The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 36

36 THE GUARDIAN Saturday October 15 1988 the clowns for WJ.Weatherby in New York For this whimsical glimpse of a relationship between two burglars, Forsyth has a budget of $6 million and hopes the film will be successful enough to assure him steady American backing. The original script was by the American writer-director, John Sayles, but Forsyth did the final version emphasising his view that criminals "live in a separate world that is a kind of metaphor for the way I think we all A Goya self-portrait from 1800, when he was 54, and Disparate de gigante, in a proof state, from 1816-17 Let there be ght One of the main achieve Waldemar Januszczak reviews Madrid exhibition which rewrites ratory drawing). When the appalling Ferdinand VII, surely the ugliest king in all of art history, was restored to the Spanish crown Goya worked for him too. Thus, like Picasso a century later, he looked after No 1 with indefatigable enthusi much is made of Capricho no.39 which shows a donkey carefully studying his family tree. "The poor animal" says Goya's caption "has been driven mad by Genealogists and The half of the exhibition devoted to Goya's graphic work is relentlessly impressive.

More so than the paintings where examples of insipid portraiture from the European rent-a-ro-coco-pose school do occur, particularly among the females. Perhaps in the end the theme of the show does seem ever so slightly forced onto the subject. There is certainly an element of weirdness and macabre inventiveness in operation here that no amount of enlightenment talk can enlighten. Goya and the Bogeyman in Spanish Folk Art would, you feel, be an equally revealing show. Nevertheless this great Prado spectacular must be seen as part of a much needed late 20th century re-assessment of some of the major artistic heroes of our time.

It must be seen alongside the cleaning of the Sistine ceiling which has put a rational colourful Michelangelo in the place of furious loner filled with terribihta. Or the careful iconographic examination of an enlightening the Goya legend "Goya's portraits reveal a bias toward an impartial verdict about the ultimate moral worth of a given I do not know if they are as frightening as all that. But his thoughtful, modest Jovellanos, lawyer and short-lived Minister of Justice, compares very favourably with the squalid Manuel Godoy, the most powerful man in Spain, arriviste, royal boot-licker, philanderer, seen here slouched on the field of war in a chair rather too small for him, and who finally, and completely co-incidentally, bears a strong resemblance to Nigel Lawson. The single most striking portrait in this collection is the little seen Francisco de Cabarrus, founder of the Bank of San Carlos. It now belongs to the Banco De Espagna.

Painted at full-length, Cabarrus wears an outrageous lime green outfit which and this is one of the lessons the show teaches probably did not seem outrageous at the time. (This incidentally is one of the many Goya portraits which fails the mirror test; that it to say it fails that old schoolboy test of holding it up to a mirror to see if it remains symmetrical when reversed. Like Gainsborough, whose painted female portraits are comparably paper-light, Goya, from Saragossa, was a regional painter writ large). The Goya show is full of those delightful "imperfections" that the 20th century loves, figures that don't quite sit in their seats, legs not quite attached to bodies, weightless feet, substanceless desks, sword hilts guttering with thick paint but not, convincingly, with jewellery. INCOLN Centre's all-co median production of Waiting For Godot has afcertainly become the most talked about event of the New York theatre season.

Confusion over the date of the opening night even set off rumours that director Mike Nichols had found himself like a circus ringmaster trying to control the clowns and needed more time. Steve Martin who plays Vladimir and Robin Williams (Es-tragon) certainly have little stage acting experience except for doing their comedy acts, and Williams especially is noted for wild improvisations. But fears that he might upstage the author, Samuel Beckett, were put to rest at thge start of rehearsals when Williams com don't think Beckett's the kind of guy you could call up and say, 'Hi, Sam. Listen, I just want to do a little rifling'. You just don't go off on Nichols began his preparations by visiting Beckett in France and the playwright, in expressing an Irishman's admi ration for comedians, even obligingly sang one one of the songs in Godot to make sure they would get the tune right.

Nichols insists that his come dian studded production will be true to Beckett vision "We'll do it all Sam's way." An avid Beckett fan who saw one of the first previews described the production as "slightly heavyhanded but fascinating" with the comedians' wellknown personalities mak ing Godot seem more a positive fable of patient endurance than the picture ot stoic despair de picted by some other directors. But many changes are likely to be made during the preview. Unfortunately it is being presented for only seven weeks in the 290 seat Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, only about 15,000 tick ets will be available and mere are over 36,000 members of Lin coln Centre. THE hundredth anniversary of Eugene O'Neill's birth in a Times Square hotel is being celebrated tomorrow with a reading by Colleen Dew hurst, an actress associated with many revivals of O'Neill's plays, and a posi tive orgy ot other celebrations in theatres across the United States. Gaga over Degas ONE OTHER much talked about event is the huge Degas restrospective that has already been seen in Paris and Ottawa.

The 300 paintings, sculptures, pastels, drawings, photographs and monotypes are being shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the inaugural exhibition in its new Tish Galleries. Some canvasses shown in Paris couldn't be brought to New York but many of the great pastels that are owned by- the Metrophtan have been added in their place. The mammoth show, which opened on Tuesday has been greeted by critical raves with the New York Daily News's headline across a whole page typical of the Brush With Greatness The Metropolitan is absolutely gaga over Degas." The rush to buy tickets suggests the show will be as hard to get into as Godot. Bill Forsyth The Oregon trail BILL Forsyth, who once seemed the most Scottish of film makers, is now following up his American success. After the critical raves for such films as Local Hero and Gregory's Girl, Forsyth is filming Breaking In with Burt Reynolds in Oregon, bis first film fully shot and financed in the United States.

Harold Brodkey Party pooper AMERICAN writers seem to have an obsession about following in Proust's footsteps. For at least 10 years Truman Capote kept announcing his novel in progress entitled Answered Prayers would put him up there with Proust. It didn't as he didn't live to finish it and the chapters he left were more like superior literary gossip columns. Following in his footsteps has been Harold Brodkey who published a much praised collection of short stories, First Love and Other Sorrows, in 1958 and ever since has been promising a Proustian master-work entitled Party of Animals. Several times his New York publisher, Farrar, Straus Gir-oux announced the novel in its catalogue only to have to beat a hasty retreat.

Finally Brodkey was asked to return the large advance with interest and he promptly did so by signing up for an even bigger advance well over $75,000 with Knopt. He continued to publish much praised short stories in The New Yorker and elsewhere, said to be taken from the novel's 3,000 pages and to keep up the anticipation he has now, at 57, published another collection, Stories In An Almost Clas sical Mode. But waiting for Brodkey has begun to weary New York reviewers who for years tended to agree with Professor Harold Bloom that here indeed was "an American Vanity Fair reported "the suspicion that the cult build up of Harold Brodkey has become a bit of a con Brodkey insists he will pub lish the novel next year but in another mood he says: "I write like someone who intends to be posthumously Wild about Ingmar WHEN Ingmar Bergman's auto biography, The Magic Lantern, was recently published in America, the New York Times invited probably his greatest American fan to review it Woody Allen. "Pound for pound the best of all film mak ers" is the way Allen described Bergman. It was Wild Strawberries in the late fifties that began his "lifelong addiction" to Bergman's films, but The Seventh Seal was his favourite.

'Bergman evolved a style to deal with the human interior," Allen summed up, "and he alone among directors has ex plored the soul battlefield to the fullest." Of Bergman's tempestuous private life, he commented: "With this kind of background one is forced to be a genius. Either that or you wind up giggling behind locked doors in a room the walls of which have been thickly uphol stered by the state." Robbins returns JEROME Robbins is already rehearsing his Broadway return next year. A $7-mil-lion anthology of numbers from his Broadway shows ranging from On The Town in 1944 to Fiddler On The Roof 20 years later is to open at the Imperial Theatre in February. His achievements as choreographer and director will be recaptured by a cast of more than 50 dancers and singers. But Robbins did not have all his choreography written down and has had to reconstruct some of it with the help of the original dancers.

ments of the new generation of Goya scholars who fill this show's catalogue with their stern musings, and who have emerged from their own dark ages of the Franco era with the desire to see Goya in his true social context, has been the re-evaluation of the famous (famous for not being much good that is) tapestry designs which Goya churned out for the various royal residences. This is Goya in his sweet period seem ingly producing pastoral scenes of frolicking peasants in a Spanish coutryside bursting with bounty. The show pulls a couple of these royal tapestries out of the large colourful scrum they usually form at the Prado and provides them with a new storyline. Winter scenes of peasants bent into the snow that have previously been taken for innocent, Breugel-like celebrations of the simple life, are discussed here as examples of his social criticism. Goya it seems was commenting on the hardships suffered by day labourers and farm-workers at a time when the Spanish agricultural economy was disrupted by a series of crop failures and freezing winters.

Goya, near as damn a self-made man, would have had no difficulty identifying with the underprivileged. His attitude towards the priv ileged is more puzzling. Inventories and wills show that Goya, the court favourite, was never poor. He worked for all the Spanish kings who reigned in his life. When the French invaded Spain he worked for the Bonapartes.

When the Bo-napartes were defeated by Wel lington he worked for Wellington, painting him in that sad, ordinary portrait we know from our National Gallery (represented here by a lovely prepa closed down for two years. Expecting to be hailed as a public benefactor, Dr Stockmann finds that his report on the baths is suppressed by his mayoral brother, that the local paper deserts him and that he is branded by the townsfolk as a traitor and enemy of the people. Resisting escape to America or the chance to make a private profit out of a public crisis, Dr Stockmann decides to fight for truth with the help of his beleaguered family. Miller, who adapted the play at the height of McCarthyism, admits that he was disturbed by some of Dr Stockmann's Accordingly, in the famous confrontation with the citizens, he cuts Stockmann's division of men into grey- hounds and mongrels, deletes his plea for men to work their way "out of spiritual bondage "WWTTHAT is it about Wit Goya that attracts those parades ot weirdness that orbit like flies around his work. Strange things happen in the Goya story.

The superstitious can find much to feel superstitious about. Where, for instance, is his head? When his body was ex-umed and brought back to Spain from its first grave in Bordeaux where he died in 1828 the corpse was found to be decapitated. When Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington was stolen from the National Gallery in London in 1961 the theft was billed as "a protest against old age pensioners having to pay for television During the Spanish Civil War the Republicans reprinted his stomach-turning Disasters of War and sent copies to Eleanor Roosevelt. I catalogue these events because they are strange in a way that we might now call Goya-esque, and because you could never imagine anything similarly peculiar happening to -Goya's notable artistic contem-pories, to solid, proud David, to the painting Quaker, Benjamin West, and never in a million years to Sir Henry Raeburn. The 20th century has been the first to be united in its admiration for Goya.

The 19th either ignored him or couldn't make its mind up. There was some interest from the symbolist fringe but his prices were absurdly low and the world's first major Goya exhibition was not held until 1900, 70 years after his death. It is thus the id of the 20th century with its knee-jerk love Newcastle upon Tyne Peter Mortimer Ear, Nose and Throat CAN theatre help save the NHS from the nasties? Or would a campaigning leaflet serve more purpose than Sue Townsend's new comedy (sponsored by NUPE and NALGO) set in the 'occupied' day room of a threatened hospital? Its heart is in the right place; I'm not so sure about the balls. ARTS 8362132 Gt Newport St WC2 CC 379 4444 Mon-ThU at 8 pm. Fit Sat 6.30 pm 9 pm TEECHERS If you enjoyed JOHN GOOBER'S BOUNCERS UP 'N' UNDER you won't be able to resist this latest HULL TRUCK hit "In a class of Its own" Mall STUDENT STANDBY E1.50 oH (1 hour prior to performance) BLOOMSBURY 3879629 18-20 Oct at8pm CAM ERI THEATRE OF TEL AVIV ABANDONED PROPERTY In Hebrew with simultaneous translation, batDe ol wills ot mother and daughters DRILL HALL 6378270 LAST PERF TONIGHT GAY SWEATSHOP TWICE OVER HAMP8TEAD 7229301 Mon-Satatspm.

Sat Mat at 4.30 pm HEDDAQABLER byHenrlk Ibsen In a version by Trevor Nunn directed by John Dove ORANGE TREE, Richmond 9403833 TONIGHT At Bpm only TornCourtenayin DEALING WITH CLAIR by Martin Crimp until 12 Nov. Mon-Satat8 pm, Sat at 5 pm 8OHOP0LV 6369050 18 Riding House 8L.W1 (Oxford Circus) until 22 Oct SPACE start stuoyofovo" by David Spencer Theatre Royal Stratford East 534 0310 LORCAS THE PUBLIC youtln'tseennothlnallkeltyet. Go and go again" CL8pm WAREHOUSE, Croydon 6804060 THE ASTRONOMER'S GARDEN Join our FREE making Nat Send aae to DeptQ. THEATRE DESPATCH, PC-BOX 633, 8 E7 THE I 1 I of square pegs trying to fit into round holes that has cannon-ised Francisco Goya Lucien-tes. It has done so, it now seems, with a limited understanding of his work.

The dark side of Goya, the seeming irrationality of his hobgoblins and witches, the unflinching gori-ness in his Disasters of War. that has attracted the century's admiration, is only one side ol Goya. It appeals because we expect our geniuses to be miserable, poor, ill, imperfect, complicated, existential fantasists, and poor, grumbling, afflicted, deaf old Goya fits the bill perfectly. Now an enthralling exhibition at the Prado in Madrid slaps our wrists and tells us not to be so silly; to stop re-making artists from the past in own century's image. Called Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, the Prado show restores to Goya the faculty of reason by placing him firmly within the context of the Spanish Enlightenment.

The show is built around a memorable suite of portraits. If, as the Enlight enment claimed, "man's greatest chance of salvation lies in his ability to then these lawyers, politicians, art-collectors, liberal clergy, doctors, architects staring out thought fully from the middle of the Goya show are the evidence. In his famous character as sassinations of the Spanish royal family Goya filled the corners of his painted rooms with finery and peacock-pomp. Here the corners of the portraits are filled with books and clocks, letters and scientific instruments and classical statues. The catalogue claims that And where are the nasties themselves? The only sight of the "opposition" is a briefly glimpsed Tory MP, more avuncular than pernicious, and though the staff and inmates unite against pending closure the cosy sense of their having a good time plus lack of small hospital detail dilutes any feel of a crumbling system.

It's a combined Tyne Theatre Company and Good Theatre Company production for a writer whose drama achievements have been over-shadowed by the loathsome A. Mole. But only three characters here seem freed from dominating 'message. Don Warrington's black malcontent, Ralph, strikes up the play's only true relationship with the bored executive's wife and private patient Mavis (Georgina Hale), the former's powerful monologues neatly balanced by the latter's monotone frustrations. Otherwise, the author's instincts seem inhibited; Miriam Karlin's true-blue ward sister turned activist, David Yip's cheerfully stoic nurse, and Kim Durham's adult waif all serve only a perfunctory purpose in Sue Pomeroy's uncluttered Tyne Theatre production (a neatly sick looking decor from Kate Burnett): But attempting to keep both the paymasters happy and the audience entertained brings an uneasy mix of glib-sitcom and instant commitment.

See Peter Nichols and Lindsay Anderson for better enlightenment. The play tours to Chichester, Cambridge, Lincoln, Basildon and Brighton to December 3. Peak prize THE annual 1,000 Board-man-Tasker Prize for Mountaineering Literature was yesterday awarded to Joe Simpson for his book, Touching The Void (Cape, 10.95), an account of his dramatic escape, badly injured, from a crevasse on Mount Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. The judges of the award. which was presented at the Alpine Club in London, compared the work to the accounts of concentration-camp survivors in its intensity and powerful description of the human spirit's ability to survive against overwhelming odds.

asm. He even became President of the Spanish Academy. It is, I think, pushing it, wish ful thinking, to see the sum total of his genre pictures as a comment on man's exile from a structurally coherent world and man's attempt to assert himself in a universe that ignores his very To claim that much is to ignore too much the pugnacious street-fighter who aims low blows here there and everywhere, at priests, lawyers, pimps, women, teachers, notably in his celebrated Caprichos. You probably have to be Spanish and superstitious rather than incredibly well read in the Enlightenment literature of the time to understand the Caprichos half fully. To the outsider, like Baudelaire who saw only fantasy there, all these witches and chickens with women's heads and bats flying out of people's brains were pure witchcraftery.

The show contains not only a marvellous proof edition of the Caprichos but also most existing preparatory drawings for what is surely the greatest suite of etchings ever made. They are notable for the pictorial inventiveness which never allows Goya to chose an obvious pose when a curious one is more revealing; for their beautiful exploration of various gradations of mole-skin black; for the unmistakable enthusiasm of the establishment bashing that is going on. (Is it I wonder with an eye to the American museums where the show travels next that so into aristocracy" and no longer has Stockmann claiming that "those who live by lies ought to be exterminated like Ibsen's Stockmann is both Mr' Valiant-For-Truth and a disquieting Norwegian Coriolanus. Miller's version focuses on the former and I find it somewhat ironic that one of the greatest attacks on conformism ever written has to be doctored for modern taste. It remains, however, a mesmerising play and one of enduring topicality (has anyone ever noticed that it is the prototype for Jaws?) It is also a mark of Ibsen's genius that he combines a quasi-Marxist understanding of economic imperatives with a dazzling theatricality.

Witness the superb scene, where the Mayor comes to lean on the newspaper publisher and edi- tor. It is only when they realise Caravaggio which has challenged the modern image of him as some sort if proto-gay debauchee. In all these cases what has been restored to the artist is a social context and the faculty of reason, the ability to think an artistic programme through. It is not just individual artists who are being re-examined by this new art history. It is our entire image of what artists should be.

Goya and the Age of Enlight enment at the Prado, Madrid until December 19. The exhibi tion then travels to Boston and New York. that the baths, though privately owned, will have to be reconstructed at public expense that they change tack. And I defy anyone not to feel a thrill when Stockmann understands their volte-face through spying the Mayor's hat and cane on an office desk: that is real play-writing. Although using the sanitised Miller version, David Thacker is intelligent enough to see (like Patrick Garland's 1975 Chiches ter production) that Dr Stockmann's weaknesses are as important as his strengths.

Tom Wilkinson plays him beautifully as a naive, intemperate hothead who stumbles into idealism. In the early scenes Mr Wilkinson radiates a broad-beamed, comic self-satisfaction as he hymns the virtues of home-life while being unable to remember the name of the maid. But in the great episode of public confrontation (excellently staged with the citizens' faces looming out of lamplit gloom) he acquires a tongue of fire: Mr Wilkinson also makes you feel that Stockmann's more extreme statements majority is always spring not from instinctive elitism but from an emotional reaction to the blockage of his democratic rights. David Henry is also admirable as his brother whom he plays not as an oily villain but as a smooth small-town prag-matist unable to credit, like all conservatives, that not everyone is motivated by money. Clive Swift exudes a wonderful gingery cynicism as Stockmann's predatory father-in-law.

Tom Mannion plays the venal editor as a young man torn between desire for Stockmann's daughter and complicity with power and Richard Butler as his publisher offers a neat vignette of a man for whom moderation means swimming with the tide. I still wish the Young Vic had used a translation that retained Ibsen's heroic objectivity. But it remains a great evening in the theatre: one reminding us that all first-rate drama intertwines private passion and social relevance and proving the eternal, topical truth that connivance at local corruption is a symptom of national sickness. An Enemy Of The People is at the Young Vic (01-928 6363) until November 12. Tom Wilkinson as Dr Stockmann and Connie Booth as Katrine in An Enemy Of The People Michael Billington on a magnificent revival of Ibsen's Enemy Of The People at the Young Vic The Jaws of Ibsen impact IBSEN'S An Enemy Of The People has not had a London run since 1962.

1 can only urge theatre-goers to besiege the Young Vic where they will discover a magnificent revival by David Thacker. I should not be surprised if, like the same director's Ghosts, it transfers to the West End: better, however, to see it at the Young Vic where it acquires a throat-grabbing power by being played in the round. My one reservation concerns the use of Arthur Miller's 1950 translation which softens and subtly distorts Ibsen's purpose. You will recall that Ibsen's hero, Dr Stockmann, is the medical officer at a Health Institute in a thriving Norwegian spa. He discovers that the baths, on which the spa's fortunes depend, are a contaminated pest-hole and need to be This voucher can be redeemed against all Impact special offers.

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