The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 31

ARTS 31 Sarah Gristwood on how Egypt loved Show Boat's Queenie A rounded performance Karim Alrawi on how Egyptian officialdom hated his play about colonialism and homosexuality No queens on the Nile THE GUARDIAN Friday July 27 1990 an Egyptian Pasha and was sent back can not be true. Believe me, that was why their women came here in the first place." The drive for Empire, he explains, is due to the unbridled lust of English Memsahibs. He returns to the heterosexual Jewish professor and the homosexual Egyptians, before flying into a sudden rage. "You say Nasser was the son of a postman. I will never allow anybody to say that on stage." "Nasser described himself as such." "It is offensive for an Egyptian president to be called son of a postman when the Jew is a professor." After more discussion he offers me a solution.

"All 1 want is balance. If you say one thing then somewhere else in the script you must balance it with its opposite." I object that writing plays is not like selling onions by the kilo. Don't make the young Egyptian a homosexual," he continues. "Make him a revolutionary. Make the Jew repent his Zionism.

Delete Nasser is son of a postman." He smiles and shakes my hand as I leave. "Have another go. I won't remove everything," he says. "I'll let you keep your point of view." Karim Alrawi's play Crossing The Water, originally commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre, London, was sclieduled THE building is large and old, a block of apartments sequestrated in the Fifties and now an annexe of the Ministry of Culture. It is ill kept: there are no signs outside, no plaque stating that it houses government offices, as is commonly the case here in Egypt.

We ask for the offices of the theatre censor and are directed to a room with a darkly varnished old desk and a tired couch. The walls are bare of any pictures or posters. There is not a single book. There is no trace of a personality, nothing to betray the interests or passions of the thin, balding man with a moustache and thick glasses who has occupied this room for the last 35 years. It is common for plays to return from the censor with speeches cut and sometimes with whole scenes torn to shreds, but complete banning orders are rare.

My play was banned. I am here to ask for an explanation. I have brought a journalist friend along, partly as witness and partly as mediator. "I don't go to the theatre," announces the censor. "My job ends at the dress rehearsal.

What happens after that is the responsibility of the Theatre Surveillance people." We ask about my play. His face turns a dark shade of red as he states categorically, "I can never allow this play to be performed in any form. It's production is absolutely refused. It is a play that says Egyptians are homosexuals. This is something I refuse to permit on stage." "The play is trying to make a point about human relationships in a colonial context, where some people have a great deal of power and others have very little." I respond.

"It says Egyptians are homosexuals." "The relationships between the English and Egyptian characters is not just homosexual. The homosexuality is a metaphor." "I don't see that. It can't be a metaphor. It is normal for English people. They have laws to protect themselves doing it with each other.

It is completely normal for them." We argue pointlessly for a while before he changes his line of attack. "The Jewish character," he says while serving us coffee, "He is well rounded. He is a sympathetic character. He has no contradictions. I can tell you any Jew who sees this play will come up to you and kiss you for what you have written.

He is a university professor and a Zionist, a racist and a political extremist." "Aren't these contradictions?" I ask. "Not for a Jew. For a Jew he is a hero." "This is a play about people trying to belong in places that are not theirs to belong in." I protest. "This story that your character mentions about an English teacher who had an affair with THE pilot of Hie Egyptian plar.o invited Kar-la into the cockpit arid asked her what she did in Show Boat, then about to be staged at the Cairo Opera House. "Sing, act, dance," she said.

"How do you dance?" asked the pilot. "You are too fat." In fact, Karla Burns has played Queenie in 11 different versions of Show Boat, mostly in her native America but including that of the RSCOpera North about to open at the London Palladium alter stints in Leeds and Stratford. In Egypt, they went wild for her. "They had never seen a woman of my stature move as I do." When she did Hey, Feller the "11 o'clock special" number lost in the Rodgcrs and Hammcrstein archives for more than 50 years, they halted the performance to make her do it again. And when she went into the hotel bank to change some money she was there for 15 minutes signing newspapers with her picture in.

She was taken aback to be asked to verify her weight, reported in the paper as 180kg near 4Q01bs, ma'am" said the reception desk), but gratified to find a traditional appreciation of "the Reubenes-que On the whole, she thinks that the pilot's comment was a positive one. When she turned up for this production, the director and choreographer took one look and offered, concerned, to alter the dances for her. "I forget that people don't know me over here." She played along for a while to tease but, in fact, she wouldn't have dreamt of letting them do it. Her personal reviews were wonderful for the show but that's only the half of it. Her best known work has tended to be on the borderline between musical theatre and opera Kiss Me Kate and Porgy And Bess.

There will always be certain parts she is considered cut out for Black Maria in South Pacific, Katisha in The Mikado but she is "not ashamed of or bored with "Size and colour, the things that would seem my obstacles, haven't been," she says. "Partly, it's a mindset. Partly, it's that the industry has really allowed me that." Trigger for the plot is the marriage between a black and a white illegal in some states in the 1880s, when Show Boat was set. As the story takes a 50-ycar sweep to end up in the Charles-toning 1920s, it's of incidental interest to see how the position of the play's negroes seems to have changed. "In the end we're better dressed and we're allowed to wear shoes, but we're still the servants." says Burns, who grew up in Wichita, Texas.

But most of the fuss about Show Boat has always been focused on the opening lyric: "Niggers all work on the Mississippi." Or rather, on the opening lyric's opening word. The first night it was ever performed. Show Boat was reputedly greeted with a stunned reaction. Wildly successful, it has still been in some ways a source of agonised embarrassment ever since. It was "niggers" in the Twenties, "darkies" in the ia36 film, "coloured folks" in the 1946 revival.

Subsequently it went to "Here we all work on de Mississippi" and, for the 1966 revival, the lyric was omitted altogether. For many years there was a tendency to cut Show Boat so as to bring up only its lighter, costume drama side and a few of the most famous songs. In the 1980s a movement to reap-preciate the work began attn wunlan uf my stature muve as I do she's played it. If that's not entirely what you'd think from the bare pnnted page of the libretto, then it still seems probable that Karla Burns would resist very strongly any suggestion that the part is as limited as that of Gone With The Wind. "I can't deny what she was.

But in Egypt they took her name Queenie for Queen. It did something to them culturally, made them feel good abou having dark skins. When I was doing interviews there, they really wanted to hear that she was more than just a boat's cook," Burns says. "I was able to tell them, she certainly was." 0 Show Boat opens at the London Palladium on August 1, with previews from July 25. We told you.

Remember the rules. You didn't listen. The unkindest cuts for actorly amputees THE NEW BATCH Here they grow again. Veronica Horwell FOR half of Changing Step (BBCl), Anthony Sher's teleplay on a military nursing home, spring 1917, you wanted to wince, turn away, because it had a reticence so false and actorly as to produce an Alan Bennett-parody mood. For the other half you wanted to do the same, but because it bloody well hurt, it was so untheatrically true.

It slammed you up against the physical realities of the place: tubs, steam and lewdness in the remedial baths; slop pails; woven cane backs of the wheelchairs. It shoved not just sewn-up sleeves and trouser legs at you, but the stump itself in the case of James Convey as Private Ross (a performance apparently having nothing to Karla Burns: Ihey had never there was a Broadway production in 1982, a recording in 1987, the Houston Grand Opera production that went to Cairo. Karla Burns was in them all. It would surely be at least arguable that Hammerstein's use of the word was deliberate; to shock, by implication to blame. But Karla Burns doesn't think so.

In 1927 it was still in sufficiently common usage not to have carried that message; it's time for making a point, she says, is now. "It is just so offensive, and yet we can't deny it's what we were called. It's like Jews trying to deny the holocaust. The longer we allow it to hide under a scab, the longer it remains a thorn in our flesh," she says. "Each time I've come across a new production of Show Boat the song has been trees: but just as you were about to cry this won't do, a line or a shot shut you up.

"Have you no' seen haggis in the joked a Scots ranker, "nae wings, nae head, nae legs, but my God, a plucky wee thing." "Every soldier's pack weighs exactly the same as The Cross," said the sister. A squad of the mono-legged drilled to the command And the camera stayed, patient as good nurse, with a lad as he crutched himself up a staircase, the polished hallway shining coldly behind him. They didn't actually play "Rock 'n Roll, I gave you the best years of my life" on Oh, Sweet Mystery of Rock, Where Are You Hiding (BBC2), but its celebratory-clegaic tone thrummed throughout. Ray Gosling sat upon a narrow bed in a Pon-tins chalet in November, with his blue suede shoes a bit ostentatious upon his lap, and pondered foggily just Clare Higgins and Ian McKellen Whitehall and Richard's systematic isolation of Hastings at whom the retiring Buckingham casts a wan, departing glance. It is a potent reminder that the legendary twentieth century dictators virtually all seized power from within the system.

But Mr Eyre retains the idea of monarchy. There is an inspired scene where the newly-crowned Richard hurtles towards us on a gantry-like throne clad in black doublet and backed by an heroic, idealised mural: an exact reminder of the self-mythologising quality of fascism. In Shakespeare, however, there is no directorial gain without some loss. By treating Richard as a politically astute struck actress and a kleptomaniac and the stage is set for a classic farce along contemporary comic lines. Time machine doors understudy admirably for traditional French windows.

Nine young actors tumble in and out of them with appropriate aplomb. Lucy Daniels' irreverent translation revels in the incongruity of anachronisms and colloquialisms: "I could murder a glass of tea," confesses our inventor. She even risks a smidgin of topicality: "Nowadays, it's much easier," observes Vafll- discussed in earnest. Sometimes the discussions are very painful." On this production, the decision went against forcing black actors to use the word But Karla Burns says, "I'm never offended, whether they decide to use the n-word or not. I've come to peace with myself." "I'm of the belief that Queenie is a woman who just happened to have been born in a period that didn't allow her to speak her mind.

She knows everything, hears everything that happens on that boat and that's a real tactic, a real technique of the black man. We have become a listening people." The role, she says, has got stronger and deeper every time how rock Had Made Hun Free: "If was as as big as the Reformation; bigger, don't we now know, than Communism." The 2,000 others at a R'n'R convention at the camp were not so epithetic, but they communicated how it had liberated them into personal expression: believers in one faith, yet individuals. "I might have a style and do it my way, but if you go to Taunton they'd do it different," said a Shepton Mallet rocker of original vintage, whose drapes had ossified into folk costume. He looked terrif. as did the infant French rockers, with hair-quiffs Lacroix-styl-ised but not as fine as Ron Lock, the rocking policeman, who processed in like a Mayor, long-jacketed, and upon thick crepe soles, with his lady on his arm.

Their definition of permis-si'on-to-be-yourself was far, literally, from that of a Latvian bandman: the KGB had in Richard Hi photo: douglas jefferey old soldier clamouring for action, Mr Eyre undercuts both his truculent deformity and sexual magnetism. McKellen is very good indeed. But it seems somewhat excessive for Queen Margaret to describe as "an elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog" this immaculate, evening-dressed figure at a state banquet. The great scene where Richard wooes Queen Elizabeth to gain her daughter's hand also hangs fire: it misses the point that he is seducing the mother to gain the child and it is symptomatic of McKellen's asexuality that he cuts the telltale line defining the womb as a "nest of McKellen's Richard is short on humour and hypocrisy. llevich, "to poison someone with eggs." Yet despite such impish indiscretions, Company of Clerks never obscure the Or-tonesque contempt for petty authority which is this script's central preoccupation.

"I'm ruling as Tsar," wails Vasilievich. "What will my next party meeting make of me?" Cumbersome props and costumes, and overstudied acting all conspire to slow the pace. Marcel Marceau doors make for laboured entrances and exits, in a show whose momentum is its driv- for production at the American University in Cam Wallace Theatre in November. CANNON BAKER STREET 0380772 (.. CANNON FULHAMRD 3702838 LAKESIDE thurrock 0708 880238 ODEON (LIBERTY) ROMFORD 0708740110 WYCOMBE 6 HICH WYCOMBE 0404 40635 KS3E Enter Richard the Blackshirt From late September it will go on national tour.

threatened to kill his baby if he persisted in that antisocial music. He desisted. For 18 years. And now he had crossed a changed Europe to bop at this venue with the Comets, Bill Haley's backing group. 'They had been very poor (one had bought his first guitar from dishwash money in the Depression) and they were still not rich: the music business didn't run that way then.

But they emitted a huge simple happiness. Their Haley replacement thought what captivated you in the gut was that your heart beat to the time of a medium-pace Haley number. A couple snogged in a retro manner near a '56 Chewy. On the floor, a boy the age of the Comets' grandkids raved, inspired below the ankle. The occasion, under lamps naffly-coloured, was about being young, and the necessary passing of that wonder.

Shake, rattle 'n' roll: never such innocence again. What he gives us instead is a highly intelligent study of fascist power: its myopia, its concern with self-image, even its contradictoriness. McKellen makes fascinating use of his soldier's pocket-Bible brandishing it as a symbol of integrity and even thumbing through it, in mortal despair, on the eve of battle. With his slicked-down hair and dry parade-ground voice, McKellen offers us not a charismatic Richard but a beautifully executed study of the banality of evil. There is striking support from Peter Jeffrey as a Clarence who vainly believes he is protected from murder by his nobility, from Brian Cox who plays Buckingham as a portly, overfed Machiavellian and from Joyce Redman whose Duchess of York reminds one of an Alan Bennett dowager about to go and put on another rope of pearls.

Jean Kalman's fierce overhead working-lights evoke the interrogative barbarity of dictatorship. Bob Crowley's concrete-walled set is spare and effective, not least the backdrop of an idyllic rural England that heralds the arrival of Richmond. But the great virtue of the evening is that it turns a play that, in isolation, often becomes blood-boltered melodrama into a gripping study of the political cimning and spiritual barrenness of fascism. ing force. Nevertheless, enthusiasm outweighs inexperience.

These precocious performances are blessed with much more beef than ham. A sentimental denouement dilutes Bulgakov's potent political polemic. However, his inventor's ultimate failure to traverse the centuries acts as a pertinent reminder that from autocracy there is often no escape. "Liberty is precious," declared Lenin. "So precious, it must be rationed." For Mikhail Bulgakov, like many others, glasnost came too late.

do with performing). You couldn't predict from cut to cut whether it would be risible and resistible (Oh, no, the upper-class VAD and the amputee aren't going to end up kissing passionately in the pool, are they? Lord, they are, anachronistically overcoming the anaphrodis-iac effects of class differences). Or moving, sometimes in scenes nobody should have been able to get away with ever again, as when Eleanor Bron's gracious grand dame led a chorus of Tippevary to distract from a shellshockcd man's outburst at a concert. Careful research was visible. Sher, as a doctor vitiated by a gassing, knocked himself to oblivion on a Bromp-ton cocktail of Scotch, morphine, honey and cocaine.

And audible Susan Wool-dridge, as the VAD. had a grammatical sentence-structure defunct after 1920. Symbols loomed, an armless statue, lopped and fallen Cabinet in Mosleyesque black shirt and comes before the Mayor and Citizens at the top of a microphoned podium draped with a boar-decked flag. As the chants of Amen greet his assumption of power, he slowly and laboriously raises his right hand in an unequivocal Hitlerian salute. It was Peter Hall, directing the play at Stratford in 1964, who pointed out a fundamental truth: "The political interest is that Richard and Buckingham take the greatest care when they're seizing the throne to act constitutionally: it's the classic coup d'etat with legal sanctions." Eyre's success lies in translating that insight into contemporary terms; and the pivotal scenes become those in Act Three when the government is ruthlessly hi-jacked.

Hastings, instead of being accosted on his doorstep, is sounded out by Catesby over the red despatch-boxes as they shuffle the morning Cabinet papers. After a nightmarish insert showing the death of three nobles, we then return to outside the USSR, it's presented in a clumsy, yet eminently likeable production by the fledgling Company of Clerks. In a rundown apartment block, overrun by gossips and bureaucrats, an impoverished inventor yearns for escape to a more invigorating age. Unfortunately, in his ensuing experiment. Superintendent Ivan Vasilievich swaps places with Tsar Ivan the Terrible.

Each must impersonate the other, to save their respective necks. Add a aim director, a 8tar- Michael Billington at the Lyttelton RICHARD Eyre's enthralling production of Richard III, which plays at the Lyttelton before going off on tour with King Lear, sets the play squarely in the twentieth-century. Instead of a Saturday-night melodrama about a Satanic joker, we get a deeply political study of the fascist instinct. It doesn't solve all the play's problems, but it is a reading pursued with admirable logic and clarity. The first sight of Ian McKel-len's Gloucester comes as something of a shock: this is no hobbling cacodemon but a stiff-backed, uniformed survivor of the Somme who raps out his contempt for "this weak piping time of peace." He and Buckingham move purposefully through a world of -wins-collared, Baldwinesque trimmers, but it is only after the death of Hastings that Richard shows his true colours.

He appears in Battersea William Cook Ivan Vasilievich "TRAVEL back in time? You may only conduct such experiments with the permission of the police!" Mikhail Bulgakov wrote this fantasy as an antidote to the suffocating inertia of Stalinist repression. Previously unperformed use WARNER Lf.ICF.STEK square WEST END ADVANCE BO04INC CANNON HAYMARKET MB 1327 CANNON OXFOHD8T 8S60310 710.910 toMMfclgtmCpm STARTS TODAY 430 07l BS I CANNON 484 3001 3E I SHAFTESBURY AVENUE S38SM1 BARBICAN I CINEMA CANNON slouch 0703683 493 CENTRE "SfSSBl 042321)7709 038 8891 A00.IW THE POINT MILTON KKYNES 031883 SHOWCASE PETERBOROUGH 07335S58SS WHITE LEYS E3 BAYSWATER 703 3303 3C ADVANCE BOOK1NO 783 3324 AND ALL OVER THE COUftTHY SEE L04CAL PRESS FOR DETAILS cMiurtiutiCOMWCTAr riucoioo4Na ronH.