The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 13

a a The Daily Telegraph, Friday, February 6, 1084: FILMS PATRICK GIBBS CONCERTS Stalking a Faustian legend Stalker Academy Two 9 to 5 Odeon, Leicester Square AA" The Formula Plaza I "AA" IF A director points his dangers he haminefield, estabat whose lished, and then starts his characters on a journey through it, impelled by some great attraction on the other side, he will certainly have his audience's attention, perhaps even for 116 minutes. Such is the the construction adopted by Andrei Tarkovsky in his new film Stalker, his second work of scifi following the spell-binding Solaris." It is adapted by the brothers Strugatsky from their own novel. Adapted? Transformed would be better, for whereas the finds only four, two novel paraded a dozen significant characters, the" film are largely new creations; and while the novel the background of the town of Harmon in some detail, from its smart Metropole hotel to its low tavern, the Borscht, the film is concerned only with a journey into the Zone. This is an. area of devastation outside the of course, is the future--caused no one knows quite how.

By a meteorite, some say, though others believe there was a brief visitation from another civilisation, and a very one. too, to judge from the artefacts left behind. These are naturally much sought by scientists to appraise the nature of the visitants, bite not easily come by since Zone might be described as contaminated. Soldiers sent in at first never reappeared. The ground itself seems to be sewn with sophisticated traos, operated, hand.

an official Instiperhaps, death, remote, unseen tute has been set up to examine evidence, mighty little has come out of what is now a prohibited area. Tarkovsky's great achievement is his pictorial creation of this no-man's land, looking now like some deserted battlefield, now like a bombed and now a breaker's vard, but for the most looking like the landscape we have never known, where lights are apt to flash, strange sounds to be heard. and landmarks to vanish without trace. Entries into the Zone are not unknown, by professional stalkers lured by the money brought though the race receive, for curious finds is dying, for the casualties are high. Now a veteran of these, originally named Schuhart ing into the Zone an expedinow called just Stalker, is leadtion made up of a writer and a professor of soience, also unnamed, who are not interested in artefacts or money, but have a special objective.

Deep in the Zone is said to be a where. a man's desire will be granted. It is here their interest lies. The Faust legend of a man selling his soul, one might say, but in reverse, for seems likely a man will lose his life before the room is reached, so unpredictable and treacherous is the journey. Again it is a remarkable visual feat of the director to make this journey really seem so perilous.

Stalker having always to throw markers on ahead to test the ground for traps is one clever device to keep us in a continual state of expectancy. In fact, though the journey, through dark tunnels and deep waters, is physically arduous, nothing very eerie actually happens, unless it is the cry spoken by an unknown voice, that saves the writer's life, or the mysterious appearance of the professor ahead of the men he was following. Meanwhile the characters are to some extent filled in, the writer tending to be extrovert and talkative on his professional problems, the to be reserved and calculating, and Stalker himself to personify humanity facing philosophically the problems and dangers he might find in life itself. Given these characters it might be thought that reaching the threshold of the Room might be the occasion for great debate before finally committing themselves, SO to speak. Actually what happens is predictable and unexciting, reminding us that the Strugatskys are writers of sci-fi not philosophy, and while they may raid a Marcuse or a Heidegger, some of their observations such as You can't build happiness on, the unhappiness come straight from Aunt Annie in Household Hints." Oh, I dare say materialism, idealism and the rest are given a great going over in a superficial sort of way, and future of mankind accorded a word or two, now of hope, now of foreboding.

But it is surely rather a let down from this would-be rarified discussion to hear a at the very end comforting words of common wisdom from Stalker's wife who takes the Christian position on the place in life of pain and pleasure, and has a good word for old fashioned love, in sci-fi if you please. So while the film is never less than wonderful visually, intellectually and emotionally it seems to me to lack a comparable distinction. No fault, this, of the actors who reflect uncannily all the dangers of the journey while making pretentiousness and platitudes sound suitably profound. COLIN HIGGINS made an enjoyable comedy in Foul Play" (with Goldie Hawn and 5 the subject ford another Chevy Chase), has in 9 to the cast, too- Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and a newcomer THEATRE JOHN BARBER So we all feel sorry for the rueful Lavinia EXACT REPORTING of the humdrum has a fascination for Alan Ayckbourn. But this most prolific and ingenious of playwrights always reports the humdrum with a novel twist.

The twist in Suburban Strains at the Round House is that it is a play with music. A dozen or so tinkly, pleasant little ditties by Paul Todd, to Ayckbourn's own tart lyrics, point up the dilemmas and distresses of poor Caroline, his schoolmistress heroine 66 SO unlucky with my sorry choice of she sings, I'm uncertain and unsure and alone." Lavinia Bertram brings a charming freshness and an agreeable voice to a girl whose choices soon make us all feel Previews Feb. 17 18 OPENS FEB 19 RO WAN ATKINSON IN REVUE GLOBE THEATRE SHAFTESBURY AVENUE W1 Tel: 01-437 1592 439 6770 FOR WEEKS ONLY TWELVE sorry. Having married a handsome, lazy actor (Robin Herford) she has to support him while he flirts with other women and eventually seduces one of her pupils. After throwing him out of her cosy flat, she next invites in an attractive doctor.

If not eager to make love to her, he is enthusiastic about criticising her face, her deportment and all that is hers. She ends by turning him away and taking back her husband but remains uncertain whether she would not be better off alone. Ayckbourn surrounds her story with brightly sketched caricatures of her comically dreary father, a fussy female neighbour with an obsessive cook of a husband and so on. The cast is small but the comedy effectively exploits the torturing wounds of everyday chat. Scenes overlap and their order is shuffled so that past, present and future can be ironically juxtaposed.

One of the effective songs, Table Talk," sets gossip music. Another, Dorothy and parodies Da ballads. I liked best 66 I'm an Individual," the heroine's spirited version of Shakespeare's 66 Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds." This is a rueful, truthful portrait of a sweet, perplexed young modern, seriously weakened by the author's fondness for miniscule and unnecessary detail. The evening has its rewards but it is somewhat tepid dramatically. It does not convincingly that Ayckbourn's talent the cruel trivialities of social behaviour can really get the best out of the emotional and exciting possibilities offered by a musical score.

HUNTING GROUP ART PRIZES The Hunting Group of Companies presents prize money totalling £11.000 annually, including two major awards for painting: THE HUNTING GROUP PRIZE OF £5,000 FOR THE OIL PAINTING OF THE YEAR BY A BRITISH ARTIST THE HUNTING GROUP PRIZE OF £5,000 FOR A THE WATERCOLOUR OF THE YEAR BY A BRITISH ARTIST £1,000 for prizes divided among the finalists. The awards are made for A works included in the annual Open Exhibitions of the following Art Societies: Sending in days 1981 Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours 8th and 10th February (Exhibition 6th-29th March) Royal Society of Portrait Painters 28th April (Exhibition 19th May-10th June) Royal Society of British Artists 1st June (Exhibition 18th-30th June) Royal Institute of Oil Painters. 20th and 23rd September (Exhibition 16th-18th October) Royal Society of Miniature 9th October Painters, Sculptors and Gravers (Exhibition 23rd November18th December) Royal Society of Marine Artists 2nd November (Exhibition 20th November2nd December) New English Art Club 23rd November (Exhibition 9th-22nd December) Enquiries with s.a.e, should be addressed to The Secretary General, Federation of British Artists, 17 Carlton House London SW1Y 53D. who is by no means eclipsed, Dolly Parton, the singer. They are employees of a New York company.

Miss Tomlin is the experienced supervisor of a big room of typists and telephonists. Miss Fonda is the new girl, put under her wing, and Miss Parton the shapely and suffering secretary sight-their to boss the only and then company's Vice-President could hardly be more the male chauvenist pig. How these three, their ideas stimulated by some smoking of marijuana, come gradually to turn the tables, making the office into ad woman's world, has its very funny moments, especially in the disposal of a corpse, but these steadily diminish, alas. as the piece turns away from reality where, surely, a lively satirical comedy was to be found. THE NAZIS, we know, were responsible for a great deal, to which must now be added the origins, apparently of the preposterous plot of John G.

Avildsen's The Formula. The title refers to a catalyst used in a process discovered by the Nazis converting coal to oil. It appears, briefly, with Television review-P14 other documents, on the fall of Berlin, but is then seemingly lost for some 30 years, only coming up in discussion when a former detective is murdered in Los Angeles. Had his former friend, George C. Scott, not been assigned to the case, all might have been well, but this is a persistent man who not only braves an interview with the great steel baron, Marlon Brando, but chases all over Europe to solve the case.

Marthe Keller is a dubious helper, John Gielgud authoritative as usual as a scientist from the Nazi era. Big Business, as always, is to blame, but surely for the tedium and complication of this plot, through which Mr Scott plods with his usual power. 6 The European Connection By ROBERT HENDERSON ANY LINKS that there may have been between the Italian and British composers represented at the Wigmore last night i in the penultimate programme of the New Macnaughton 'Concerts' imaginatively devised series 66 The European Connection," were largely ones of circumstance rather than direct influence. That Peter Maxwell Davies was once a pupil of Goffredo Petrassi. was more a simple matter of historical fact than evidence of any perceptible connection between the personality or motivation of their two sharply contrasted pieces.

Apart from their scrupulous and shared commitment the composer's craft, there was little, if anything in common between Davies's subtly undemonstrative recreation of the renaissance Scottish motet Si quis deligit and the gladiatorial interplay and almost aggressively electric idiom of Petrassi's Grand Septuor." The illusion of calm and placidity produced by the fragile, mostly very subdued, yet hyper-active motifs of Bernard Rands's also seemed to draw both for its atmospheric and colouristic effects more on oriental than specifically Italianate sources. Its cultivated awareness of the precise nature and quality instrumental sound he has, however, clearly passed on to his own former pupil Vic Hoyland whose specially commissioned Andacht Zum Kleinen," like all the music in the recital, was bravely played by the Lontano Ensemble directed by Odaline de la Martinez. Though a tough work to grasp in its entirety, there was little actual toughness in the musical substance itself of a score full of impeccable heard, rigorously composed and imagined ideas, textures and sonorities. And if a concern for the purely sensuous nature of sound is indeed a recognisably Italian characteristic, it was a quality shared by both these pieces and the delicately mellifluous writing voices and instruments of Berio's El Mar la Mar" with which. the programme began.

John Ogdon EACH MEMBER. of John Ogden's audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last night must have wished him every possible success. Serious illness has kept one of our most beloved pianists from the concert platform for. three long years and so this was in so many special ways a significant and moving occasion. In all fairness it must be admitted that not everything went as smoothly as Mr.

Ogdon might have wished but, in outline at any rate, the pianist's intentions seemed as spirited and warm hearted as ever. The odd skimped detail here, an occasional attempt at impossible there, kept everyone on their toes, yet the lavish colouration of Szymanowski's Masques (impressively described by the pianist as music sing 66 an aura of extreme finde-siecle opulence was finely realised and a periodic retreat into self communion in Beethoven's op. 109. Sonata and Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques was often eclipsed by characteristic energy and commitment. For his encore Mr Ogdon chosen nothing less than Chopin's minor Ballade and finally left the stage in a storm of cheers.

B.M. Daniel Barenboim CAN IT REALLY be true that 25 years have passed since Daniel Barenboim first appeared on a London platform? Incredibly, yes, according to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, who celebrated the event at the Festival Hall last night by featuring him as soloist in two. of his favourite piano concertos. First came Mozart's Piano Concerto in K488 the very work which introduced him, at in 1956. Impossible to compare the two performances.

of course; but it is doubtful if the budding musician could have displayed the poise, the relaxed mastery of last night's A 2A CHRISTIE'S SOUTH KENSINGTON IS HERE TO HELP YOU South Kensington A ROAD OLD From the routine to the bizarrewhatever it is, one of our specialists will advise on its value and saleability without charge or obligation. Telephone or write for further details, or call in at our reception counter between 9am-5pm. SOUTH KENSINGTON 85 OLD BROMPTON ROAD. LONDON SW7 3JS. TELEPHONE: We specialise in your interest.

performance. Perfectly proportioned, beautifully phrased, it was quintessential Mozart, a distillation of Barenboim's vast experience of, and concern for. this composer. And the orchestra, under Charles Dutoit, phrased with him to the last minute detail. After the interval he gave a wide ranging account of Brahms's towering First Piano Concerto.

How gently his initial entry stole upon the ear And with what guile he built from this almost passive entry a performance of we sonorous depth, of imperious weight and of free mobility! A limpid, contemplative Adagio contrasted greatly with a Finale of enormous punch and drive, set, incidentally, at a tempo which took account not only of the composer's 66 Allegro but also of the equally important Non troppo." A generous, magisterial performance. N.K. Theatre lease sale By Our Arts Staff The lease of London's Cambridge Theatre, which is owned by the Laurence Parnes Organisation, is up for sale following the announcement of the retirement for health reasons of the organisation's 51-year-old managing director, Larry Parnes. The theatre has been dark since the closure on Jan. 24 of 66 The Last of Mrs 99 Cheyney starring Joan Collins and no show has yet been chosen to replace it.

The Parnes Organisation out a 12-year lease on the theatre in 1972 and has an option for a further 15 years. Yesterday the company put the value of the remaining four years of the lease at 66 a conservative £250,000." Mr Parnes, who will continue to advise company, said he was cutting on his work on medical advice. "I have had a holiday for six and a half years." The impresario began his career in the early days of pop music in Britain with stars like Tommy Steele, Billy Fury and Marty Wilde. The unknown facts about a well-known car. A lot of people claim to know everything there is And that's miles better thananythingthenew to know about the Allegro.

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