The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 17

ARTS 17 Michael Billington and Hugh Hebert on a night of Pinter at the National where his new short play is mmm a a I I I followed by a lacklustre Bartholomew hair, ana on television were ine piaywngni taiKS poniics Precisely, Mr Pinter THE GUARDIAN Saturday October 22 1988 highlights nainterlv nrecision. Michael Thursday Monday Michael Billington 1- -ini Miranda Richardson and Michael Gambon in Pinter's Mountain Language waiter strikes out silencers, any voice of dissenting anger is welcome. His latest play, Mountain Language, has emerged on cue this week. The idea originally emerged after a trip he made to Turkey with Arthur Miller four years ago on behalf of PEN, the international writers' association. They were highly critical of the treatment of the Kurds and of American support for the repressive Turkish regime.

There was a story at the time telling how during that trip, at dinner with the US Ambassador, His Excellency remarked apropos of local difficulties that there were many opinions on any given issue. To which Pinter replied, "Not if you've got an electric wire hooked to your genitals." The play is not, he insists, about the Kurds. But maybe it concerns language as both the agent of liberty and the instrument for those who misuse it as a form of aggression. Verbal violence in bis plays stands in for the physical reality. Which is how we came to have Anna Qatnbon (the paunchy Sergeant pebble-specs), Tony Hay-garth (the tortured son), Eileen Atkins (nis irozen, ternnea mother).

Miranda Richardson (the mutinous younger woman) suggest a whole world oeyona the confines of the action: the result is a masterly portrait of compressed suffering. After this Richard Eyre's pro duction of Ben Jonson rumbustious 1614 comedy, Bartholomew Fair, seems heavy-handed. The great virtue of Jonson's play is that it gives us a pungently vivid picture oi Jacobean London. Centring on the great Smithfield August fair, it records the smells, sights, sounds, private humours and verbal exuberance of the time: the programme even comes equipped with a mouth-watering glossary explaining the meaning of a bugle-maker, a hedge-bird, an in-cubeeandajordan. Given the play's Jacobean documentary vivacity, it seems pointless to transpose it to Victorian times.

At first Mr Eyre cunningly updates Jonson's characters. Thus proctor Littlewit and his pregnant wife are pure Pooter, the nouveau riche Bartholomew Cokes is a boatered. blazered sillv-ass, Justice Overdo becomes a Sher- lockian investigator in a deerstalker and the Banbury puritan, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, is even equipped by David Burke with an authentic Ian Paisley accent. But laughter is slow to come because the fun seems rootless. When the pig-woman Ursula (needlessly played by a man) cries, "Do you sneer, you dog's head, you trendle-tail? You look as you were begotten atop of a cart in harvest time when the whelp was hot and you hear the surging vivacity of Jacobean invective rather tnan the more couth tone of Victorian England.

Jonson's belief in dominating humours a temperamental kink due to the excess of one of the four bodily fluids-also seems alien in a society growingly alert to complex psychology. The chief compensations are William Dudley's spectacular designs with rotating Ferris wheels suddenly turning into ornately decorated fairground booths and a clutch of good performances. Michael Bryant as a Wandering madman, look ing like a battered clocnara with the crown of his head poking through a fragile topper, is superbly obsessive in his quest for a judicial warrant. Anthony Donnell as the ill-tempered Humphrey Wasp resembles a constantly exploding firecracker. And John Wells brings to the disguised Justice, at one point appearing as a tottering Smithfield porter, a fine puzzled sobriety.

But it is typical of the heavy jokiness that David Burke's otherwise excellent puritan busybody is finally revealed to be wearing pink frilly drawers: Jonson was at tacking monomamac zealotry, not sexual aberration. The evening is fitfully rather than consecutively funny. But after this and The Changeling, one wonders if Mr Eyre is going to transpose every classic he does at the National. A change of period can sometimes liberate a play: it can also, as in this case of this Victorianised Bartholomew Fair, corset it. icoNFeReNce, Ford practising her Anglo-Saxon.

"Those old words are still very strong," Pinter tells her, "they can hit you in the stomach" as apparently they do in Mountain Language. The slightly strained element in this long interview, though, was Pinter's conviction that in some sense he has always been a political writer. That isn't quite how he saw his work at the time. Witness a 1961 inter- view, republished as an introduction to his collected plays: "I'm not committed as a writer, in the usual sense of the term, either religiously or politically I don't see any placards on myself, and I don't carry any banners." True, The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter, The Hothouse all written in 1957-8 can be seen, as he now says, as being about authoritarian power. And Pinter talked about the sense of the existence, a few score miles away, of the Gestapo during his wartime childhood as an East End Jewish Jaybe aljbf this has some- THEY used to cry rare Ben Jonson." But the adjective could equally well apply to Harold Pinter.

His first new play in four years, Mountain Language, had its premiere on Thursday in the Lyttelton only to he followed half an hour later by Richard Eyre's new production of Bartholomew Fair in the Olivier. The contrast was startling. Where the Pinter was sharp, precise and committed, the Jonson was long, diffuse and somewhat strenuous fun. Pinter's new play lasts 25 minutes, occupies four scenes and, like One For The Road, deals with physical and psychological torture in an unnamed military state. A group of women, dubbed mountain people, are lined up waiting to see their imprisoned male relatives.

Abused by a foul-mouthed Sergeant, they are told they must not speak their mountain language in the camp. A young woman, who does not speak the patois anyway, learns that her husband is in the wrong batch and that she can gain access to him only by sleeping with an official. An elderly woman is permitted to visit her son and is brutally instructed to speak the language of the capital. By the time the rules have changed and the mountain language is officiary accepted, she is unable to communicate with her tortured, trembling, beaten son. Katherine Schlesinger in Bartholomew Fair What is astonishing is how much Pinter packs into a short space.

He deals with the use of language as a repressive instrument, the arbitrary cruelty of military states which make up new rules as they go along, the brutish incompetence of totalitarian societies which shunt the wrong prisoners into the wrong place. Directing the play himself, Pinter also makes his points like late Beckett through a series of resonant images. The simple sight of mother and son confronting each other in helpless non-communication across a table in a bleak, brick office in the Blue Room," the Guard announces over the phone) is indelibly moving. Pinter distils the daily barbarism of military societies with WEEKEND! Dumb Hugh Hebert "TT EAVE aside the imagin-1 1 able tabloid headline II says 'f' to JLL-fcarold on TV Anna Ford's interview with Harold Pinter on Omnibus (BBC-1) began with the question whether he took himself too seriously, and brought the answer that the state of the nation from the poor to police powers cannot be taken too seriously. Perhaps she meant not seriously but pompously, but was too polite to spell it out.

On this showing, Pinter is wise to give so few interviews. He may offer the illuminating sidelights on his plays, but as a political animal he is not the best advocate of the views that he holds with increasing passion. Still, as the State ponders placing a bulk order for Dancing Mary Clarke at Covent Garden THE Royal Ballet's first triple bill of the season, given on Thursday, consists of Ashton's lovely Rhapsody and two works by the ever resourceful David Bintley. One is his Still Life at the Penguin Cafe, made earlier this year and the hit of the evening with the audience: the other his new ballet The Trial of Prometheus. The only adjective I can think of for Prometheus is that it is professional.

Aided by an effective score commissioned from Geoffrey Burgon and, especially, by vivid designs by Terry Bartlett, who with heavenly fire True Stories: Grey Gardens (C4, 10.0) If you missed the masterpiece first time round, don't make the same mistake again. Cine verite pioneers David and Albert Maysles were accused of voyeurism in 1975 when audiences first saw this documentary about two socialites-turned-eccentrics living in their decaying 28-room Long Island mansion. One of them just happened to be the aunt of Jackie Onassis. Friday HRH The Prince Of Wales: A Vision Of Britain (BBC1, 10.20) Prince Charles, the BBC is at great pains to tell us, "authored" this "important" Omnibus film himself. One for the monarchitectural history books.

For the Prince expounds his views on "the design of the built environment" (architecture). Charles has a bee in his coronet about concrete and steel which he reckons should be cloaked in old fashioned brick and stone preferably with a few traditional details pasted on for good measure. 75 minutes long. Nice views of London from a boat. David Newnham Radio Today: The Rain Gathering (Radio '4, 3pm).

The Young Playwrights Festival continues with Jeremy Raison's funeral drama. Not Dead But Lifeless (Radio 4, 4pm). Mother copes with-widowhood, son dreams of angels in Pat Boran's play. Kagamuinn (Kamo 4, 7.45pm). Ann Ogidi's Rastafarian hero faces his friends with a surprising career choice he wants to join the police.

One Friday Not A Million Miles Past (Radio 4, 8.45pm). Richard Hatton's hymn of hate to life in a provincial town. Tomorrow: Angles; Chicken on the Motorway; Listen to My Inside Mind (Radio 4, 2.30pm). Three short plays from 15-year-olds dealing with the return of a Middle East hostage, a reluctant teenager's family holiday and the effect of a tragic, accidental death. Monday: Woman's Hour (Radio 4, 2pm).

A special from Egypt: Jenni Murray looks at Egyptian women, then and now. Third Bar (Radio 7.5pm). Playwright John Guare talks to Karel Reisz about his work, including tomorrow's Radio 3 play. Tuesday: Women and Water (Radio 3, 7.30pm). Guare's long play, set in the American Civil War: Natasha Richardson plays Lydie Breeze, daughter of a Nantucket whaling captain, seeking the truth about her father's last voyage.

Wednesday: The Years of the Locust (Radio 4LW, 11am). Repeat of June Knox-Mawer's collection of incredible, and entertaining, tales of the British locust hunters in Africa and Arabia. Great Men of Music (Radio 4, 3pm): In Craig Warner's play, Eddie doesn't speak, but has his own musical notation until love strikes. Val Arnold-Forster America she interviews whether they were school-children on the integration buses or Harvard academics also consider the long-term effects. A well-balanced historical perspective (both from Ms Hardcastle and the people she talked to) plus direct and intelligent reporting: a rare combination and excellent listening.

Eugene O'Neill, whose centenary was celebrated this week, was a prolific playwright, well-known for a handful of plays. As well as two major repeats, Radio 3 gave us a quartet of lesser, early works, the SS Glencairn plays. Set below decks in a tramp steamer at the time of World War they were separate but linked sketches with familiar O'Neill themes vulnerable men coping hopelessly with women and the demon drink. Interesting to hear a noticeably different style in these, Cal-ifornian productions: eccentric, sometimes over-leisurely timing, though adding to an authentic sense of ennui. If O'Neill's plays have given us a sense of what America is like, how much more directly have Irish playwrights affected ourview of Irelahd, troubles and all.

and, I'm sure, other radio listeners have learnt much about the present conflict there from the widely-acclaimed output from the Northern Ireland BBC drama studio. And I've certainly heard characters supporting extreme positions, or representing para-military organisations. 1 Will the new government ban extend to the often extremely persuasive arguments of the playwrights? Milton! thou -should'st Landshapes (C4 6.0) The hills come alive to the sound of music. First in a seven-part series which tells the dramatic and continuing storv of our landscape how it was formed and the processes by wnicn it constantly changes. Largely shot from, the air (a brace of helicopter pilots appear in the credits list) and accompanied by John Keane's specially composed music, these programmes frequently achieve the quality of educational ballet as the screes and escarpments, shingle banks and ox-bow lakes of the British Isles dance beneath our feet.

Actor and playwright Tim Preece talks us through the aeons. Streets Apart (BBC1, 8.30; Not Scotland) East-Ender Sylvia, who put jellied eels behind her to become a successful but single literary agent, bumps into old flame Bernie, now a widowed cabbie with a penchant for fish 'n' chips. Six-part romantic comedy serial promises some nice observations on class pretension and perhaps a few moist eyes. Tuesday Personal Notes (BBC2, 7.20) For devotees only. Beside a swimming pool, Andre Previn conducts a largo interview with violinist Isaac Stern about the state of music.

Clips of actual music to stir the somnolent, but what this new series really needs is water polo. South Of The Border (BBC1, 9.30) Excellent new drama series does for South London what Perrier did for water. Two-girl private detective team wade into deep trouble amid the towers and terraces of our rate-capped metropolis. Credible portrayal of working class blacks and whites, with plenty of humour, music and excitement to leaven the social realism. Eight episodes in all to be going on with.

Wednesday Out Of The Twilight (BBC2. 3.0pm) Gimmicky but worthy docu-drama which asks: Are the old the lost tribe of television? and comes out with a resounding Yes. The BBC, in this notable piece of self-criticism, asks itself all the right questions (Are the old taken for granted as a captive audience? Do we promote an image of old people as fading, troublesome, comic characters?) and then falls on its tear-stained face by putting the programme out at 3 o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon. The Power Of Music (BBC1, 9.30) Paul McCartney is the come-on mannarrator for this moving documentary on music therapy. Ann Paul, notable for her films on conductive education in Hungary, shows us how music enriches the lives of children and adults with a variety of mental handicaps.

At the Nordoff-Robins centre, Justin, severely autistic, responds to a strummed guitar. In a North London mental hospital, an old man intones: "The one place I want to be is in Heaven." But he sings a thin duet: "Summertime, and the living is easy." Voice of MODERN history gets more and more modern. Once upon a time school history ended with The Causes of World War now it starts with them. If I'd remembered that earlier, I'd have understood From Sea to Shining Sea (Radio 4, Wednesdays and Thursdays) from the start. It isn a history ot the us over the last 25 ears-but a background to history that we already know.

Sally Hardcastle is looking at the way Americans react, and have reacted, to their history. The series. Droduced bv David Powell, is arranged in historical sequence, roughly President by President, taking the important themes that concerned the nation at the time. The Kennedy years, with the push for integration, and the beginning (barely noted at the time) of the Vietnam war. Johnson, with the protests about Vietnam mounting.

Nixon, with every chance of popular success, scuppered by Watergate. This week, Ford, the man we all remember falling up and down airplane steps, tackling the restoration of post-war, post-Watergate national self-es teem ana me return oi ine Vietnam veterans to an embarrassed, luke-warm reception. Ms Hardcastle concentrates on what people felt rather than what governments did and. importantly, the connections between the two. Most importantly of all, she and the people Val Arnold-Forster The beautifully moulded shapes for the two creatures as they warm into life and into dance are the most imaginative sections perfectly realised by Fiona Chadwick and Simon Rice hut there is curiously little dancing for Stephen Jefferies as Prometheus.

Bintley relies instead upon his amazing stage presence. Yet there is a curious lack of passion throughout; it blazes only when Prometheus rounds on his judges and tears their temple apart. And at the end when the two creatures, in their anatomically patterned body tights, are joined by the host of progeny similarly garbed, the irreverent thought occurs that Prometheus has PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFERY thing to do with the feeling of menace in those early plays. Yet as you watch the clips interleaved with the Ford inter view, they look much more like by-products of American gangster movies, with the odd hint of Sam Beckett and Camus thrown in for good luck. Pinter doesn't deny his 20 successful years as a writer who regarded politics with'a certain detached contempt, from The Caretaker to Betrayal.

And brushing away the tabloid jibes of "Bollinger Bolsheviks" when he hosted a gathering of Lettish intellectuals, it is unfair to sneer at his arrival just a few years ago among the committed. But he sees the dilemma clearly. As he told Anna Ford, "The trouble with writing polit ical plays is that you know where you are when you start so the play in a sense becomes redundant." Or perhaps the real trouble is that ne Knows where he is going to be when he finishes. I really wish Ford had asked peopled his world with little ballet dancers. Ashton's Rhapsody is devised wholly for classical ballet dancers.

It is fast, intricate and full of neat foot work. But in performance on Thursday its beauties were far from fully revealed in the dancing ot the two principals. Karen Paisey is pretty and neat but hasn't enough attack. Bruce Sansom is alto gether too flimsy a dancer to follow Baryshnikov. Perhaps the only dancer today who could fully master the complex choreography is the Argentine virtuoso Julio Bocca.

Could the Royal Ballet not invite him? This programme can be seen again on October 25, 26 and November 2. mtte over vihbks AND MUST SAY, faulD ALWAYS HEAR DEOP IN HERE WHEN I i zim rir--m JN6UD6H1M4.Y. PORIS, -WHO'S THAT JOHNNIE EMBIaCASME'C LOST HIS JoS AT rftSUUY INSfRATJ oxFoBDso -WE geewreY has UIM IN HEBE Foe TRIAL ft' THET 7HINH has enhanced many Bintley ballets, it tells of how Prometheus animated his two creatures of clay with fire stolen from heaven, was brought to trial before the Gods, who mocked his creatures and destroyed them, and how he envisaged the day when they would revive and multiply, cover the earth and defy the" Philistine Gods. The parallel with the struggles of the creative artist against boorish and insensitive critics is obvious and, as he has done before, Bintley uses an antique theme to make a timeless point. The piece is clearly structured and provides strong if not very inventive dance, opportunities for Ares, Dionysus and Hermes.

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