The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 15

15 I' 1 I 1 1 I films MUSIC Ordinary People Plaza "AA The Great Sfpbii Gate Three 'EJuridice Camden Torn on harum-scarum fatfk in the need always to win1 Even when the-family moves house as it has to every yer so he refuses to sing songs which have VHT Tlwn aim it was VP aled many people may away with' anri at ctanrPS whnse full noteirtfal tor i 0d- harm is only half-un ai a i or not appreciatea cti: feiV-tlarrtvB'j smoking can oau se your legs to drop off Things are getting worse Last night we learned 'that '4wfeVsJi 'r show an1 alarming tendency to grow xr a a 'otve T'Kic in Fnrm a i nn 'woe Mtn Atii- ifV oil to ttnOf failure in-' them like5 "Dixie" 'But as long: as he is on it ram paging zealously as a dotty disciplinarian whose family begins increasingly to laugh and then to sneter at his an tics the characters intensity reaches cartoon prdportiOns of Jon-soiiian sweeo and energy It examine the pheiwmeiiOB Of wrtof dole? queue poverty with a breatn-less Mttle filmed report entitled There's Still A Lot Of It About (BBC 2) Peter Bazalgefte interviewed a lady accountant who had jttst spent £15000 on a second jnmk coat and blew £2000 anMly on having her hair dwieilt makes you feel so wondeMll she gushed He moved on to a well-preServed specimen of the many ae voiea 10 -raiiier more earnest matters- like the latest crisis in Gdansk or Afghanistan ducing among others specially worthy performances from Robert Dean and Susan Moore as Orpheus and Euridice and Nuala Willis as the goddess Venus Nash Ensemble Sarah Walker By ALAN BLYTH THE EVER-NERGETIC and adventurous Nash Ensemble are off on another series of well-planned concerts This one being given at St John's Smith's Square is to include at least one recent work by a British composer and to be framed on each occasion by French music The new piece in last night's opening programme was Oliver Knussen's "Cantata" a quartet for oboe and strings in one movement It was typical of this composer's music of the moment in saying a great deal within a succint form The intimacy of expression and relative modesty of its harmonies did not exclude much original thought and depth of feeling It also moved unerringly from start to finish an unusual achievement these days The beginning is calm the middle hectically cliamtic the close quiet again but not without a hint of worry behind the restrained facade It was played with fine understanding by Gareth Huise and the string members of the Ensemble They were joined by other members of the group and by the ubiquitous Sarah Walker in the version of Faure's La bonne chanson for voice with piano and string quintet Miss Walker as is her wont in all her repertory caught precisely the mood of this cycle hSe suggested its- subtle and withdrawn sensuality through her still yet intense singing tonal Bertie wooster type caiiea Blood Beach Scene Leicester Sq Odeon Kensington "AA" Penitentiary Eros Piccadilly THE THING keep on saying is I love you" lit ireally is It's no good just feeling it and it's worse to be ashamed of it Just say it Don't be shy Because if you do say and you've' got to be convincing about it of the person to whom 'you declare it will feel secure in your effections arid be able to put-up with all kinds of criticism What am I drooling on about? Who am I to make such assertions? Well I've been learning from two new American films about the obstacles to understanding among modern families' It isn't that there's really any lack of love It's just that no one knows how properly to express it Indeed in the family which occupies our attention in Robert Bedford's Ordinary People they can scarcely say anything except "Pass the mustard" Life here is very formal tasteful colourless and cold in its smart suburban eagerness to cloak feelings in polite evasion There are-two sons And when one of them drowns in a boating accident the Mother who is younger can't stop blaming himself Not that he did less than his best to save his brother It's just that he feels guilty for surviving But of course he doesn't realise why he is so hopelessly melancholic Nor do his parents see the reason for his moping But a- psychiatrist does American psychiatrists always do and once the cat is out of the emotional bag it looks as if mother is' this time to blame for she was ever more concerned with neatness and appearances rather than people Very house Rupert Dee who descrai typical day spent in thf working on the Dhone I 'When they should be as troubling to us as the plight of that taciturn son 'You wonder how he has stuck life with them for so long though his glumness is at least momentarily relieved by- the brief entry into his life of a girl who sings in the school choir Indeed Mr Hutton: sensitively shoulders the film's emotional burden and it is no fault of-Miss Moore or Mr Sutherland that they make so little impression as his parents They suffer from their creator's concern for his theme before' their individuality The upshot 'is engaging and serious-minded It is a film which deserves attention not only for its message that love should dare to speak its name but also for 'its emotional nuances But the truth is that- no one (to an artist) is' ordinary And these people- dre vto6 near to seeming ordinary that is t6 say unreal merely representative to touch us as they should MORE EMOTION comes across the screen sprawlingly sentimentally absurdly embarrassingly but somehow hopefully in Lewis John Carlino's The Great Santini in which Robert Duvall plays: a roaring ridiculous but sincere Marine jet-nilot who' drills his fanrily with the same enthusiasm as he goes about his flying duties In- his energetic" heartiness and single-mjnded devotion both to his family and the Marines he creates confusion admiration indignation and despair wherever he goes But his self-confidence is somehow irresistible and his failure to see anything from 'anybody else's point of view though annoying is consistent with his proud and very cool in her courteous wayiShexan't even weep at her elder son's funeral And father? Well 1 he's a Weak well-meaning chap who finally ticks mother off in 'a rare moment of insight and she leaves home in a huff leaving us rather in the air Anyhow the son has' got over his guilt and been able to choke out the fact that he loves his father Now' all this may sound abysmally sentimental and it would be if Mr Bedford had not stuck so tenaciously to his theme of people being frightened by their feelings and in particular of expressing them What the film is really about is adolescent or rather loneliness and the- way in which attempts to relieve it can go wrong especially when the kind of moping here depicted (quite brilliantly by Timothy Hutton) turns the moper into a case history But there is something so essentially familiar about these family conflicts -that we need to know more about everybody's background before they can come fully to life and' the way in which the tale relies on flashbacks rather in an bsen manner (there are strange echoes of "Little Eyolf in the unravelling method) is frustrating Nor is-Alviii Sargent's' dialogue able (as was Ibsen) to establish the past in any depth to make the present more vivid Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland as the blandly devoted- parents anxious not only for their son's welfare but also for his success at School are given little chance to show their characters' in a sympathetic light They seem merely dull or indifferent isn't Often on the screed that a performance is itself worth a visit but- it is 'm Mr DUvalfcs i dazzling case and of course there is our old theme Of how to" love people in Spite of themselves And how to recognise its expression in people too shy to talk about it If the target for this satire on obsessive egoism and old-fashioned patriotism' is too easily -hit (the teenage daughter mocks her reactionary father by murmuring to him that she is pregnant- by a cross-eyed Jewish black) the character remains so blithely assured of his mission both as a father and military pilot that there is no denting it IN Jeffrey Bloom's Blood Beach the heart sinks at the wretched lengths to which film-makers go to discover something' to 20 minutes I'V and at We or Annabel's places I had posed to exist only in the columnists 1 The recession-: V- affect mp her a imp I'm not By ROBERT HENDERSON MAINLY concentrating on operas of the 17th and 18th centuries the performances of the enterprising little company Musica nel Chiostro have been particularly notable in the past for their nice blend of scholarly precision and entertaining discreetly inventive productions For its third season at the Riverside Studios this week it has chosen an ever more obscure work than usual the Euridice of Jacopo Peri As the earliest surviving opera composed in 1600 for the wedding of Marie de Medici and Henry IV of France and primarily intended for an audience of cultivated intellect and sensibility it obviously has a considerable documentary importance its long stretches of recitative simple Strophic songs and choruses already containing the essential ingredients of the operatic style as employed on a more grandly lyrical scale just six years later by Monteverdi in his 'setting of the same story All that remains of Peri's original score are the voice partas and a base line For this version the composer Stephen Oliver has kept the vocal parts intact but has abandoned the base in favour of a much freer entirely new instrumental accompaniment score for an ensemble similar to that of Stravinsky's "the Soldier's Tale" The transformation has been skilfully and deftly managed giving to the music an enticingly modern sound while cleverly retaining a proper sense of the original Someone presumably the director Graham Vick in collaboration with his designers Yolanda Sonnabend and Richard Hudson has had the bright idea of setting the opera around and occasionally actually in a kind of children's paddling pool But as we know ideas in operatic productions can be dangerous things here introducing into the staging a sometimes implausible element of fashionable chic If concern for the discomfort of poor Daphne required not just to kneel but to lie immersed in the water during her eloquent solo tended to distract attention from the finely expressive singing of Kate Flowers both the conductor Nicholas Kraemer and the young and mostly very very assured cast coped bravely with the situation pro ployed" he explained real ably enough Do you ei In fact the news is not exactly new As long ago as 1940 it seems cases of enlarged male mammaries apparently a o'c ia- with hormone-injected meat were recorded: More recently the oestrogen-induced condition' has broken 'Out in Puerto Rico Ha vant and other -parts where they manufacture the Pill The trouble arises' from the inhalation or absorption df very- fine but potent chemical dust Bryan Gould beavering away on his esoteric quest encountered difficulties None of the factory managements involved woUld talk to him and they weren't too keeh for their employees to talk Either" Emba r-i rassment was understandably the name of the game especially as the condition was said to be related to the loss of the sex urge The' only pair of male glands avaiilable £6r viewing Were foreign one's Mr Gould's- rather restricted more suitable perhaps for a NewsnighC itehv tftan a full-blown current affairs revealed a serious theme of side effects in general vToo meet people who have a less money than ydu?" Bazalaette Not if I 'can it" replied Mr Deen eiveasinff candour ami iti uo iua iuik jll -jbu uoi the heart that sinks' hut the sands at a California seaside resort swallowing up screaming members of the not fast enough for me And in Penitentiary which is not only about 'boxing but also about quarrelsome" black prisoners who are allowed what' ate known' as connubial rights if they wjn -in the ring the violence and 'brutality make the heart sink even faster Behind these "shenanigans was implied astonishment that anyone should be spending and not hoarding in the Thatcherite slump Mr Bazalgette and his producer Judi Connor seemed to be a little naive 'They rather overlooked the regrettable fact that anyone st ashing away actual cash these days is effectively tearing half of it up every three or four years delivery and dynamics perfectly judged Whether this arrangement is more apposite than the one usually encountered for voice and piano is open to question The evening opened with Saint-Saen's jolly Tarentelle" neatly played and ended with Chausson's dreary and over-long Concerto for violin piano and string quartet where the composer exploits all too fully his penchant for portentous chromaticism Marcia Crayford and Ian Brown with the strings were in any case a litle too stiff in its advocacy THEATRE The trouble with pictures she finds diversion with a male model A curious collage of flashing scenes includes an assembly of shots of wife lover and a woman model in the nude as Muybridge develops his art We are shown how he conceives the idea and also of the alluring dangers of such developing media But we are to believe that he was long in seeing the domestic situation Oliver Ford Davies gives an arresting performance as this bearded and somewhat pontificating seer He shoots the seducer and is tried for murder From a rather facetious start the piece gradually gains power with an affecting ending in which a film projector in the roof gives the old man a short view of his wife "alive" through moving pictures Colette Hiller as the wife Jonathan Burn the lover and Lucinda Curtis as the lover and Lucinda Curtis as the model do very well in this promising little production Director Roland Rees By HAROLD ATKINS AN INGENIOUS conjunction of a 19th-century murder drama and plenty of nude posing is achieved in Snap" Nigel Gearing's short play at the New End Theatre Hamp-stead It is skilfully produced by the Foco Novo Company with its confection of lights poses and sounds Mr Gearing weaves his story into the early development of photography and he has some semi-philosophical things to sayl of the mesmerising effect that this art and its more powerful successor the cinema can have on commonsense and the sense of reality His thoughtful and imaginative English-born photographer Edweard Muybridge working in San Francisco is so devoted to his camera the freezing of moments of beauty the fixings" of past scenes that he neglects his pretty wife and Mm MIME it Interim Theatre Company Cartoon By FERNAU HALL THE Interim Thearte Company is a very unusual one: it brings together artists who are deaf and artists with normal hearing and its pieces are designe 'tlo appeal both to deaf people and to general audiences Cartoon" now being performed at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre Holborn has many defects but also some promising scenes The theme is communication and this is expressed in a fantastic way by showing a cartoon character accustomed to communicate through captions who moves out into the big world- where he meets people who communicate with spoken words and others who use the sign language of the deaf The play is both written and directed by Pip Royall and he shows a very erratice feeling for what works in the theatre His production is extremely repetitive the dramatic effects are rarely projected out to the audience and the mime shows no consistent sense of style Fortunately there is on deaf artist Sarah Scott who shows exceptional talent 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