Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • 7

EVENING STANDARD TUESDAY 25 NOVEMBER 1997 7 booed It is an unpleasant tradition in opera but people respond very emotionally found the production witty theatrical colourful pacy and entertaining The ideas were well thought out and you should acknowledge that Film director Anthony Minghella said: on the side of the angels much easier to be in the business of adjudicating than in the business of Both he and Miss Ewing later joined Princess Michael of Kent and other guests at a party in Pegs in Covent Garden Lowery who as producer of the Royal recent Ring cycle is no stranger to controversy was there too So was his co-director and choreographer Amir Hossein-pour who said: am so used to being booed Anything modem is There will be nine more performances before Christmas and four in February with three different casts Review: Rage 48 by ROBIN STRINGER Arts Correspondent BOOS and cries of rang out at the end of the Royal new staging of The Barber of Seville The catcalls came when director and designer Nigel Lowery joined singers on stage for curtain calls at the end of the first night at Shaftesbury Theatre last night Some traditionalist opera Cans had departed noisily during the first act but a sizeable number stayed to express their disapproval at what must rank as the zaniest musical in town Nigel updated version is spiced by a host of visual gags that introduced Sooty and Sweep a gorilla and a rotating pigeon into the chaotic climax of Act 1 The band hired by hero Count Almaviva to woo his Rosina turned out to be a bunch of rock guitarists and Berta the maid sang of love while stripping to her undies in Playboy bunny mode The heroine packs a box- Co-director Amir Hosseinpour: am so used to being ing glove police turn into burglars and 18th century Seville is like an abstract painting But the boos and odd cry of that greeted Lowery and his team when they took their curtain calls were countered by rival cheers shouts of bravo and sustained applause Among those supporters was opera star Maria Ewing who said: know why they Chairpersons: Richard Briers and Geraldine McEwan Picture: alastair muir Old man Briers sits in comfort in the weirdest French farce of them all IT IS for and away the weirdest French force of them all The set for Eugene The Chairs may require even more exit doors than those needed in a Feydeau force to save panicking adulterers from being caught in the act But in this Eugene Ionesco play the characters are stirred not by the drives of sexual desire but by a dance of death not though a piece to be taken altogether seriously despite its sombre denouement being possessed by a blackish mad-cap humour and aptly described by Ionesco as a tragic force Sadly Simon Theatre de Complicite production misses the tragic over-emphasising the farcical McBumey is obviously determined to put fresh comic stuffing into The Chairs and to suppress its hard tragical material What a mistake! The play needs a delicate balance of both elements Its ninety-something old couple a caretaker and his wife living in a bare circular room which is sur- ners and the flustered enthusiasm rounded by water are figures of an elderly school boy out of his Immersed in fantasy-land They are depth is always endearing But he admittedly comic in their prepos- crucially misses the senile fellow's terous imaginings: for they expect sense of pain at a life which has and then welcome a crowd of distinguished though always invisible guests to listen to a professional orator delivering the old message to humanity rushed by like a train with nothing init Miss McEwan artificial arch and affected in voice and manner swoops upon the role and tortures Chased sometimes for hours to the point of exhaustion only to face being ripped apart by a pack of hounds Hardly the quick clean kill hunters would have us believe In an average year they get through 20000 cubs dog-foxes and vixens Even heavily pregnant vixens are considered fair game 73 of the British people think hunting with dogs should be banned (MORI) Your MP will get the chance to support Michael Foster's Private Member's bill to ban hunting with dogs on November 28th The play builds to a frenetic cli- it out of shape like a cat playing max of excitement and agitation cruel games with a mouse The Old with a chorus of bells chimes and Woman becomes a grotesque turn buzzers signalling the arrival of the her wistful longings ignored her visitors The couple are then affectations overdone McBumeys engaged in a rush to fill the stage production helped by the jaunty with chairs obsequiously engaging Nineties swing of of Martin in the oddest party chatter new translation is dynamic physi-like my simpers Geral- cally exuberant and spectacular dine McEwan's lurid Old Woman with startling scenic surprises But with her wild whisps and plaits of too frivolous hair who has already put her petti- play is a prime post-war coat and pelvis in far too public example of that now highly unfosh-Yiew The arrival of the Field Mar- ionable movement the Theatre of shal a heavenly the Absurd which saw the world drools Miss McEwan is only sur- darkly as a limbo from which passed for excitement when the human communication reason and Emperor himself arrives in a blaze God had all vanished The Chairs is of light a tremendous though terrifying The Quay stage design a vision of old age and senility and dilapidated set of doors and high the dreams within it Not that you brown walls powerfully evokes a would know from this production sense of emptiness and decay Ionesco deals with the pathos of a Ratings: -O adequate senile couple surprised by time try- good lng to redeem their empty ftitile very good lives with last fantasies of glory outstanding Richard Briers's vain Old Man poor with blank eyes deferential man- More reviews: Rage 48 LEAGUE Qim International Fund for Animal Welfare WORKING fOIWUUfE Ban Hunting With Dogs.