The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 25

ARTS GUARDIAN 25 Deer-shooting, laid-back West Virginia-style Art is tlie Michael Billington welcomes David Hare's profound commentary on modern Britain in The Secret Rapture at the National THE GUARDIAN Thursday October 6 1988 Mte Mmm tonicii lonely huiitetf AVID HARE'S great gift as a dramatist is for relating private despair tn the nnhlic takeover of the firm by Marion's husband, the President of Christians in Business, which leads to rapid expansion and the ultimate ruination of a mildly thriving cottage-industry. But the thing that is really destroyed, by a combination of the anarchic stepmother and bruising capitalism, is Isobel's love for her partner, Irwin. On one level the play is perfectly clear. Hare is saying (as he has done in every play and film he has written) that you cannot separate political and human values: that if you live in a society that sanctifies greed, worships money and excuses mendacity, it is bound to affect personal relationships. But although Hare is a moralist, he is clever enough to see that few people are immune to the blandishments of capitalism.

Irwin, a mildly talented designer and a nice guy, acquiesces in his firm's takeover when his salary is doubled. Hare doesn't condemn Him; but the pay-off is that business expansion and incorporation kills off something that works. As a portrait of our times, the play is lethal, accurate and witty. I know of no work that pins down so well the two-di-' mensionality of Thatcherism: the combination of sharp intelligence with limited vision. But I find it slightly harder to fol? low Hare's thinking when it comes to the subject of human pain.

Through Tory Marion as one of those women who measures everyone against the high standards of integrity they demand of themselves. But there is a dead giveaway when she says that you wouldn't think, to look at her, that she ever had a sense of fun: the truth is you wouldn't and that is because Hare has omitted to show that virtue can bring joy. The other actors have an easier row to hoe. Penelope Wilton is superb as Marion whom she endows with a crisp, laundered sexiness and smug smiles of self-satisfaction at having made mincemeat of a delegation of Greens. Paul Shelley as her Christian husband, given to baptismal immersions in his swimming pool, is all-scrubbed certainty.

There is also excellent work from Mick Ford as the emotionally devastated Irwin, Clare Higgins as the alkie stepmother embodying what Schopenhauer called "the tyranny of the weak" and from ArMe Whiteley as a silky young predator. Howard Davies, after his work on Williams and Bouci-cault, caps a magnificent year at the National with a production that combines irony and heart even if John Gunter's designs, with their panelled walls and vast gardens, romanticise Gloucestershire bookselling. But, greatly as I admire Hare's ruthless analysis of the amoral-ity of modern Britain, I question his transcendental assumption that goodness can only triumph through death. the BBC, made of it. Signals, Channel 4's new" arts magazine; commissioned a Mori poll apparently to check they had an audience.

"It confirms the arts are exploding all over Britain." My God.what's that? It's only an art exploding. It also reported that two thirds of us write letters, two per cent of us have flying ducks on the wall, one in four read poems and stories aloud, more go to museums than go to foot-' ball matches, 50 per cent of football fans have been to museums in the last year: do you believe a word of this? More men than -women have prints of famous paintings (Patrick Hughes's face appears in a cutout Mona Lisa), more women than men read novels (Mor- -wenna Banks squeezes between a couple of prop books). These two speak alternate sentences. Signals' patron saint is. Vitus.

The first programme was a relentless whirl round exploding arts centres that's enough Halifax, back on the bus it's Wednesday, it must be South Shields on, on to the Newcastle Metro quick, we're missing Lorca in Lerwick. I would assure you that Signals must, in the nature of things, get better if I didn't see that a treat in store was open air dancing in the streets of -Leeds. A Woman's Story (Timewatch, BBC 2) by Ag-nieszka Piotrowska was a beautiful, stirring, slightly starry- world. But his astonishing new piay at tne Tne Secret Rapture, touches pro-founder chords than anything he has written before. It is partly about the corrosive effect of the Thatcherite ethos on human relationships; but at a deeper, quasi-religious level (and the title refers to a nun's union with Christ) it is about pain, martyrdom and the idea of fulfilment through death.

The framework' is clear even if the final meaning is tantalis-ingly elusive. Two sisters are brought together by the death of their father, a Gloucestershire bookseller (who seems, incidentally, to have lived in an incredibly baronial mansion). Marion is a junior Tory Minister, cool, managerial, intelligent, but lacking any gift for empathy. Isobel is part of a small-scale design firm: she seems to have inherited her father's humanist tolerance and unimpeachable pre-Eighties integrity. Two events trigger the dramatic crisis.

One is the sisters' attempt to solve the problem of what to do with their stepmother, Katherine: a young alcoholic wrecker whom their father had married late in life. Isobel is persuaded to give her a job in her firm with foreseea-bly disastrous consequences. The other key event is the Jill Baker as Isobel immunising yourself against agony and keeping family for weekends; and through Irwin, Hare depicts, with aching realism, the sense of emptiness that accompanies a broken love affair. The problem for me is the character of Isobel. Hare says in the programme he is trying to buck a trend by creating a heroine rather than another maligned villain.

But I was never really clear what she represented. Does she embody a supine English tolerance that allows itself to be exploited? Is she a shining example of integrity? Or is she a born martyr half in love with easeful death? She may be all of those things but. I find her fuzzy rather than complex. Under Hare the sharp satirist I suspect there lurks a romantic who sees suffering and pain as proof tjfhevaUdity of existence and who wants us to celebrate the idea of Isobel as a secular bride of Christ. Jill Baker plays her very well Nancy Banks-Smith YOU could tell West Virginia was in a bad way.

There was only one cow in the deep snowy landscape and that seemed to have a leg coming Paul Watson, who made that fine film The Fishing Party in which three city types ended up drunk and shooting seagulls, also made The Hunting Party (BBC 1). The deer hunters were three west Virginians, tarry, Gerry and Dave. Larry is a sweet, sad, slow talkin man with a natural partiality; for wandering round the woods, pondering: "Mebhe it's a search within ourselves tor something we had in the past." Even when his son was born, he. arrived late with a cooling With his sad eyes and State.Trooper's hat, he strongly resemmes uepury uawg: Dave wore black sunglasses and matching moustache. "When Aherica attacked Tripoli.

I enioyed the hell out of that" When he took the glasses off, the eyes were watering. If it explodes, Dave donKs it. "Til drink everything from distilled kerosene to grain alcohol. Everyone thinks I'm not wrapped too Gerry spits at the name of social security. Sometimes he just spits to keep his hand in.

"I hate food stamps. Anybody gets food stamps I hate." A remark which' made a hangdog hound dog which was rooting for scraps crawl into its kennel and peer doubtfully out There was also a lone hunter who seemed to have come completely apart in the post. "My seven-year-old now, he kin come up here and shoot anything he wanna shoot even West Virginian conversation is laconic, limited and punctuated with bangs. Watson seems to have caught a sort of religious fever, endemic in these parts, and made an apocalyptic vision of middle America called Revelations, hecticly cut and luridly lit with flashes of terrible American television. A visibn of the -pits.

God knows what TV Morgantown West Virginia, who co-prpduced this with and her proselytising husband, ne snows the lmpossimity of 3 Prix Italia 1988 Scrubbed certainties: Paul Shelley and Penelope Wilton as Tom and Marion French photograph; oouglas jeffery PRIX ITALIA RADIO DRAMA 'HangUp' Written by Anthony Minghella Directed by Robert Cooper Starring Anton Lesser and Juliet Stevenson thoroughly modern Zola RAI PRIZE TELEVISION DRAMA 'Tumbledown' Written by Charles Wood Directed by Richard Eyre Produced by Richard Broke Starring Colin Firth Robin Thornber in Derby AT IS 'Paines Plough The Writ ers Company (as thev now like to be clumsily known) doing, putting on a 103-year-old French novel? The answer is that they are doing just what they should staging a brilliant coup de theatre that is resonantly relevant to our times. This Version of Germinal, Emile Zola's seminal book, adapted with shining clarity by former actor and now writer, William Gaminara, and directed with breathtaking elan by Pip Broughton, must count as a completely original piece of artistry. It takes a literary classic and make's it so immedi ately, theatrically vital that Glyndebourne take a WW eyed account account of Annie Besant (Frances Barber in a series of devastating bustles). Surely she was Shaw's St Joan. As she defended herself in court against a charge of obscenity (she had published a pamphlet oh contraception) the very rhythm of her words was Joan-like.

Shaw said she was the greatest orator of her time; Mary Lutyens, in this programme, that she was far greater than Churchill. Oh, for a taste of it. She spoke for two days in court with passion, power and without pausing for breath. There are moments you feel an unworthy twinge of sympathy for her husband, who took to hitting her. A hundred years after she led the historic strike of match- girls, the Bryant and May.

faci. tory, rus, is a smart new development. Say something, Annie. a number of people walked out. Raw nerves were clearly fingered, and not just because Germinal deals with the still throbbing issue of a pit strike accurately distilling issues that are still hotly debated.

It pitches principle against shades of pragmatism without either seeing everything in simplistic cartoon terms of black and white or losing sight of the things that matter, like morality and it presents the issues in terms of real, warm, flawed, living, breathing human beings caught up in a hurricane of social and economic change, much like you and me. The staging is stylised and economically expressive, with a massive table serving in Simon Vincenzi's bleak black and grey design as master's mansion, village inn, or oppressive under triumphant Katya on poser's language, but even more it forms a nuanced portrait of human feeling unlike any attempted before (or since). Lehnhoff blunts that subtlety in the staging's heavy underlining of obvious aspects. It is good to get away from the bleak immobilism with which the ominous mother-in-law is usually suggested, and substitute a smart snobbish bourgeoise. But the Kabani-cha's sexual play with Dikoy's walking-stick is overdone, and the strobe-lit storm is tricksy and unsatisfactory.

There is an interior-exterior ambivalence about what the storm represents and about Ka-tya's guilt her conviction that her infidelity has been against nature, however much Janacek and his audience can see it to have been entirely natural with a husband so subject to his mother. Happily Glyndebourne's touring cast communicate real feeling, however artificial some of the gestures they are asked to make may be. Rita Cullis's KfltvA ifi marvallnuclv cimcr nnii a triumph of unaffected i 1 i a. vocai lniiecnon ranging irom PRESS AWARD RADIO DOCUMENTARIES 'One Big Kitchen Table' Produced by Piers Plowright Compiled by Roberta Berke the road. Tom Siitcliffe reports Once more with feeling Souvarine.

Immensely moving, rich and complex and genuinely innovative, the tour is a co-production between Paines Plough, Derby Playhouse, and Plymouth Theatre Royal, and a credit to them all. Why isn't there more of this sort of magic? It's the most exciting theatre I've seen for ages. In Friday's preview I carped at Derby Playhouse's brochure for attributing a Guardian recommendation to this new production rather than earlier work by Paines Plough. I had overlooked a crucial colon and I owe an apology to artistic director Annie Castledine. Now I would recommend this to anyone.

Germinal is at Derby Playhouse (0332 363271) until October 22, and touring to Harlow, Weymouth, Ipswich and London (The Place). have a strong field. Christopher Ventris's Kudryash cuts a wonderfully youthful figure on stage and sings disarmingly, if with a touch less than ideal power. Michael Myers's Boris is brave and exact and sounds very Me. Alastair Miles's Di-koy; boring and irascible, is excellently judged.

Paul Strath-earn's Tichon acts the early scenes of castrated helplessness very well, though he lacks the vocal resource for the emotionally harder conclusion. The whole cast has been scrupulously prepared for the tour by Stephen Lawless. Sian Edwards, conducting, does ahetter job than she has managed in most of her other operatic assignments so far. The London Sinfoiiietta Opera Orchestra, however good its woodwind and low strings, is not-well led. The first violins often lacked cohesive ensemble and attack, and a good deal of the lyricism in the score was unrealised.

But Edwards's nervous energy and would-be brio lent a proper urgency, and suited the jagged and fragmentary ideas in the music. Certainly this is one of the most: pieces of work GTO has lpu; Familiarity should smooth-out the orchestral difficulties and the conductor's -anxiety. It Js well worth catering. GTO's Katya Kabanova is at Glyndebourne tonight, Tuesday and Friday week, and then tours to Oxford (October 21), Southampton (October. 28), Plymouth (November 4), Manchester (November il), and Norwich (November 18).

ground roads; Jim Sim-mons's lighting pinpoints the moments and Andy Dodge's music reinforces the mood. But it's superb playing by a strong, ensemble company that gives this show its distinct, contemporary, continental feel from the opening moment when the whole cast holds the audience's gaze to the ineffably tiny touch of human tenderness at the end. Although the words sometimes get lost, the performers are all compelling even when distributed about the set like struggling supporters to a socialist banner, but I was particularly impressed by Robert Patterson as Etienne, the inspiring outsider, Robin Soaris and Lois Baxter as the coal owners in the great house, Debra Gil-lett ahd Eileen Pollock as the miner's family, and Stafford Gordon as the revolutionary Cullis: star the making distressed whisper to the most heart-rending cries, and invariably, beautiful to hear. In the summer Nancy Gustafson was more glam but-less moving, less the victim of fate and passion. still under-rated, is becoming a real star.

The best scene was the shared confi-. dences with Varvara under the mofher-in-law's gimlet all glances and' terrors ahd deep affection. And Alison Hagley's Varvjra'matohed and con- trasWwoMarfltilly and delicate beside Cullis's statuesque and slightly gangling: awkwardness. Hagley sang thrllingly too. Susan Bickley's Kabanicha does not steal the show, though she has all the presence required.lt is the other women's emotions that matter.

The men, as always with Janacek, self-confessed campaigner for women's rights, have a tougher time. But again GTO. Congratulations to everyone involved in the production of these award-winning programmes bringing the total BBC Radio and Television Awards in 1988 to 164. mm JANACEK'S commitment to truth and emotional realism in principle does fit well with the mannered expressionism of Niko-laiis Lehnhoffs production and Tobias Hoheisel's sets for Katya Kabanova. Katya, perhaps the Czech composer's greatest work, marks Glyndebourne Touring Opera's 20th birthday (and longest) season.

When Katya ends up silhouetted at the back of the stage and ruffles her hair in the breeze, the image has an immediate cinematic resonance. The heroine poses on the horizon in the poetic middle distance, the sky suggesting the freedom she subconsciously wants though not at all the guilt to which she is irrevocably committed. The production has a self-conscious style, a striking look to it that makes a welcome break from the knowing wit of Sendak and Hockney here, or the cosy narrative realism of Peter Hall's recent stagings. But the whole point of Janacek is his incredibly detailed notation of the characters' the music reflects the com qIF Guardian v. This voucher can beredeemed against all GuardianImpact special offers To obtain a copy of Quardianlmpact please gend a cheque or money orderfor i .00 plus 39p postage and packaging and made payable toTneGuardian and Manchester Evening News, Group pic to; Impact Special Offers The Guardian 119 Farringdon Road London EC1R3ER Assignment Hong Kong The chance to review the Hong Kong Philharmonic on their home For details, see Monday's Guardian.

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