The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 18

THE GUARDIAN Saturday June 25 1988 Michael Bilflington about playing innocence and evil Bubbles and butlers f0 if, attractions FateJM Nancy Banks-Smith madhouse counterpart, Lollio, literally looking down on this world of tormented white lust from a curved balcony high up in the roof. As a concept, the production has a drawing-board brilliance. But a play comes to life in the hands of its actors and, at the PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFEHY Torn between love and hate: Miranda Richardson in The Changeling. Creature of the deed great innocent. I cling to that idea anyway." But innocence can be a' problem.

"I always think of actresses who can maintain this wonderful air of innocence. You don't always know whether you've got that or not. So what complicates things is a sort of self-monitoring which I'm quite guilty of and almost a playing of the innocent because you don't trust that you have that quality." Eyre "allows everyone their freedom but then he brings all these strands together," she says. "We've had time to do things a few different ways and are still changing things, which I find very exciting. I said to Richard Eyre the other day, 'Why should it feel like a failure to ditch something that you've been working on It ment Beatrice-Joanna hires de Flores to commit murder the evil multiplies with a Macbeth-like intensity and speed.

"There's no time for thought," says Richardson. "It's like a relentless wheel of fate. A perversion of everything that is blamed on fate." And that is how she thinks Richard Eyre's production will feel to the audience. Audiences and actresses, including Miranda Richardson, find it hard to accept Beatrice-Joanna as the instigator of all the evil. "You could argue," says Richardson, "that Beatrice-Joanna didn't have the idea of murdering her betrothed in the first place at all it was Alsemero who put the idea in her head.

Alsemero who is supposed to be the Desmond Christy IRANDA Richardson played Ruth Ellis in lance With A Stranger and that made her a star, a part she doesn't line playing. So she behaves as if her mother had told her not to talk to strangers, even in interviews. She talks easily about her new role at The National, but doesn't want to talk much about anything else: "There's a limit to how much I can tell you about my flat, my cat and my garden." Richardson is playing Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling, one of those Jacobean tragedies that is much possessed by death but even more so by sex.From the mo ICHARD EYRE'S Dro- 1 ductionofThe Changeling at the Lyt-Ltelton is like a blood stained calling-card. As director-designate of the National, Mr Eyre offers tanta- He transposes the play's actionff to a 19th century Spanish slave- colony, radically alters the dimensions of the stage and suffuses everything with a fullblown theatricality. Visually, the production is magnificent; but it is flawed by erratic casting and some reedy speaking that fails to relish the play's language.

Middleton and Rowley's play (1621) is a Jacobean classic that unites sex, class ana money, it reeks of modernity in its notion that loving and loathing are inseparable arid in its idea that we are existentially defined by our actions. Beatrice-Joanna, the daughter of an Alicante lord, hires her father's detested servant, De Flores, to murder an unwanted suitor: she is enslaved both by the event and the killer who tells her, in one of the most resonant lines in Jacobean drama, "You are the deed's creature." But where the heroine is destroyed by her pas sion, an ironic sub-plot set in a madhouse, we see a doctor's wife, Isabella, retaining her chilly integrity when seduced by a counterfeit lunatic. T. S. Eliot condemned the sub-plot's nauseousness and Una Ellis-Fermor suggested it could be cut altogether.

But Mr Eyre and his designer, William Dudley, remind us that the whole play is predicated on the notion of love as a "tame madness." The opening image is of the principal characters being conjured up from a huddle of floorbound lunatics. And Mr Dudley's set consists of a tunnel-shaped stage that is all gold-encrusted Spanish baroque and sun-burnished walls flanked on either side by a towering, white-tiled that descends into some infernal pit. It is as if the Marat-Sade were pressing in on a world of colonial opulence and intelligently reinforces the idea of the play. But Mr Eyre thickens Middle-ton and Rowley's brew by adding the idea of race to that of class. De Flores is no Jacobean cutpurse but a lordly black in white livery who clearly awakens fierce sexual longings in his mistress: the more she condemns him as a "standing toad-pool" the more you feel she is aroused by him.

And, in a witty piece of grouping, Mr Eyre shows both De Flores and his Biff will be back next week. Ml teams and escaped lunatics then retire deferentially. This sort of thing can sear the soul of a sensitive artiste (with the stress on the tiste). Bernard's predecessor as butler was Joseph who shot himself and why not. Sharn, it turns out, is his son and wreaking revenge on the Carringtons want to see them tormented! I want to make then suffer for the rest of their miserable for making his father buttle.

Jimmy's (YTV), a documentary serial set in St James' University Hospital, Leeds, mixes hope, dread and chocolate mousse in a recognisably lifelike way. The warden of the nurses' home is warning the new intake about the midnight mousse eater. "So get yourself a little basket because you'll find girls can pinch from you. It's unbelieveable. We had one girl with a chocolate mousse.

Somebody upended it, picked the foil off and scraped the mousse out! I know it sounds terrible but it does go on. The security department know about it but we have never solved one yet." The plastic surgeon is talking to Jim Cawood. Mr Cawood says little and that gruffly because he has mouth cancer. "You have quite a large cancer in your mouth. That's why your teeth are loose.

The operation takes four, five, six hours, depending if the tide's in or not. When you wake up you won't be able to talk. You've stopped smoking, haven't you? It's important." Mr Cawood lives at home with his mother. She has no phone. Neighbours will run across the road and tell her.

"She's a bit nervous." "Yes, you were saying she wouldn't feel too happy about coming to see you?" "No, no, no, no way," croaked Mr Cawood. Horror crawls over you for a woman, so elderly and terrified. Jimmy's can fairly claim it is making the work of a real hospital accessible and friendly. What it must also do is examine itself regularly, like a woman checking her breast for something malign. It is a half-hour serial transmitted twice weekly in the early evening exactly like a soap.

You could say that familiar format is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. But I have never felt easy about using sick people like soap. How vulnerable patients and their families are, how frightened and eager to please. How ill-placed to appreciate what being on television means. Consider Mrs Cawood who has no telephone but I bet has television.

What will she do when her son's face is being cut away on television? When the chairman of Yorkshire TV has his prostate op televised I will take it all back. moment, the ideas are stronger than the performances. Miranda Richardson is a fascinating actress who always suggests something darkly sinister under a doll-like beauty but her effects are too minutely achieved for a big space like this. What she underplays, in particular, is the heroine's ungovernable sexual obsession with De Flores. Where previous Beatrices (Diana Quick and Emma Piper both played the role in 1978) have shown a quirky fascination with his corrugated features, Ms Richardson treats him with patrician disdain.

She comes into her own in the later scenes of degradation fellow has undone me endlessly" is rancidly sexy) but Ms Richardson offers an internalised portrait of a woman torn between love and hate. George Harris is a striking De Flores. He has a contained power and built-in hauteur that reminds me of Viv Richards leaning nonchalantly on his bat before smiting the English bowlers round the park. But even Mr Harris's best effects are visual: in particular, his gloating, lubricious smile at the mime-show wedding of Beatrice to her chosen groom, Alsemero. Paul Jesson is all agonised nobility as the deceived husband and David Ryall gets across the wilful wealthiness of Beatrice's dad.

And there is a notable cameo from Rebecca Pidgeon as Isabella, Beatrice's madhouse alter ego. There was a great moment in Peter Gill's 1978 Riv erside production when the two women passed within a hairs-breadth of each other: here a comparable effect is achieved by having Isabella suddenly made manifest behind Beatrice during a madhouse masque. Mr Eyre has opened his ac count with a bold, arresting production very different in style from Peter Hall's militant classicism. What worries me is not so much the Babel of regional accents everything from Geordie to Liverpudlian as the sense that the play's meaning is being imparted visually rather than verbally. Classical theatre is partly about a communicated delight in language: I only hope Mr Eyre puts that high on his list of priorities as he takes over the National's hot seat.

In praise of older women Val Arnold-Forster "It's been such an unusual couple of days." Steven Carrington in Dynasty (BBC 1) JOAN COLLINS was bobbing about in a bath of bubbles wearing only a wig, false eyelashes, and her "Eat your heart out, Cleopatra" smile when her fourth husband, referred to on all sides as Sham, burst through the door and shot a glass of champagne out of her hand shouting, "That's for my father!" "Sharn!" said Miss Collins not turning a hair and, of course, you wouldn't if you were wearing well, anyway. Sharn snarled. It had been a tiring day. He had already kidnapped Adam Carrington's baby, blackened Leslie Carrington's eye, stolen Steven Carrington's car and now he had to part Miss Collins from her diamonds. No small matter He snarled some more "Get out!" and at this Miss Collins rose all Botticelli from the foam and wrapped herself in a tiny pink towel.

When everything in the bathroom is superstar-sized why, you may ask, is the towel so exiguous? Why is Sharn rushing around perforating Miss Collins's plumbing? Why is Miss Collins drinking his father's champagne? Is there, as newspaper copytakers say, much more of this stuff? Well no, not much more. This is the last of the present series of Dynasty. Sharn, like Hamlet, who in other respects he barely resembles, is doing it all for his father's ghost. Haven't you ever felt dreadfully sorry for the domestic staff in American soaps? They make speechless, fleeting appearances serving food which, under the stress of some trauma, is never tasted. Take J.

R. in Dallas. Only last week, having thrown Sue Ellen off the ranch, he arrived at the breakfast table full of beans. Nevertheless he ordered a helping of eggs, grits and hot biscuits from Theresa, apparently the only servant at Southfork. Then Miss Ellie, who like all the Ewings has little sense of tactful timing, mentioned that she had given half the ranch away and J.

grits turned to ashes on his lips. The Carringtons, a cut above the Ewings socially, have a butler called Bernard (with the stress on the nard) who, despite the size of the Carrington man sion, has nothing to do but to announce the intermittent arrival of terrorists, television Manchester Jeremy Moore Halle Groves GIVEN that Wednesday evening's Halle Prom was advertised as a Byron bicentenary concert, the orchestra might perhaps have been expected to repeat one of the programmes they gave recently as part of the Nottingham Festival's Byron celebration. Instead, what were presumably financial considerations intervened, leading to a decidedly un-Byronic but popular work, Brahms's First Piano Concerto with John Lill as soloist, being used to fill the second half. The logic of this proved rather faulty there were more than a few empty seats in the Free Trade Hall. But at least the one Byronic work retained from Nottingham, Berlioz's Harold In Italy, gave me the chance to enthuse once more over the viola WHEN BUYING A TV, MAKE SURE IT COMES WITH TWO GUARANTEES.

Lady had beaten Macmillan at golf. No militant feminist, she would prefer to "get the men to back Lady Seear, a familiar and impressive politician and broadcaster, has never been, she told Cliff Morgan in the My Heroes series (Radio 4, Fridays), an extreme feminist. She had never adopted an "anti-man" attitude: "extremely unproductive," she explained. A sensible woman with a variety of experience, she talked with notable common sense. Heir Liberal beliefs springing partly from her observations of Communism versus Fascism before the war, she remarked that Hitler, after all, had been a hero to some.

She talked with admiration of others, from her history teacher at school to Lord Gri-mond, but rejected the notion of heroes. "People who influence you greatly, yes; heroes, no." Only last week, Woman's Hour, where we met the Reverend Elsie Chamberlain, had an Sheffield Robin Thornber Gregory's GirB WHY IS IT, I wondered, that when the Sheffield Crucible hires professional singers for a musical they can find radio mikes for them, but when they hand over to the youth theatre they're not wired for sound although the band is nearer the audience? Then I realised that the people I was watching were actually two of the leaven of professional actors in a largely amateur young company and there was no excuse for their apparent inability to project At that point I gave up. I think it is a bit of a con. Gregory's Girl is not advertised to the public as being anything other than a Crucible company production one of the country's six centres of theatrical shouldn't, but inevitably at the start it does. "Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and think, 'Why didn't I do it that way It doesn't always work but it does give you that extra jolt of adrenalin which is really all that Beatrice-Joanna is living on by the end of the play." She seems to nave no definite plans after The Changeling.

But aren't the offers pouring in "It's really not like that. Everybody's got a false idea about me, that I'm rolling in megabucks. The Spielberg (Empire Of The Sun) was the biggest financial kick I've been on. But there's not that much that comes in." At which point a wardrobe mistress comes in to rescue Miranda Richardson from any more questions. item on heroines.

The presenter, Jenni Murray, admitted to first admiring Florence Nightingale, and even more the Victorian woman who had changed her name and her clothes to become a senior army doctor. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies had the same blessed clarity of speech as the two politicians and the same good sense. She was on Desert Island Discs (Radio 4, Sundays and Fridays): Sue Lawley and she chatting together in the kind of relaxed way that neither of Miss Law-ley's predecessors could have achieved. And it was noticeable how, like the other women, she had reached a ripe old age without getting pompous. It seems BBC bosses are worried about the mildest swearwords offending the older woman.

Perhaps they heard Miss Ffrangcon-Davies talking about a Shakespeare production of her youth. God-awful, she called it, and she's 97. excellence. I suppose if they'd announced it as being little better than a school play not many people would have bought tickets. You can't knock local young amateurs as if they were professional performers but neither should they be presented as the real thing.

Most of the company here were from local schools and the youth theatre. It's unfair to compare them with Bill Forsyth's film, but that's what many people will do. The stage adaptation, by Andrew Bethell, was no more than mediocre; the songs, by Lee Hall, were instantly forgettable. Robert Jones's design didn't work. The only sign of outstanding talent, imagination and vitality was in the movement, choreographed by Neville Campbell and Penny Rae from Phoenix Dance in Leeds.

Phil Clark and Mike Kay directed. You might like it if you know someone in the company. Gregory's Girl is at the Sheffield Crucible (0742 769922) until July 16. Calendar ickets also of iy At the stunning Priority or in person Middle Discounts A G( fjk sei Xajig GOOD week for connoisseurs of one of the de- ghts of radio, the voice ot the older woman. Baroness Elliott, Baroness Seear, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and the Reverend Elsie Chamberlain two politicians, an actress and a cleric.

No knowing their combined age, since the Rev was not saying an apparently coy gesture from such a down-to-earth woman. But, so she said, "people would think I ought to have shut up by Not a sentiment many male clerics of her age would voice. Robert Carvel talked to Lady Elliott of Harwood in Carvel In Conversation (Radio 4, Thursday and Saturday). She is 85, and still an active member of the Upper House. Her voice was clear, precisely Edwardian "gels" for girls and still with the confidence of one who had always moved in the highest circles.

Born a Tennant, half-sister to Margot Asquith, she married Walter Elliott, later a Tory minister, and sailed into a variety of posh posts. Like all the Carvel conversations, full of beguiling titbits: Jimmy Maxton had been a Tory at university, whereas Elliott had been a socialist and 1 4 prefer to have things playing of Rivka Golani. Miss Golani cultivates a very individual tone, not to everyone's taste perhaps, but a sound that never suggests that her instrument might in any sense be an inferior violin or cello. Her acute awareness of the viola's dual role as protagonist and spectator made her the ideal soloist and her technique seldom faltered. Of course, Harold In Italy is as much a symphony as a concerto, and the success of the performance was in large part attributable to fine playing from all sections of the Halle.

Their good form was a hearten-ingly consistent part of the evening, whether in Wolf-Ferrari's brief, quirky but enjoyable overture, the Secret Of Susanna, or in accompanying John Lill in the Brahms. Unfortunately, neither the soloist nor the conductor, Sir Charles Groves, managed to inject much life into the concerto. Their leaden interpretation tended to squander the full-toned and spirited contribution given by the orchestra. i The Moscow Classical Ballet THE ENTERTAINMENT CORPORATION present, DIRECT FROM THE USSR fit I- 9 lc THE! MOSCOW LASSICAL BALLET MMMHBHMi in the nHBMMHHMaMBBHH WORLD PREMIERE NEW PRODUCTION van Lake PRODUCTION DESIGNED BY TIM GOODCHILD LIGHTING DESIGN BY BRIAN HARRIS Performances: August 9, 10, 13 7.45pm August 13, 142.30pm ki km a rAiw mm ki jl trim new theatre specially created for Business Design Centre Islington hotlines 836 1226 or 836 3464 24 hour credit card no booking fee from THE THEATRE MUSEUM, Russell Covent Garden 1 lam-7pm Tues-Sun (no booking fee) Ticket Prices Front Stalls 26.30, 21.50 Stalls 21.50 18.30 E16.S0 Rear Stalls 11.30 6.50 upr reputation lias always been, our best guarantee. But for those who in now there's a five year fjlyHH1--' comes "ee Wlt" every 2 FST Sony TV bwgttt between June 1st antlupBfrflgain, our TV's; jfiTnXTOtlTT Monday-Thursday and matinees forchildrenOAPUEMOGroups Postal Bookings FIRST CALL PA Box 92, London WC2H 9SU.

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