The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 21

ARTS GUARDIAN 21 Joyce McMillan at Glasgow Mayfest considers the mythologv of violence in the Gorbals and an esoteric history of women's violence Mem wtao'ire mate me Murther most un-Maigret THE GUARDIAN Monday May 23 1988 Nancy Banks-Smith at "the where Johnny's friend Bobby (nicely played by Gilbert Martin) tries to make his fortune and escape the slums, are there odd moments of sweetness and romance. Hayman's production exposes the stupidity, and the political nihilism of introverted Gorbals culture with energy, inventiveness and loads of theatrical style; what he does not do is to set it in context, to show how a violent ethic co-existed with the real community life of the place, how an environment which could be so vile won the intense loyalty of the people who lived within it for three and four generations after the industrial revolution, and how difficult it was for working-class people to become "upwardly mobile" without selling out to the kind of establishment values that had created the slums in the first place. If Glasgow is half in love with the idea of the "hard it's perhaps shows to Mayfest only if they satisfy those twin criteria of excellence and accessibility, even if that means running a smaller festival. In any case, the sparse audience at many events in this year's much expanded Mayfest shows that the festival is in danger of outgrowing its public suppor Two final thoughts: Mayfest desperately needs to re-establish a social and cabaret centre somewhere close to its big theatre venues; secondly it has to re-think the absurd division between its "city centre" programme (professional) and its "community" programme (broadly amateur). If Mayfest as a "popular" festival is to mean anything at all, it has to be about theatre-for-the-people and theatre-for-the-culture-vul-tures coming together and drawing strength from one another.

No Mean City tours to Newcastle, Kilmarnock, Kirkcaldy, Edinburgh and Dundee, returning to Glasgow Citizens' Theatre from June 28. Nominatae Filiae at the ICA, London, culture that's prepared to do its own slashing and enforcing. Meanwhile, at the Third Eye Centre, Zofia Kalinska, the great actress-director from Poland, is presenting her view of the violence of another oppressed group. Her show, No-minatae Filiae, is a rich, bloody, one-hour, multilingual spectacle tracing the history of women's violence in the high culture of the West. Alone in her studio, trying to sleep or to work, a woman artist is haunted by desperate images of strong women from the past, of Medea and Judith and Jezebel and Phaedra and (heaven preserve us) of someone who seems very like the Blessed Virgin herself, gentler than the others, but ruthlessly determined to make them all stick to their stereotypes.

To these women, womanhood and motherhood are crosses to bear, instruments of torture, provocations to murder or suicide; some of the visual imagery is spine-tinglingly powerful, and the whole show performed with immense style and some wit by an international company of actresses is bound to strike a poignant chord with any woman who has tried to balance the demands of her own creative life against the trashy, limited images of womanhood handed down by our culture. The trouble with Nominatae Filiae is that it uses a theatrical vocabulary so specialised, so shorthand, and so unknown beyond avant garde theatre circles, that it simply would not be tolerated by any audience beyond the gang of interested professionals who packed into the tiny Third Eye studio. It is not so much a show as an experiment with a certain theme and a certain theatre technique, like notes for something that might one day become a play. It seems to me that if Mayfest has any special quality as a festival, it has to be in finding work that can bring the best of modern theatre technique into a context that attracts a big, general audience. Next year, Mayfest's director, Bill Burdett-Coutts, should, I think, be ruthless in bringing dark underside of the city's psyche, and a dilemma.

How does a radical theatre company deal with a novel which focuses ruthlessly on everything that was vile, ugly, brutish and negative about traditional working-class culture in Glasgow, and focuses on it in a sensational way that some Glaswegians find strangely seductive even today. In the event, David Hayman, his adaptor Alex Norton, and his co-director Gerard Kelly, have gone for broke on a dark, expressionist approach, designed to show Johnny Stark's posturing, swaggering, slashing life for the brief and pathetic thing it is, on a dark cavern of a stage, surrounded by rough scaffolding and sooty, blood-streaked walls. Characters come and go like nightmare figures from Damon Runyon, in implausibly huge gangster suits and (for the women) high-stepping gangster's moll platform shoes. In extremis, his Johnny Stark (Alexander Morton) howls and beats his chest like a gorilla in the urban jungle; only I MO MEAN CITY, the novel by A. McAr-thur and H.Kings-ley Long, is possibly the most notorious piece of writing ever to come out of Glasgow.

Published in the 1940s, written (very badly) in the style of an anthropological study of the behaviour of "the slum dweller" in the Gorbals, it tells the story of Johnny Stark, one of the great gang-fighting "Razor Kings" of the late Twenties. It somehow succeeds in both patronising Glasgow's slum sub-culture its violence, its sexual brutality, its raw tribal codes of behaviour and, at the same time, myfhologising it. The Glasgow "hard licensed by his deprived background to slash his way through life, has become an essential element in the self-image. Choosing No Mean City as their 1988 Mayfest production, 7:84 Scotland and director David Hayman guaranteed themselves two things: a huge audience of Glaswegians ready to gawp at this vision of the marriage. The state of his socks would be more to the point.

Lanky and ragged, he reminds you of a hatstand in a cheap, cafe where people'll hang clothes they don't mind being stolen. "Julie," said Madame Maigret observantly as they hung over the liner rail "you look He looked like the wrath of God and, as retribution is the wrath of God perhaps that's all right, really. Work Isn't Finished (Channel 4), a tribute to Fenner Brockway who died last month aged 99, began with a shot of his endearing little statue in Red Lion Square, London. It is the only statue I know with crumpled trousers, spectacles and a smile. He is giving a cheerful wave.

Behind him you can see the tree which will blow down and break off both his arms. The Humanist Association in the Conway Hall nearby, where he lectured, took the little cripple in and put him in the ladies' lavatory, which tended to startle callers. So they threw a sheath over him which, if anything, aggravated matters. At the moment he stands in the hall, still cheerfully waving his stump at Professor Ayer, who came to lecture on The Meaning of Life. I'm sorry I missed that; I've often wondered what it was.

The Association considered attaching a chained collecting box to his leg but that would cost 100. Life must be discouraging for a humanist. You feel Lord Brockway would have seen the funny side of it. His smile suggests so. I read that in Poland once he met a Comrade Penis and could not resist sending a postcard to this fighter for freedom hoping he was still strong and erect.

To see him strong and erect again would cost around 4,000. The sculpture has set his face like stone against a porous plinth as the National Front, irritated by a reference to Fenner Brockway's "unceasing ef Michael Billington discovers in Cymbeline a triumphant swansong In praise of death because, as one of the frontier towns of the industrial revolution, it recognises a certain honesty and guts in a street At one point, the back blue-and-white panels part to reveal the Roman and British armies in massed formation: I normally get confused as to who is fighting on whose side in this play but Hall's formalised battle scenes make everything clear. Hall's achievement is to suggest that Cymbeline is an epic play in which crucial human values are being put to the test. Even Bill Alexander's admirable RSC production treats the last act as a joke with David Bradley playing the king as a bemused spectator. Tony Church, however, treats Cym beline as a figure of genuine moral stature who sees the multiplying revelations as proof of some divine plan: his "Does the world go round?" is not some eye-popping gag but a moving enquiry about the mysterious operations of the universe.

The sound I hear in these late plays, however, is of Shake speare in his late forties confronting death. Paulina will wing her to some withered bough. Prospero's every third thought will be of his grave. Innogen, assumed dead, need fear no more "the tyrant's Technically, they are experi mental plays. Thematically, they seem to share Marcus Aurelius's belief that death offers a release from impressions of sense and twitchings of appetite.

By making us listen to them hard, Hall has unearthed Shakespeare's own intonations of mortality. twisting his words Nordically. "We've been here all day while you've been doing your middle-class jobs." Some audiences wouldn't have seen the joke. The guitar didn't seem to be working for the first few numbers, but by the time they reached Motorcrash everything was firing harmoniously. The song treads a fine edge of violence, voyeurism and fascination on my bicycle I saw a motorcrash, a proper motorcrash and lots of walking wide-eyed into horror.

Bjork is curiously well adapted for all this. Small and pixie-featured, she marches and dances like a seven-year-old but has a voice which would shake La Scala. The voice brings a child's self-absorption to the simple, vivid imagery of the songs, with often disturbing consequences. Offset against the solemn Bjork is the playful Einar, blowing a toy bugle or narrat- THE end crowns all. Because of crucial re-casting, Cymbeline is the last of Peter Hall's Cot-tesloe Shakespeares to be unveiled.

It is also triumphantly the best. It gives weight and dignity to this strange mixture of Holinshed and Boccaccio, highlights the perennial debate between Nature and Nurture and brings out the drumming insistence on death as a blessed release from life's travails that sounds through all these late plays. Hall's restrained classicism here works best because it is filled out with emblematic images and naturalistic detail. The wager over the virtue of Innogen (with Hall adopting the spelling of the Oxford Shakespeare) is here conceived in a world of clay-pipes and postprandial drink. But when Tim Pigott-Smith's swaggeringly arrogant Iachimo gains access to Innogen's bedchamber, he finds that his malign bet is all but undone by his own lust.

He frantically unbuttons as if he means to rape the sleeping heroine. Inspection of her left breast once more inflames him. And the removal of her bracelet becomes a fantastically tricky operation involving the moistening of her palm: a gesture at once practical and erotic and the kind of detail that gives the scene internal life. Hall discovers in the play much more than the sumptuous romantic fairy-tale he directed at Stratford in 1957. Instead it becomes a complex Astoria Adam Sweeting Sugarcubes WITH frail old people packing out Wembley and the charts stuffed with the dross that even Eurovision couldn't stomach (yobbish novelty records, the pitiable Wet Wet Wet, the wholly regrettable Fairground Attraction), The Sugarcubes have swept down from Iceland to save the world.

Someone had to do it. The only thing wrong with their Astoria show was the bevy of cameramen cluttering the stage, and for the first half a man swinging a large camera on a rope frequently blocked the view of the band, especially singer Bjork. Just when muttered threats in the house confrontation of virtue and vice, civility and degradation always shadowed by mortality: it is the Into The Woods of its day with everyone put on trial. Geraldine James's Innogen emerges superbly as a tough, strong-jawed woman full of irony and anger: she gets a laugh when she wonders why Pisanio has dragged her all the way to Milford Haven if he doesn't mean to kill her but smothers mirth entirely when she wakes up next to Cloten's headless corpse. Batting for virtue, Basil Henson also makes the banished Belarius not some wayside preacher but a figure of golden-voiced stoicism.

What prevents these late plays being sentimental is the emphasis on depravity and violence; and Hall once again pinpoints the uncompromising cruelty. Ken Stott's Cloten is not simply comic but a dangerous regal thug. Peter Woodward discovers in Posthumus an insecure neurotic who lapses into Leontes-like madness when he believes Innogen has betrayed him. Seeing these plays back to back you suddenly start to discover all kinds of unsuspected echoes. One of the pleasures of this Cymbeline is the physical excitement of the staging.

The separate ingredients of Alison Chitty's set here reflect the play's diversity. The suspended astrological ceiling becomes the natural vehicle for Jupiter in his earthly descent. The bare stage boards open up to disclose a rough, uneven hillside. looked likely to result in him being dismembered by punters, the band sent him packing into the wings. Otherwise, the performance was a rare glimpse of a unique unit in its prime.

Unlike virtually anyone you could mention, The Sugarcubes just don't sound like anybody else, an extraordinary achievement this far into pop's plagiaristic progress. Certainly they play some fearsome riffs and drive a solid fist of rhythm into your stomach, but then they also have Einar, the astonishing Bjork, and a dizzying knack for conceptual thought. Not so much a rock group, more a battle of wits. As they wandered onstage an hour late, Bjork nonchalantly munching an apple, it was Einar who set up the mild combative frisson the 'Cubes love. "Don't complain," he goaded, A MOST ingenious wheeze.

To solve a tricky case Maigret (HTV) pretends to be Irish hang a murther charge on and, further to confuse the issue, dresses like something that the Surete would have arrested on sight. His duffle coast, collapsible hat and trousers Moused around the ankle were the sort of thing you would expect to see in a field, being pointed at derisively by discriminating crows. Utterly confused by his dilapidated Paddy, hanging around as if waiting for a copper for a cuppa, the murderers are thrown off guard and easily arrested. In the showdown on a cruise liner, surrounded by the regulation cluster of suspects, Mai-gret's clothes seem to take on a terrible Quatermass life of their own. His torn cardigan buttons up the wrong way, the sleeves creep up his arms and, as he whirls in his enormous boots, his shirt leaps out of his trousers.

By now he has adopted a Groucho Marx lope. One of the murderers is so shaken by the whole thing that he bursts into tears and confesses on the spot. It seems to be Maigret's fate to appear on television looking like some Labour leader or other. Rupert Davies's fondly-remembered Maigret, wreathed in smoke, seemed to be based on Harold Wilson. Richard Harris's suggests Michael Foot, who was once described as looking like The Man Who Has Seen The Most Terrible Thing in the World.

The Most Terrible Thing In The World may well be this 3 million TV film dear lord, where does the money go written not by Simenon but Arthur Weingarten. You know, the Arthur Weingarten who wrote episodes of Murder She Wrote. As he has bought the rights to all the Maigret books, he can do as he chooses. It seems to be the story of an Irish downandout who wanders into the cast of Dynasty. There is the richest man in the world presidents open doors for me, senators kiss my two feuding sons get the hell off my a straying wife, a wilful child and, drifting like a ginger ghost among these cardboard cutouts, this distraught wey-faced waif whom the wilful daughter understandably addresses as "a Short, of course, for inspector.

In spite of the occasional Paris location, no one makes the slightest attempt to appear French. Madame Maigret, whom one feels could at least have mended the cardigan and burnt I the hat, tags along being concerned about the state of their Gunfire HOW dearly the BBC radio loves a birthday. But it's hard to give a successful party for a birthday boy with a gun in his hand. Especially when that gun has been seen time and again. Certainly the background of the present upheavals on the West Bank lend urgency and an added dimension to this week's programmes celebrating Israel's 40th birthday.

The File on 4 three-parter, The Twice Promised Land (Radio 4, Wednesdays and Sun days) took us, in the first part, from the earliest days of Zionism to the British departure from Palestine. A deeply-felt and detailed history, inevitably one-sided, it drew on the testimony of Jews who had known the Holocaust and explained the fervour for what they felt to be their promised land. But the question remains as to the effect of this fervour on the Palestinians already living there. This Jewish soldier based in an Arab village, vividly remembers protesting at the murder of an Arab child. But the child was nevertheless killed.

And mostly because of the glum British vacillation in the post-war years, the Arab viewpoint remained firmly hidden in the background. The second in the series dealt less in history and even more in the emotions and loyalties of the Israeli Jews, explaining the background of different racial groups from the Ethiopian Jews who thought that no white man could be Jewish, to the cultured Israelis of today. We met these latter on other programmes throughout the week, worrying, in Walking the Tightrope (Radio 3, Saturday), about the future of theatre and celebrating the achievements of the Israeli I Val Arnold-Forster from May 24 to June 4. PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFERY can party commercial these days, don't they folks, and yet Wilder's observation of the sun rising 1,000 times in three years on weddings and funerals still seems mighty profound, don't it? Susan Hogg is a radio director who's just moved from Belfast to Manchester and her production has a visual spareness that's highly effective Sally Crabb's set is a bare zigzag of a town's high street, precisely lit by Stephen Henbest. The company mimes all the paraphernalia props of Appalachian materialism, with offstage actors clinking the sound effects of rattled milk bottles evocatively.

Their playing, thus emphasised, is meticulously truthful, especially Katharine Rogers's soot-on stage manager, narra tor, and guide. It is a delightfully detailed, beautifully managed recreation of the world of Grover's Corner in all its sunshine and storms, first love and burial humanity. I just wish it didn't make me want to join in and throw up at the same time. Our Town is at Contact Theatre (061 274 4400) until June 11. GREENLAND A New Play by Howard breiiLun Cast; BON COOK DAVID HAIG QMFILA HANCOCK SHLARRYLAMB JANE LAPOTppp JANET MdTEEB BENONWUKWE i FSLEY SHARP, VoMAN Directed by Simon Curtis forts to eradicate tended to spray "wanker" on it.

I miss that optimistic wave quite a lot. 4,000 seems cheap for such cheerfulness. And talking of statues A Week Of British Art (BBC 2) began with Antony Gormley, whose sculptures are moulded on his own body. His wife appears to wrap him in scrim and plaster guided by nervous comments from the mummyfied sculptor within: "I'm going to fall I quite like his work in a nervous sort of way but, chiefly, I couldn't help thinking what a wonderful way to murder someone. Suppose she never let him out? I was much taken by his explanation of a sculpture which seemed to be flying out of a wall.

"It hopefully refers to an aspiration that all human beings have within them the abil ity to transcend the physical limitations of their bodies." 'Oh, shit," added the sculp tor, having banged his head on the wall. on Zion Philharmonic in the two-part Fanfare for Israel (Radio 4, Thursdays). At the end, talk turned to the occupation of the West Bank. On one side was the forceful voice of Abraham Borg: the Messianic policy was a false Messiah 20 years of illusion I find in the Torah that I must consider the distress of the stranger, of the Arab. We all were drunken by the overwhelming victory of the '67 war." On the other, the voices of the West Bank Jewish settlers, and the chilling conviction of a small girl asserting in piping American accent: "We were there first." As with Northern Ireland, it is drama that sends the clearest of messages.

After Every Dream, Sam Jacobs's Monday play (repeated today) follows a kibbutz family over the last 40 years and is a proper old-fashioned drama with the old-guard kibbutz couple (liberal, secular) versus the new Israel their son turned religious and their old friend ruined by a wicked Oriental Jew. Plenty of incident a remarkably noisy faked miscarriage, rape and death and finally the predictable blow: a love affair between Arab and Jew. It is a play about friend ship and old values, set against a backeround of politics, but hardly addresses the fierce realities of today. Nevertheless an evocative production and redeemed by warm-hearted performances from Lila Kaye and Miriam Karlin. Like Ms Karlin, Maureen Lip- man is a fine actress too, often remembered for her over-em phasised comic roles.

She played the mother in Nava Se-mel's Prix Italia-winning The Child Behind the Eyes (Radio 4, Wednesday). A touchingly written monologue about a small Down's Syndrome boy. No politics here, but a reminder that mothers whatever their political, religious or national nersuasion love their sons. A message worth hearing. Will there be birthday celebrations for the PLO? Superbly full of irony and anger ing thespishly as the band roars along behind him.

As the musicians powered out the swaggering pulse of Traitor, Einar coolly narrated the circumstances of his impending death. In Deus, Bjork and Einar debate the existence of God to a sweet-centred pop melody "Deus does not exist, but if he does he lives in the sky above me he wasn't white and fluffy, he just had sideburns." More tea, vicar? As Bjork sings it, "this blue-eyed pop is just pure ecstasy." But how long can it last at this level of intensity? Be there before they vanish. Manchester Robin Thornber Our Town HOWEVER repellent you might find aspects of Thornton Wilder's play the insidious GD ff iMftSfe nil to in Geraldine James smug complacency, the insularity, the false naivety of its squirming, smart-arsed self-satisfaction you know what his answer would be: that's just clever city folk's talk. In almost any other context people would run screaming about sentimentality. The awesome thing about his lofty, minutely observed portrayal of the small town, home-town fabric of life in turn of the century New Hampshire is that it is probably true to that life.

And it's not just that that's how, for those people then, it was. But somewhere in all of us there's a bit that would like it be like that for us now. As Garrison Keillor discovered. But there's no arguing with the way in which Susan Hogg's production at Contact Theatre Manchester brings that homespun, folksy world of the Webbs and the Gibbs and the coming of the automobile to life. Lines like, "Guess I can stop and talk if I've a mind to," sound just a little too much like James Stewart doing a Republi- Guardian Conversations Is a regularserlesoflunchflme events in which writers and artists talkattheICA Thursday 26 May Michael Chabon The Mysteries of Pittsburgh On a visit from the Stales, Michael Ctiobon discusses his highly enjoyable firstnovel with Emma Dally of CosmopolilanMogozine.

aiardtaConvarMffon vents art from IMunrUllSpm, I InlttuttolCorMfflDoriirvAiti ITWMoftUx.do.SWl TthptuM bookngt01.no U47 IoioWoiopm 1100-940 lailr mo CD 0 a ONE OF THE GREATEST LOVE STORIES OF ALL TIME.