vintage Beethoven experience, they weren't helped by unauthentic acoustics. The opening string phrases of the Fourth Symphony, executed with scru pulous attention to the composer's bowing marks, rather fell apart in this hall.

Thereafter, though, Norrington communi "A more complete film than any on the Academy's Best Film list. Derek Malcolm, THE GUARDIAN "Big screen cinema of the best kind easily Steven Spielberg's best to date." John Marriott, DAILY MAIL vast door which might be locked for all she knows or, as doors do, open on to another area rather than onto a sheer drop. But when Puccini's music is conducted as passionately as it is here by Clive Timrns. these questions of staging seem mere details, it is not tnoughtiess or inconsiderate conducting: the voices are rarely drowned and the structure is logically shaped. It is, however, uncommonly vivid in its exposure of the emotions, particularly in the Scarpia-Tosca exchanges in tne second act, and it does ex tract the maximum colour from a score which, as he makes so very clear, is not so much lurid as brilliantly dramatic.

There are further performances of Tosca at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, tonight, on April 11, IS, and 20 and on May-Sand 7. it tours to Manchester, null, Nottingham, and Bradford. 6 ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATIONS PG SPIELBERG Miller Nicholas do Jongh ARTHUR Miller has been busy observing the arts and tricks of memory from the hazy porthole of old age. His double bill Danger: emerging from this scrutiny and now receiving its European premiere at Hampstead Theatre, shows up two examples of elderly minds protecting themselves from the pain of clear and true recall. Miller in his own words is dramatising pro cedure and the moment when "a buried layer of experience suddenly surges flashes news from below." Yet no real dramatic flashes, no fresh illuminations, are sparked from this damp-sauibbed double bill which reveals Miller playing the amateur psychiatrist.

The second play, ciara, alone exemplifies Miller's theory while presenting Albert Kroll's struggle, in the first blast of bereavement, to recollect the name of the young man his murderered daughter Clara brought home on a visit The young man, it almost instantly emerges from Kroll's recollection, had already served time for murder and we are there Q.E.H. Barbican Meirion Bowen Two concerts FOR anyone bored with the successive Karajan recordings of the same classic masterpieces, the London concert scene oftens some enlightening alternatives, indeed, there were two concerts on Wednesday providing tresn insights into the best known of Beethoven's orchestral works. At lunch-time, in the Barbi can, the Wind Soloists of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe played a transcription of the Seventh Symphony. This was something of a the name of the transcriber is unknown, only one set of parts survive, and two other transcriptions (of the Eighth and Battle Symphonies), alongside which it was advertised in 1816, have disappeared. Turning the Seventh into an example of Harmoniemusik for popular entertainment meant ignoring or dispensing with its symphonic uniqueness.

For the convenience ot the players, three of the movements had been transposed down a tone. This wasn't worrying, except that after the scherzo (in the original key), the finale (transposed) made one sit up with a jolt, for the tonal architecture of the piece had been disturbed Much odder was the re-writ ing of the finale with most of its development section gouged out. I supposed that since this movement relies so much on repeated rhythmic patterns, it was thought less effective on wind instruments, though here, the sturdy ESO soloists, playing conductorless, displayed great resilience and an admira- ilf if "A BILIOUS FARCE" OUARDMN "PERFECT GRIMLY FUNNY" TIMES "A Brave. Intriguing Defiantly UN-ENGLISH EVENING" GUARDIAN "51 'ikmfmms' tip father even for a child no one else will adopt remains unanswered. Maybe it can only be answered case by case.

In a programme with a lot of unobtrusive observation of de-. tail, the ending in a way told everything. Billy had wanted his new dad to look like George Michael, and Dave did not. "Billy wanted me primarily because I was better than no one," says Dave as he ponders the harsh memory that when the deal fell through, Billy's reaction was the cruel, "Who's going to buy me presents now?" The adults try to massage the disappointment away: kids who have been deprived, says one, can be very materialistic. SEE BOTH PROGRAMMES FOR THE PRICE OF ONE ASK BOX OFFICE FOR DETAILS 19 at 7.00pm Anvil 4 PREVIEWS FROM MONDAY OPENS APRIL Empire QFCTT1VT THE BALLARD Directed by STEVEN WARNER BROS.

Presents a STEVEN SPIELBERG Film "EMPIRE OFTHE SUN" starringJOHNMALKOVICH- MIRANDA RICHARDSON NIGEL HAVERS and Introducing CHRISTIAN BALE Musicby JOHN WILLIAMS DireclororPhotographji ALLEN DAVIAU, A.S.C. ExeculiveProduccrROBERTSHAPIRO PreducedbySTEVEN SPIELBERG KATHLEEN KENNEDY FRANK MARSHALL scmnpiaybvTOMSTOPPARD DIRECT FROM A SELLOUT SEASON AT THE ABBEY THEATRE, DUBLIN ARTHUR LAPPIN IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE ABBEY THEATREPRESENTS BascdonlhenovelbyJ. G. WMBBHOi(UlBlAUkMllOUU! MOW SHOWIMG ACROSS THE COURJTRY SEE LOCAL PRESS FOR DETAILS A new play by AD AN MATHEWS Directed by BEN BARNES "please, go see "A DON MAR iimiJI Vk 37965654444(24hr) LYRIC STUDW HAMMERSMITH Box Office: 7412311.