The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 32

THE GUARDIAN Friday January 21 1994 Fascism's unfinished business Ronald Atkins Michael Hastings's new play at the Pit traces fascism's contemporary roots Michael Billington Philip Voss as Alfred 'an aristocratic Hitlerite cocooned in a world of treacherous fantasy' henaietta butler BENNIE WALLACE: The Talk Of The Town Enja ENJ-70912 A STYLE of saxophone playing that imprints itself after a few-bars ought to have helped Bennie Wallace make more of a splash. Perhaps he has an identity-problem. He has recorded successfully with singer-pianist Mose Allison, and his own albums can mix mainstream fare with bits of country music in a manner that confounds the norm. Taking Sonny Rollins as a model while harking back to soulful balladeers like Ben Webster causes few shocks today, but Wallace also zig-zags between the kinds of spaced-out intervals an Eric Dolphy might pick. Just as nothing riles the avant-garde more than a snatch of melody, so some fans react against any sound that reminds them of the turbulent sixties.

Both sides should, of course, welcome Wallace for getting fresh mileage out of the title tune, and for romping through The Best Things In Life Are Free, a jolly slice of pre-depression optimism that Sonny Rollins has overlooked. Wallace fires off pet phrases at random much as Eric Dolphy used to do, but in the same way they tend to bind the listener to him. Since his approach generally is to charge straight ahead, he has wisely linked up with Jerry Hahn. among the less extroverted guitar stylists to work opposite Gary Burton. Whether accompanying or taking his own solos, he makes an ideal foil.

CHARLIE PARKER: 1949 Jazz At The Philharmonic Verve 519 303-2 DURING one of his busiest and most productive years. Charlie Parker found time to take part in this Carnegie Hall concert of September 1949. Early examples of Jazz At The Philharmonic in action reflected the belief of promoter Norman Granz that something close to the spontaneous jam session, laced with plenty of razzmatazz, worked best in front of an audience. He had a point, though one might wish a challenging set of tunes would come more into the reckoning. In those days, many regarded Parker's music, already called bebop, as coming from another planet and in no way fit to be heard on stage alongside the contributions of Lester Young, Roy Eldridge and the rest.

Rather tense on the opening number, he settles down and is usually quickest to conjure up the appropriate riff or fill-in, notably when Ella Fitzgerald scats along with the ensemble. Young, who some histories put well into his decline by now, in fact plays beautifully and is the most consistent performer. BRUCE ADAMSALAN BARNES: Stde-Steppin' B19 Bear Bear CD38 NO MUSICIAN cuts through the barriers with greater case than saxophonist Alan Barnes, former star of the Pasadena Roof Orchestra and of bands led by Humphrey Lyttclton and Tommy Chase. Today, you might hear him erupt from the middle of the Mike Westbrook orchestra or catch him with Bruce Adams, a trumpeter whose talent has not until now been displayed regularly before a jazz audience. Adams is what used to be called a hot soloist, fiery in the manner of Roy Eldridge, though also leaning towards bebop.

The tearaway passages probably make more impact live than when recreated on record, but elsewhere Barnes and Adams seem the perfect match as they dig into the ballads and blues. which finds its echo today in Europe's resurgent nationalism and the yearning, expressed recently in the German opinion polls, for a "strong In short, I can forgive Hastings's play its technical flaws for its attempt to grapple with the emotional basis of fascism. Steven Pimlott's production also renders the time-switches with great clarity aided by Ashley Martin-Davis's design which uses a traverse curtain to unveil a Yet Hastings's play still says something important about the cruelty and sentimentalism at the heart of fascism. The boy Beamish ruthlessly exploits the housemaid and implicates the butler in gun theft even as he envisions a Saxon England where you live in barns and hunt your own food. "Every time you bring up the past as if you owned it," his older self is told by his returning lover.

And Hastings nails very precisely the proprietorial romanticism of fascism ICHAEL Hastings's last play was about pensions. His new one. Unfinished Business at the Barbi- can's Pit, is about fascism. It is not perfect but it is consistently interesting and makes a valid moral point: that the spirit of wartime fascism, based on an appropriation of the past and a purblind rural nostalgia, is very much alive in Britain today. Hastings reinforces his argument by switching between past and present.

The pivotal figure is one Beamish: a reminiscent denizen of a West Country retirement home that, somewhat improbably, is the self-same manor house in which he grew up. Reliving the events of 1940, he recalls his passionate affair with a housemaid, the clandestine meetings of Hitlerian sympathisers awaiting a German invasion and the death both of the equivocal butler and his own aristocratic father. Beamish may now be ailing; but he unrepentantly dreams, in the post-communist world, of fascism's re-emergence. It would be easy to list the play's faults. Hastings over-exploits the long arm of coincidence: even the nurse to whom Beamish pours out his heart turns out to be a blood connection.

He sometimes signals the parallels with the past too glibly, with people in 1940 talking of a classless society, lamenting moral decay and dreaming of traditional English values. And echoes of The Remains Of The Day are insistent without Ishiguro's ironic perspective. Love in a Nancy Banks-Smith SIR FRANK ROBERTS charming old chap really did not seem to hear what he was saying. If he watches Soviet Wives (Channel 4) and sees himself smiling among old women weeping, he may put his head in his hands and groan. As we do.

A beautiful, poignant film, produced and directed by Caroline Bailey, it was full of images of ice, gripping in a rigor mortis, dripping in a thaw. It's the chastening story of 15 Soviet girls who married British men and were caught in the cold war. Only one saw her husband again. The women took sanctuary in the British Embassy but, as the first secretary cabled back in 1951, "The Soviet wives have over a period been whittled down like the 10 little nigger boys in the nursery rhyme." It is the true, amused tone of the diplomatic service. He meant, dear God, what he cold climate vision of 1940 manor house England.

And there are fully achieved performances from Geoffrey Bayldon and Toby Stephens as the older and younger Beamish, from Jasper Brit-ton as the misunderstood butler whose only desire is to serve and from Philip Voss and Gemma Jones as the aristocratic Hitlerites cocooned in their own world of treacherous fantasy. At The Pit (071-638-8891) till Feb 24. nor the husbands to return. Shura said, "I just longed to be with him. You do when you are young.

If he'd been somewhere in our country I'd have set out to find him on foot." And Lolya: "We wished we could fly away with the birds or escape through the drains. We were just girls, so young." It was stalemate. Stalin had hoped to use the wives as pawns and Bcvin would not play. When Stalin understood that the Foreign Office would not defend them, he picked them off one by one without protest. Shura, a chickenbone of a girl, was sentenced to 10 years penal servitude in the Arctic Circle.

She smuggled out one last message: "Tell Bill I love him and I'll never forget him." Lolya was tortured in the Lubianka but refused to divorce John and was sentenced to 25 years hard labour in Siberia. "My life was over but I regretted nothing." You felt that, if hell froze over. Bill and John were still lucky men. When Stalin died, the world warmed a little Lolya was offered her freedom if she divorced John. "I knew it was the end.

I knew it would make John's life easier. How long must he suffer? But as long as my heart beats, I shall love him." Neither of them remarried. "All I would like to do now," she said, "is put flowers on his grave. John would be glad to see me near him." There are already two frosted red roses entwined there. Nearly 50 years on two of them, old and fat, met again and wept.

"Oh, Lolya, oh. ray dear! How we've changed! Let me look at you! Where did our youth go. where did everything go? Dust and ashes." The film followed the fortunes of Shura and Bill, Lolya and John, Clara and Alfred. Shura met Bill in Archangel. She was snowballing.

He was wearing his sailor's cap jauntily on the back of his curly head. "He wasn't very tall, just a bit taller than me. He was skinny, I was skinny too. And he was fair. More attractive than me.

Well, I think so." The memory of their parting is still sharp. Bill's ship. John's train. Alfred's car. Lolya's husband John had tears in his eyes.

He said "Don't forget I love you. I'll wait for you even if it takes a lifetime." Alfred left Clara standing in the dirty Moscow snow. "She would turn out, I'll never forget this, in deep snow with delicate little shoes. She stood there on the Embassy steps, looking very lonely, very fragile somehow and forlorn." She was pregnant. Then they waited year after year.

The wives were not allowed to leave meant was that 14 had been seized by the secret police, sent to prison camps, vanished like snow. All but one and that's little Ann and she hid under the frying pan. As the nursery rhyme goes. Clara Hall, the one survivor, had a baby. This weak creature probably saved her, not the British government.

Sir Frank, number two at the British Embassy in Moscow at this time, smiled. "A lot of the girls were not wholly admirable Soviet citizens, let's put it that way. They got married in a war situation, got to know these young soldiers, life was difficult for them, they got presents and so they got married. No ambassador would particularly want to have a whole lot of, well, useless people, unreliable people around. I suppose we could have made a very complicated legal case that this was British territory but we needed a lot of Russian staff, servants and all sorts of things.

The Russians could have said we're not going to allow you to employ anybody On Movietone News the wives, pretty and laughing, were passing Clara's baby from hand to hand..