The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 19

THE GUARDIAN Thursday May 26 1988 ARTS GUARDIAN 19 Michael Biltington on Chekhov's might-have-beens triumphantly realised in Uncle Vanya GlorioTiiis iraige A touch of Bojungles Nancy Banks-Smith are the only two people of culture in the district; and although Gambon, brushing his hand across his thinning hair and erupting into childish fury, is wonderful to watch he needs more of that Chekhovian thwarted rage for life. There is, however, the sense of a real, tangible relationship between him and Jonathan Pryce's Astrov: it is summed up in the superb moment when Astrov essays a drunken dance and crashes into Vanya landing them in a tangled, jocular heap on the floor. But Pryce's magnificent Astrov also has that crucial sense of life's worth which is what makes its unful-filment so moving. her ground and saw him off. meets the To do the Johnsons justice, they deplored the killing of wildlife and, if actually at- tacked, he would just keep cranking his camera while she fired above, under, and all around the animal.

Like Annie Oakley, she was the finer shot of the two. It is cheerful to see how far honest enthusiasm will take you. Their film of a family of. young gorillas larking around; beating their chests, and the pygmy mother lullabying her baby are remarkable by any standards. Dark Continent was the first sound movie ever made in Africa will hear the roar of the lion and the ugly snort of the charging rhino.

The natives will sing for you and dance to the beat of the It is also a sign of the production's merit that it rediscovers an almost forgotten character in Telegin, the impoverished landowner who lives on the estate. Jonathan Cecil plays him as a bright, buoyant man in middle-age permanently affronted by the fact that people cannot remember his name. He gives you the man's whole history; and when he rushes from the room in terror at Vanya's explosive anger, you sense exactly the nervy vulnerability that led his wife to desert him. But two performances need more Chekhovian intensity. Benjamin Whitrow's Serebrya-kov has a tetchy amour-propre but little of that sense communicated by Lebedev in the Leningrad production at Edinburgh last year of an arrogant peacock who treats the universe as if it were created for his convenience.

And although Greta Scacchi is radiantly beautiful as Yelena, she doesn't use her body to the full: the character should have an offensively swaggering indolence which Astrov (in Michael Frayn's needle-sharp translation) actually describes as "inadmissible." These are cavils, however, at a production which is strongly cast, excellently designed-(Tanya McCallin's set has the right feeling of people thrown together in a cramped house outside which the landscape ICHAEL BLAKE-MORE'S production of Uncle Vanya at the Vaudeville shines like a good deed in a naughty world: it is a gem amidst the fake jewellery of the West End. For me it misses total perfection because of details of interpretation but, as should happen with Vanya, I found myself watching the end through a mist of tears. Oddly enough, one of my doubts centres on Michael Gambon's Vanya. He is, of course, mesmerising to watch. A bulky figure in a crumpled linen suit, he presents us with a 47-year-old emotional adolescent.

One of his first actions is to plant himself on a garden swing and, whenever Yelena weaves into view, he gazes at her with adoring eyes set in a lolling head. Gambon has inherited Ralph Richardson's ability to exist in two dimensions at once. Half the time he seems to be living in a private dream: there is a magnificent moment when he is accused of being drunk and cries "possibly, possibly" in a voice so alien and remote it might be coming from a man under hypnosis. Gambon offers a brilliant monument to effectuality: a man crippled by unrequited love and professional futility. But I am reminded of something Eric Bentley once wrote: that Chekhov's elegiac note is moving "because the sense of death is accompanied with so rich a sense of life." It is the element of might-have-been in Chekhov's characters that makes their waste so tragic.

Gambon's Vanya for me just misses greatness because he is directed to play defeat from the start: all hope and dignity have been shredded. But Astrov points out that he and Vanya WELL and away the jolliest thing on television was the sight of Osa Johnson dancing the black bottom with pygmies in the heart of the Congo jungle, osa was wearing a solar topee and rather bulgy jodphurs; the pygmies the bare necessities. Osa's dancing partner was a grizzled and patriarchal pygmy. She danced with some verve and bounce, clapping her hands and stamping her feet. The old man tilted his beard up, watched her face and followed.

He was the better dancer. Behind them a chorus line of little knees were bending in perfect unison. "It was remarkable the way they quickly caught the rhythm of our modern music," said Osa's husband, Martin, who was filming this big production number. "Sometimes they got out of time, but they quickly came back to it again." It all irresistibly suggested Snow White dancing with the seven dwarfs "I like to dance and tap my feet but they won't keep in rhythm. You know I washed them both last night and I can't do nothing with 'em" with perhaps a touch of the Shirley Temples and Bqjangles.

The innocent, the awful charm of Dark Continent (Wideworld, BBC 2), which was filmed in 1932, was not the journey but the Johnsons. The rhinoceros Rhino is Public Enemy No 1 in the crocodiles placid Nile becomes a river of horror, teeming with slithering the gorilla to the mountain domain of the monster man-like are still with us, though baffled and belea-gured, but the Johnsons will never come again. They were American the way Americans were American in, as Martin would put it, The Days of the Dawn of Life. Breezing in, sure of their welcome, boundlessly confident, breath-takingly brash and with more bounce than the jumping frog of Calaveras County. Martin did the filming but Osa organised the expedition, hired and nick-named the bearers him Coffee and put the wind up charging rhinos.

One of these made two determined assaults on Osa. Though half extinguished by her ten gallon hat, she stood mm He presents us with a damaged idealist who is quirky, eccentric, sensual and used to burying his pain in vodka: there is an unforgettable moment when he complies with Sonya's request not to drink and then, suddenly remembering the patient who died under chloroform, his eye steals longingly towards an unclaimed glass. Pryce gives us the might-have-been; and there is an exact psychological truth about the way he fondles Sonya with the thoughtless familiarity one exhibits to those one does not love. At its best, Blakemore's production grasps the essential point that Chekhov's characters are painfully alive: there is intensity in their lassitude. That is why Imelda Staunton is the best Sonya since Plowright: she is a woman who is quite desperately in love, parroting Astrov's opinions as if they were her own and giggling over their midnight feast in sheer pleasure at getting him to herself.

And the brave, falsely heroic smile she puts on at the doctor's departure is one of the most moving examples of a breaking heart I have ever seen. vice by sentimentalising him or assuming his business is love. Janacek's real theme is the dignity of ordinariness. Honour of course was not an operatic novelty. But Janacek's modernisation of the age-old theme makes his extraordinary scenes of confession all the more moving.

He balances honour in a specially middle-European way with healing faith, and the sense that life must go on. Even after Kat'a's suicide or the shooting of the Vixen, devastating as those acts must be, Janacek's music is reconciling and strangely triumphant. With Brenda Hurley's accomplished piano accompaniment, one doesn't get the colours of Family gems Jonathan Pryce and Elizabeth Bradley PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFERY A triumph of strength in weakness Martin Johnson on location This pioneering work with sound may account for the Johnsons taking their. phonograph along. It did not seem to occur to them give the boys and girls some modern that it was Africa which gave jazz to America.

In theory the Johnsons should make your toes curl and, here and there, a toe does curl. But in practice they were winningly big-hearted and full' of beans. "The happiest little savages in the world," as Mar tin said, describing, he thought) the pygmies. THE Civil Service, like some strange species of animal, de fends itself by releasing a sort ot sopormc miasma. Predators slump over, bored to catalepsy, impaling their heads on their pens.

It is superbly effective but as additional protection every senior civil servant wears grey. so it is impossible to tell permanent secretaries apart at five paces in a poor light or a good club. In Whitehall (Channel 4), a critical investigation of a furred up system, a lot of men- in grey suits said zzzzzzz. ing petulance. Menai Davies is a forceful grandmother with a voice of tempered steel.

Norman White, as foreman and mayor, registers with impressive freedom and ardour. Mary Clarke doubles superbly Ste-va's fiancee and the servant girl (who takes the shepherd boy's lines about learning to read). Linda McLeod's Kostel-nicka is passionately resolute. No weak links. Indeed there's almost too much resolve and boldness in this line-up for a story of so much human weakness.

Not that full-throated singing can be anything but a benefit for Janacek's music. Within its admitted limitations of subtlety and range, this Jenufa would be hard to better. More performances in Brighton on Friday, at the Place next Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, at Bracknell (June 7), Newcastle (June 9) and Edinburgh (June 11). stretches to infinity) and which subsumes the comedy into the tragedy. At the end, with Vanya and Sonya together at the work-table and with her cradling his great baby's head in her arms, you feel the poignancy of starting life again on the flat when, as Desmond Mac-Carthy said, "a few hours be fore it has run shrieking up the scale of pain." I know of no more moving climax in world drama.

his instrumentation. But one has the shapes of the numbers, the thematic cross-references and the melodic potency. Matthew Richardson's tight and traditional staging, squeezed between white walls along with piano and pianist in sober peasant black, creates both immediate dangers and a feeling of the epic emotional scale within this tragic typicality. Ashley Martin-Davies has created a very effective little, sparsely furnished set. All the confrontations are focused around a central table, with a low L-shaped wall and bags of grain in the far right corner behind which characters remain when not in the scene.

make itself heard, despite a decent performance from Laurie Ventry as the burglar, and an excellent one from Elizabeth Philips Scott as his wife. Neither play is helped a great deal by Jo FarreU's translations, which seem for all their energy and ingenuity, to hover uncomfortably between total transcription into a contemporary Scottish idiom bit Norah Batty," says Julia of one of the dresses she tries on), and an attempt to create a more neutral modern Scott's English, that would leave the Italian setting intact. As for Neil Murray's sets, I would rather have seen the plays done on a bare stage with a few sticks of furniture; his white studio bedsit for An Ordinary Day is cluttered and unconvincing, his jokey swathes of Bordello-red velvet for The Virtuous Burglar nasty- looking and unnecessary. It's good to see Fo's more reflective recent work being tackled in Scotland. But if we're going to follow him into some serious introspection about the spiritual damage inflicted by the new ethos of the 1980s, we have to give him full the style of our productions, for having developed into a sadder and more questioning writer than the song-and-comedy-man of popular political drama that we came to know and love in the 1970s.

Borderline Tour ends this weekend with performances at Paisley tonight, Kilmarnock tomorrow, and Greenock on Saturday. For details ring 0292 281010. Maggie Nicols: bridging the chasms, photograph: allan titmuss Tt a(f 1 A plush curtain across the back suggests the back room of the Kostelnicka's cottage. A door on the right bangs in the wind after the terrible infanticide. But it's the actual perfor mances that are the real secret.

Virginia Kerr's handsome Jenufa is quite outstanding, strapping both in voice and frame, capable of colours and control that reveal the hidden strengths in the role. Paul Stratheam is an electric Laca, flashing eyes as well as his knife, pained and desperate. Colin McKerracher is a more than persuasive Steva, with high musical skills (suggesting a Peter Grimes in the making), and exactly the proper lip-curl- Finborough John Fordham Maggie Nicols THE singer Maggie Nicols and an imaginative lighting designer called Sue Tandy are currently collaborating on Light and Shade, an improvised pertormance tor voice, movement and lights at the Finborough Theatre, above the Fin-borough Arms pub in Earls Court. This kind of merciless exposure Ms Nicols performs with few props other than keyboards, and free-associates on the theme of fear and anger for close on 90 minutes is a bold step for an artist who is more commonly to be found in strictly improvised music contexts, and it would be unfair to potential visitors to claim -that she really gets away with it. The show does, however, highlight the range of vocal skills she has been steadily expanding for 20 years.

She can combine a rich, reverberating bluesiness with coaxing polemical singing, skittish, bird-like high register sound effects and abrupt skids in and out of affable disarming chat. Maggie Nicols has long been absorbed by the theatrical and educational scope of free music, and its potential for bridging social chasms. Light and Shade illuminates both that potential and its contradictions. Circling about the stage in a restless manner that blends movements suggestive of Indian dance with vaudeville tap routines, fitfully curling up and uttering anxious noises that frequently end in bursts of exuberance, Maggie Nicols simultaneously displays both the camouflaged sophistication of her craft and an art-lessness in which the humdrum takes over. Once she verbalises, the observations made so much stronger by the things you once couldn't "Fear is the plague of the clang on the floor like dropped change.

In Tuesday's show she took to task another reviewer's criticisms of her "liberal Whatever kind of angst it is, its articulation can be witty, defiant and razor sharp Ms Nichols' singing- I Tom Sutcliffe in Brighton INTERNATIONAL opera on television shows all too clearly the dangers of Very seldom is it finely acted at the level of personal contact. But with Scottish Opera-Go-Round's Jenufa every flicker of the eye tells. You can't fake pain when the emotional wounds are that close, and if Laca's motivation for marking Jenufa with his knife isn't plain in all its ambivalence and subtlety then nothing is. One does Janacek a disser Edinburgh Joyce McMillan Dario Fo double bill I'M BEGINNING to wonder whether Scottish theatre's love affair with Dario Fo hasn't got slightly out of hand. Obviously, his major arces like Can't Pay Won't Pay and Accidental Death Of An Anarchist have come as a godsend to theatre companies seeking a broadly based audience among a people who, on the whole, find Fo's earthy, subversive, anti-clerical and anti-authoritarian stance highly sympathetic.

But the most popular of his plays with their happy knack of showing the firm roots of socialist theory in the hilarious, surreal experience of ordinary people under capitalism are now more than a decade old. Their political atmosphere is a shade comforting and nostalgic, and their jokey, extroverted, comic mood seems to come a little too easily to a nation that would always rather crack a joke than talk honestly about its inner life particularly at a time when the Left needs serious self-examination, and new thinking about the triumph of individualism, rather than cheery affirmations of old verities. It's interesting therefore, to see Morag Fullarton's Borderline Company moving away from the mainstream of the Dario Fo repertoire to present two relatively minor works, the Virtuous Burglar (1959) and An Ordinary Day (1986), both in new Scots-accent translations by Jo Farrell. 'The Virtuous Burglar is a cheery, lightweight, one-act farce from the period when Fo was still bent on slipping the odd subversive idea into the framework of conventional social comedy, and it's diffioult to see much value in it today. Set in a plush Rome apartment in the late 50s, it opens as a decent, straightforward burglar is interrupted at work first by a phone call from his doting wife, and then by the return of the owner of the flat, accompanied by a luscious and randy looking lady who certainly isn't his wife; the moral of the tale is that the only honestand sexu- FREE DIRECTORS PACK WHEN YOU BUY A SONY CCDV50 CAMCORDER ally faithful character in sight is the so-called criminal.

An Ordinary Day is a rather strained solo attempt, on Fo's part, to develop the kind of feminist monologue on which he and Franca Rame were working in the early 80s, and although it's hardly vintage Fo the situation is a little awkward and implausible, the humour uncomfortable it at least represents an interesting attempt to get to grips with the spiritual and emotional emptiness that is such a pervasive feature of human experience in the 1980s. In essence, the play is a one-hour monologue for a woman called Julia, alone in her flat, whose attempts to record a video suicide note for the benefit of her callous ex-husband are constantly interrupted by phone calls from other desperate women who think she is a psychiatrist; and there's a terrible pathos, well caught in Juliet Cadzow's powerful and sexy performance, about the way in which it observes the pathetic ruses the diets, the health kicks, the addiction to TV soap operas with which modern single women try to fend off the bleakness of their lives. The trouble is, though, that both productions are wedded a little too firmly to the extrovert, laugh-a-minute imaee of Fo's work that has won him such an enthusiastic following in Scotland. In The Virtuous Burglar, the middle class char acters Sashay around the stage looking so mannered, pretentious and ridiculous that the earthy, realistic rhythm under lying Fo's comedy can hardly 2x 90 MINUTE SONY VIDEO I BLANK TAPES (UP TO 6 HOURS RECORDING) 1 FULL LENGTH FEATURE FILM 1 VIDEO MAKERS HANDBOOK ZOOM INTO YOUR LOCAL SONY DEALER NOW AND GET A CLOSE UP ON THIS OFFER ONY OFFER CLOSES MAY 31st, 1988 I'movii nan Muter re avaiiamityi.