The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 26

THE GUARDIAN Friday August 12 19H8 After Braun came the brains: How the Red Army 'invited' Hitler's nuclear scientists to work on the Bomb for Russia Cliches spun with gold Up amid atom 26 ARTS GUARDIAN bomb. Milch was unimpressed by the scientists work, and like others closer to Hitler, dis Melrion Bowen on works by Faure, Schoenberg and Sibelius at the Proms Hugh Hebert UTTTT i I model of a Jupiter in 1958 given a lavish feast in the middle of starving Berlin). There's a curious dichotomy here. Wirths, the most intriguing of the survivors that Rossiter and his co-producer director Toni Strasburg interviewed, never seems to have had any moral doubts. Nor, at first, did the scientists working on the A4 rocket, a later version of the V2.

But Irm-gard Grottrup tells how she once asked her husband whether he realised what he was doing. "Because one day his brief was 'Grottrup, you'll fire 3,000 And I said, 'Now take a compass and put it on a map. Because you can hit the whole of He was dumbfounded, but he didn't react. He was just fascinated by solving this or that problem steering or whatever. They didn't think about the consequences." The early part of the film badly needed to be pruned, in on it since 1942.

Oneof Ros-siter's witnesses, Gunther Wirths, reflects that the Germans' technology was not particularly good until they got access to information from the American Manhattan project. The assumption has usually been that this information was supplied by Klaus Fuchs later gaoled as a spy who had joined the project in 1943. Rossiter maintains that this is not true, that the information that helped Wirths and his colleagues in producing the right grade of uranium came from the Smyth Report, published openly though against the wishes of the Chiefs of Staff in the US in 1945. Just 14 months after Hiroshima, Russia's first nuclear reactor began operating. It took another two and a half years, till August 1949, to make and explode the first Russian trial atom bomb.

This programme doesn't fill in much of what happened in that can: though Nikalaus part, not least when he retreated to a high position behind the orchestra, to interpolate his last distant commentary, supported by back desk strings. Further theatrical histrionics were built into the Thea Mus-grave Horn Concerto, heard alongside the Sibelius in the BBC SSO's concert. In this continuous single movement work, the primacy of the solo horn (a role taken with unfailing accuracy by Barry Tuckwell) was challenged by a concertante brass group that interrupted, distorted and parodied the opening Misterioso music and took up new stage positins to overwhelm the succeeding Ca-priccioso section with wild fanfares. A kind of controlled anarchy emerged from the score as the four orchestral horns left for different stations around the hall, where they were fT'N ANCIENT wars the I I victors carried off the I I women. In 1945 it was the I I scientists, who lucked JULand screamed less.

A year or two back, television gave us a programme about what happened to Werner von Braun and his Peenemunde team as they were hustled smuggled, almost into the US. The Other Bomb (Channel 4) was about the German scientists who were taken East, some to work on the Soviet atom bomb. Just how much use they were to the Russians is still a matter of debate. Give or take a few might-have-beens, they should in theory have been invaluable. Otto Hahn had pointed the way with his work on spurting the uranium atom.

A lot of scientists had fled from Hitler's Europe because they were Jewish including, vitally, Einstein. But others were still there to carry on research and in 1942 a group of them met Albert Speer, the armaments Minister, and a senior officer called, unsuitably, Marshall Milch to discuss the possibility of a nuclear Riehl, one of the Germans who worked in Russia, says that even without their help and whatever aid they got from spies, the Russians would have only taken one or at most two more years to develop their own bomb. Instead The Other Bomb looked at a parallel development, the German rocket research team carried off to Russia (a few hours after being The Klein and then the fall trusted the abstract, theoretical basis of what they were trying to do. Some distrusted it also because it was, to them, "Jewish physics." Milch recommended that research should concentrate on rocket weapons, which looked more practical and could be developed faster. Speer recommended that some money at least should go into continuing the research on nuclear power.

You could argue that the German atom bomb project languished on that split vote, to some extent on an ideological distrust of its provenance. Mike Rossiter, co-producer director of The Other Bomb, reckons it was even more hampered by divided responsibility: "Three separate research or ganisations were working on it, with money from different min istries one of them the Ministry of Telecommunications All they knew was that these were scientists working in the area of electro-physics." Effectively Germany's nuclear research was put on the back burner. The somewhat brusque invi tation to continue their work further East came soon after the Red Army overran Berlin. Like the Germans, the Russians had had a research team led by Igor Kurchetov working mother: at the same time he exposes the private cost of her achievement and the permanent damage she has inflicted on her children by treating them as experimental guinea-pigs. Mr Wright is neither pro nor anti-Klein: his theme is the poignant personal failure of the public ironner-breaKer.

It is, however, a tantalisingly elusive play that can yield many different meanings. It has echoes oi Neiu in its portrayal of family life as an endless source of unresolved bitterness. But it can also be seen as a Pinteresque study of power in which Fauia a divorced German refugee practising as an analyst in Bethnal Green insidiously moves into the Klein household and becomes the substitute daughter. Like Pin ter's A Slight Ache, it is a study displacement in which Paula discovers the mother she needs and Mrs Klein makes reparation to her lost daughter. Drama itself is psycho-analy sis in action.

But Mr Wright's play, laced with wit, shows that there is also drama to be found in the private lives of the analysts themselves. Peter Gill's typically lucid production also steers a delicate course be tween exposing the occasional absurdities of hunt-the-symbol analysts and suggesting that their mother-child problems are universally familiar. Gillian Barge's Mrs Klein, all jangling beads and swooping vowels, has perhaps mst a touch of Coward's Madame Areata about her at first. But it is a performance of growing power that makes you understand the heroine's thought-processes. Francesca Annis also reveals the gap between Melitta's stylish physical maturity and unresolved infantile passions.

And there is an immensely subtle performance from Zoe Wana-maker as Paula who is both silent witness to a family crisis and a stealthy predator. "Analyst, neai tnyseir' might seem to be the overriding theme except that Mr Wright has written a highly intelligent play that throughout preserves a delicate balance. joined in their quadrophonic in terjections by three extra horns up in the gods all taking their cues from Tuckwell, rather than conductor Maksy-miuk. This liberated format was enhanced in Musgrave's concerto by a free exploration of unusual timbres, many suggested to her by procedures she had encoun tered in electronic music. The piece was ideally suited to live performance in the Albert Hall, but its surprises soon wore thin, as if the theatrics were an alibi for opting out of genuine, distinctive invention.

Musgrave's. aims were admirable, but her mind seemed to be elsewhere as she enacted them. The most substantial alterna tive to Debussy's Pelleas was Shoenberg's 40 minute symphonic poem, his last composi tion for an absolutely gargantuan post-Wagnerian orchestra. It was also completed in 1903 before he had heard Debussy's opera; and although he simply based it on elements from Mae terlinck's play, like Debussy, he could demonstrate a genuine af finity with the playwright's anti naturalistic, symbolically drenched stage conception. such an atlinity.

however, he could only do partial justice to at this stage: Shoenberg would accomplish more satisfying counterparts to Maeterlinck's dramatergical ideas later on in Erwartung and Die Gluckiche Hand. Meanwhile, as his pupil Al- ban Berg went to great pains to show, the ingredients of the play provided Schoenberg for a remarkably cohesive tone poem in four movement sonata-style format. Like Sibelius but unlike Faure Schoenberg also highlighted the Tristanesque depths of feeling that existed between the two fated lovers in the drama: this was an ultra expressionist view of the play. Undoubtedly, Bamert's interpretation had a comprehensive grasp of these different aspects: the confident shifting of tempo never for one minute undermined the vision he put across of the piece as a whole; and the playing of the BBC SO, pulsat ing with life in every detail, conveyed powerfully Schoenberg's personal reinterpreta-tion of the drama. The Lyons Opera Orchestra can be heard in Berlioz's Harold.

In Italy on BBC 2 tonight at 10.20 pm. AETERLINCK'S plays depend for their reputation todav on the abun aant responses ot composers, reaching from Sibelius to Cyril Scott. This point was reinforced oy tne three Proms that fol lowed Sunday's presentation of jjeoussys opera, Pelleas and Melisande. John Eliot Gardiner, conduc tor ot the Debussy, enjoyed equal success with his Lyons Opera Orchestra in a programme that featured Faure's incidental music for a London production of Pelleas; then on Tuesday, Mathias Bamert conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Schoenberg's sym phonic poem inspired by the same play: while on Wednes day, Sibelius's incidental music opened a Prom by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Jerzy Maksimiuk. Faure and Sibelius both suc ceeded best in a so called Fi- leuse movement, depicting Melisande at her spinning wheel.

Each composer here turned a cliche into something quite memorable. Although' Faure's spinning piece has not lived up to Debussy's jealous prediction that it would do nicely in seaside casinos, its expansive oboe melody, accompanied by muted strings, was striking. Sibelius spinning move ment, which had a viola trill as its focal point, was also his most individual contribution, the other eight movements of his suite being by comparison somewhat tame. However, the plaintive cor anglais solos, so finely executed by the BBC SSO's Alan Garner, accounted for the impact of the second movement portrait of Melisande and the ballad of the three blind sisters. Most listeners, meanwhile, will have regis- terea tne opening dawn evoca tion music, as a result of its use as the signature tune to The Sky At Night.

The Lyons Orchestra's delicately poised performance of the Faure followed aptly a suite from Bizet's incidental music to L'Arlesienne, using the composer's original scoring for 26 instruments: another succession of miniatures, this time showing an acute perception of the expressive potential of a play by Baudet. Moreover, this concert showed what a superior team they are, compared with so many other French orchestras. Not only were they sympathetic to the jazzy, sensuous colours needed for the accompaniment to Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (which had Francois-Rene Duchable as a slightly reticent soloist): but it did some justice to what across the Channel used to be known as the English Vice (well, the musical vice, anyway), a work by Berlioz. The extreme rhythmic and textural experiments of Harold In Italy seemed for once to be understood by the players, not just treated as the ravings of an opium-crazed fanatic. Gardiner had his team so well under control that the final Orgy Of Brigands appeared buttoned up.

But the overt theatrical passions of the piece came over marvellously in Zoltan Toch's realisation of the solo viola BB MUM mm i terminable shots of trains on the plains and dominant music, and a lot of sieg-heihng Nazi archive film. Though there were also some splendid shots, like Sergei Kor-ylev, Russia's von Braun, with one of his small 1930s experimental rocket launchers, looking more suitable for a Guy Fawkes party than a missile site. Korylev's research was interrupted for years while he was suspected of espionage by wondering why it wasn't done before. Of course the "glorious fiction" would have been called on to solve the "ghastly fact." Relying on Stephen Knight's carefully researched book resolving the Ripper mystery, writer Brian Clemens has come up with an intricately crafted yarn, as you would expect from tne creator ot The Avengers and The Professionals. Their proferred solution, in-triguingly plausible, is a much subtler variation on the hoary rumour fingering a prince of the royal blood, but it cries out for Conan Doyle's finesse.

Cle- mens's plotting is perfect but he nasn't mastered that mannered style. I couldn't believe that a loner Michael Billington at the Cottesloe THEATRE, Olivier said, is the first glamouriser of thought. One achievement of Nicholas Wright's Mrs Klein at the Cottesloe is that it both quickens the layman's interest in the the ories of its psychoanalyst hero ine and at the same time exposes her tragic flaws as-a mother. It is this balance between fascination and scepti cism that makes it quietly rivet ing. Mr Wright is a guy who takes his time: and the iirst act con sists of a good deal of necessary scene-setting.

The year is 1934 and Melanie Klein, the controversial explorer of the infant psyche, is off to Budapest for the funeral of her son Hans apparently killed in a climbing-accident. She leaves a young acquaintance, Paula, in charge of some vital proof-reading; and no sooner has Mrs Klein departed than her daughter, Me-litta, turns up desperately anxious to discover whether her mother has read a letter she has dispatched alleging that Hans committed suicide. This is interesting stuff but tinged with melodrama. It doesn't take a genius to deduce that Mrs Klein is bound to return unexpectedly and discover the conspiratorially giggling Paula and Melitta in cahoots. And the way the drama hinges on unopened letters with explosive contents takes one back to the world of Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones.

But it is in the gripping second half that we come to the real meat of the drama: in particular, the gulf between what people profess and what they do and the incapacity of even the most intellectually aware to handle primal emotions. In the course of a long night's journey into day, we come to see Mrs Klein as both analytic pioneer and maternal destroyer. Mr Wright pays due acknowledgment to his heroine's exploration of the love-hate impulse the infant feels towards its I Rockerman: von Braun with the KGB, but the fact that he survived at all in that era of purges suggests someone somewhere guessed he would be useful one day. Rossiter and Strasburg have in the end opted for a study of this fascinating group of privileged survivors. They lived far better than the Russians, apart as he points out that they didn't want to live in Russia at all.

Their usefulness ripnlineri and after an unhappy period when uiey were lerc pretty mucn to themselves nn an island in a lake, a kind of mini-gulag, they were allowed to go home during the thaw that followed the aeatn ot staun. Wirths summer) it nn- "I am sitting here, in good health. I have never been a soldier in Hitler time, that was great luck. I came back as a healthy man from the Soviet Union, so they had in Germanv a need firvr a man who knew how to make nuclear-pure uranium, and I was the only man who knew it like Holmes would join the Freemasons or that his ratio nalism would let him consult a clairvoyant, however grudgingly. And dialogue that lapses into anachronistic 1960s concepts like "ego massage" can't then use lines like "The game's afoot" without being risible.

There were some authentic allusions to the Holmes tradition deducing that a man's valet is off because his cufflinks don't match and some well-judged moments of melodrama. But the convincing pastiche we began with became dangerously close to spoof send-up of the style. Clemens's accomplished televisual storytelling, terse, Quid, episodic, puts a strain on the creaking revolve of Alan Miller-Bunford's elaborate stage set. And John David's production indulged extremely hammy acting even from Francis Matthews as Holmes and Frank Windsor as Watson. I have to say that the first night audience at Buxton Opera House iovea it.

oruy it had been slightly better written and much better acted and produced. HoimesAna The Rwver fin ishes at Buxton Opera House (0298 72190) tomorrow and is at Bath next week. Wakefield Robert Clark Joseph Herman WAKEFIELD'S Elizabethan Gallery with its low beam ceil ing and dim cloistered air is a perfect setting for Joseph Herman's paintings and drawings of Welsh mining life. Herman worked on the series from 1944-55 in the village of Ystradgynlais where he settled after fleeing the rising tide of anti-semitism in his native They nortrav more or less a 18 at the time." He had, he says, wonderful co-operation with the British Atomic Energy Authority, and with the French and American equivalents: "What a wonderful life YOU kept tripping over Hitler last night. The Fastest Man on Earth (Thames) in its run up to the Olympics had what must still be the most notorious sporting event of the century, the 1936 Games.

Dominated by the great Jesse Owens and the Fuhrer's studied insults to him and other black gold medallists, these newsreel films still had a kind of innocence that you can hardly remember as you watch the Coe v. Selectors slanging match. Like the German champion being, courageously, the first to congratulate Owens when he broke the world long-jump record, and looking as though he meant it. You wonder what the Fuhrer had to say to him about that. PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFERY lage, valley, pits, the miners at work, eating outside the local fish and chip shop and playing in the brass band, the mothers at home with the kids.

The best of them are remarkable for the way they pinpoint the geographical and social character of a particular area and yet manage to avoid mere topographical scene painting or tne Kind ot patronising sentimentality of many of today's artists-in-industry schemes. Herman gets at the complex heart of the matter, using the significant drama of mining life, the people and landscape oppressed by dirt and darkness, without once falling off into the usual simplistic dignity-of-la-bour romanticising. Technically and stylistically he has taken a lot from the early drawings of Rouault (fluid pen-and-wash sketches) and the paintings of Permeke (chunky limbed figures with sausage-like fingers), a fact about which he is completely open in his catalogue statement. But only a few of the figures appear entirely derivative. More resonant are his land scape paintings of roads with the odd solitary miner plodding home from work.

A dusk of umbers is lit in the very last moments of sunset by hellish glow of orange on the horizon. Cruciform telegraph poles punctuate the receding space and an occasional pit tip stands out like a black pyramid. "It was Rembrandt who gave me strength not to be afraid of the dark," he has stated. Most Expressionists, both of the old and "New" variety, have tended to equate emotive force with bright clashing col ours and gestural violence. It is probably this almost unique ability of Herman's to conjure the most rich of moods out of deep gloom and immobil ity that makes his tragic frieze of life so touchingly authentic.

Joseoh Herman. Down To Earth, oaintines and drawings. Elizabethan Exhibition Gallery, Wakefield, until September part of the Wakefield 100 Zoe Wannamaker and Francesca Annis in Mrs Klein Buxton Robin Thornber Holmes And The Ripper IF ONLY it was slightly better written and much better acted and produced this show would be a certain hit for the West End tourist trade, which is something the West End desperately needs at the moment. Setting Sherlock Holmes to investigate the contemporary Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel is one of those in evitable ideas that leave you IRA VICTOR HOCHHAUSER PRESENTS. ttwh JWO MAGNIFICENT PRODUCTIONS ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL BARBICAN HALL 01-9283191 ccO 1-928 8800 BBK 01-638 8891 sponged by ooni Bym gfo celebrations.

what you'd expect the vil.