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

a a a a a a a a THEATRE JOHN BARBER Tears, dying -off-stage SENSITIVELY ACTED and carefully directed by Harold Pinter, the new Simon. Gray play "Quartermaine's at the Queen's is a muted. comedy about dying -the dying not only of people. of talents, ambitions, loves and relationships. Only a practised playwright could find so much humour in characters so.

They retained a hold on my sympathy until I became impatient with yet another bout of tears, yet another report on things going play consists entirely of reports. We are in the staffroom of a school of English for foreigners in Cambridge and all the teachers bring back the news, each from his own battlefront, of death and the dying of the light. The principal (Robin Bailey) breaks up. as his. beloved off stage partner nears his end.

The salt-of-the-earth type (James Grout) watches. the slow decline of an off-stage favourite daughter. The spinster (Prunella Scales), having lost the man she wanted, turns on her off-stage mother and probably kills her. The egoistic, novelist (Peter Birch) abandoned his unseen wife and by his delusion that he has talent. And the attractive girl (Jenny.

Quayle) falls out of love with her offstage husband (whose new magazine dies at birth). Much of the comedy is at the expense of a less urbane provinicial (Glyn Grain) and his problems with an off-stage girl. He survives -but hardly 'seems to count. The central character, Quartermaine-beautifull played by Edward Fox- alone has no life elsewhere. But then, he has no life here either.

An abstracted near-amnesiac, he listens, makes muddled plans and loses his job for incompetence. Mr Gray mav -be saying that each of us engaged -our preoccupation blind us to the troubles of others; or, that every day brings. little death -and tomorrow a big one. But since the emotional battlefield is always elsewhere with off-stage people, no crisis or conflict can be enacted before us. result makes for.

tepid playgoing. We want be where the action is, not hear a series of reports. A not-quite-so-crazy gang THERE IS slight air of smugness about. the Festival Theatre at Chichester. Underneath the Arches 99 was perhaps devised by Patrick Garland and written by Brian Glanville to cock.

a snook at its -middle-class propriety. This revue is an affectionate tribute, the Crazy Gang of six comics and their long career in London. music-halls, with emphasis on the late Bud Flanagan the 'East End Jew. who rose from the gutters of showbiz to become a the Gang "and" a of royalty. As you enter the theatre, rough equivalents of the 'comics are on: the rampage, touting dirty postcards, polishing heads and chucking ice cream around.

Soon the stage is alive with the dear old gags. A cutie in. a grass skirt is chased by a chap with a lawnmower. Somebody says Eskimoses are God's frozen people. And: Do you know what the girl said to the sailor?" 66 No!" That's right." With Roy Hudd as Bud, the show translates incidents from his life equivalents.

into Thus, slap-dash his music hall meeting with his future partner, Chesney Allen in France in 1917 becomes part of stock Army sketch about soldiers drilling. We get a taste of Flanagan and Allen cross talk (Christopher Timothy is excel- MUSIC lent as the straight and Allen), and manor of their quiet stroll-along songs Underneath the Arches," "Hometown," Umber-ellas Allen, now 87, make a frail, suave appearance -a survivor perhaps because he retired early from too-exacting career. It was fun to see again how the lumpish comics looked when gorgeously arrayed as epicene principal boys. There are lovely lines in their dialogue when dressed as awful flower-sellers in Piccadilly Circus. It is not the course rudery it inspires, but the line My April's getting married that makes me laugh.

But, at the risk of sounding a thin-lipped spoilsport, I was not vastly amused. The admirable Mr. Hudd, standing round with a fixed grin, was wasted: he gave no feeling of the wickedly leering, louche, gat-toothed and adorable Bud. No one caught the casualy anarchic style of anv one of the others, or the exciting sense of dangerousness they gave collectively -that tonight their vulgarity really would far. tility of producAnd the Chichester gention by Roger Redfarn only reminded me of the brassy, -brash splashiness and efficiency with which impresarios were careful to surround these quite inimitable clowns.

'The Dutchman' and 'Lohengrin' By ALAN BLYTH in Bayreuth THE REVIVALS of "The Flying Dutchman" and Lohengrin Bayreuth Festival were both notable for the consummate. integration and unity of their casts. Harry Kupfer's contentious production of the first work, viewed as the dream of a lunatic Senta, is now so confidently executed that its perverse. view of the piece has almost become tenable, particularly. with Peter Schneider as taut conductor.

Simon Estes's tortured Dutchman is so eloquent in movement, voice and expression as to convince you that he is a real," year wanderer, not merely a figment of Lisbeth Balslev's unhinged Senta. Surrounded by erotic symbols, he is, though quite evidently a vision of the sexual frustration caused by the grim, severe Victorian world which surrounds her. Daland, her father, is another of Matti he is Wagnerian bass of Salminen's superb a assumptions; achieved greatness here, whereas Robert Schunk, the Erik, is at. the stage of growing promise as a Heldentenor. Singing acting of similarly unbridled intensity are to be: heard in.

Friedrich's production of Lohengrin." These erstwhile East Germans Prom: Bournemouth SymphonyBy ROBERT HENDERSON OF THE 39 WORKS performed in the 12 programmes of this season's Promenade Concerts just over a half have been by British and: Russian composers. It was the same two countries which again provided the music in last night's concert at the Albert Hall. in which the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra was directed by its principal conductor Uri Segal. What may have looked on paper failing an unlikely attract juxtaposition. to what the Proms little more than a token audience, turned out to be an attractive and cunning piece of programme planning.

Not only was the background to both works literary (or historical) and dramatic but both in their very different ways could also be described as essentially' theatrical. Most 'directly linked to the theatre was the rarely played suite culled by Benjamin Britten in 1954 from the opera Gloriana." Skilfully encompassing the musical richness and variety of the original score, neatly distilling the opera unique flavour, from the ceremonial music of the Tournament, though the. melancholy beauty of the lute song Happy Were He," here elegantly sung by Anthony Rolfe Johnson, and. the evocative Elizabethan pastiche of the Courtly Dances to the sombrely romantic finale, it also makes an engrossing and colourful concert piece in its own right. symphony, on the other hand, was never intended as anything The Daily Telegraph, Friday, July 31, 1981 13 FILMS Cruelty and The Mouse and the Woman (AA) ICA Cinema Classic, Chelsea Raiders of the Lost Ark (A) Empire, Leicester Sq.

The Great Muppet Caper (U) Odeon, St Martin's Lane, Classic, Tottenham Court Rd London release GOOD WINE needs no: bush. Probably not. But what about good art In particular good films? And especially good British films unfunded by Lew Grade Not so long critic waxed ecstastic about a British film he was suspected of helping a lame dog over a stile. But lately the evidence renaissance in our cinema has been clear. All it needs now is renaissance in the cinemas themselves.

In other words, the chance for films to late, so that something of the quality of Karl Francis's The House and the Woman can be more widely enjoyed than is possible from its exhibition at the Institute tine of Contemporary Arts in Mall and the Classic at Chelsea. The trouble of course is that doesn't sound like a barrel of laughs. Nor is it loaded with cynicism or snappy allusions to the state of modern Britain. And being neither about gangit: has no adolescent, popular sters nor courtship appeal. And (perhaps gravest omission of all) it is acted without stars.

Indeed every player is new to me. There is, however, a name" behind it all: Dylan Thomas. The story of the film has taken from his short stories: and taken (at a guess don't know the original) with just the right degree of liberty and love. If add that it deals with prosaic events of half a century ago in a style which this director makes naturally poetic then suppose that will have put the tin lid on its chances. But there is no denying Mr Francis's skill in bringing to the screen with absorbing and imaginative sensibility a tale of harsh but very human relationships.

starting in a Welsh mining village before the First World War, showing that war's effect on the characters in what turns out to be a saga of thwarted passion, and leaving us in the 1920s with a sense of having lived through their lives as if we knew them. Lunacy, brutality, and violence: the ingredients of orthodox sensational cinema are here brought together not to enliven the fable but as apparently inevitable, given the people, their natures, and the world they inhabit. Or rather the different worlds. For although they live in the a village--the young working Welshman with longings, the arrogant pit-owner with whose wife he falls so deeply and treacherouslys in love, and the poet's beloved sister- they seem incapable of coming to terms for long with each other or with their own feelings. passion from Only the brother and sister ever find that joyous contentment in each other's company which the others seek; but their happiness is marginal to the film's strong themes about the young poet's attitude to war and peace and politics and sexual passion (especially sexual passion).

Not that his big experiences of the war, to which his objections bring tial and savage imprisonment, embitter him. Nor, over blacklegs during an attempt to break a strike at the pit, do his wounds seem greatly to matter to a man whose fists can be as vigorous as his verse. But when the woman who has evidently been trifling with him (and with her own come to that) announces. she is going to bear his child and then chooses abortion, chooses, so to speak, madness. In the end-a beautiful startling end--you might say that she gets her comeuppance or poetic retribution.

But the thing. about this strangely beguiling film is that it deals in passions and physical cruelty, not for their own sake, for the sake of expressing human nature when cornered. It could be boiled the eternal triangle with an emancipated woman at the apex; but that would be to arentacle the power subtlety which of offers its each character from that character's point of view so that our sympathies evenly distributed. Moralising is out the question. Technically this first fulllength feature film also creates a remarkable sense of period which never looks.

strained; and although the director's experience in television has obviously paid off (he shares the screenplay with Vincent Kane), I do not see how Nick Gifford's" photography could ever seem so effective on the screen. No doubt the absence of familiar faces on the screen assists the air of authenticity. They are surely the right faces. Dafydd Hywell (passionate poet), Karen Archer (tantalising Alan Devlin (crippled husband), Patricia Napier (protective sister) and Peter Sproule (family friend) never crave our sympathy. They never lose it either.

AS IF TO POINT the old picture-making moral about too much money chasing too few ideas, Steven Spielterg's Raiders of the Lost Ark comes thunderously and pifflingly what foras an example Hollywood does to men whose talent seems at first naturally cinematic. They have to 'go in for blockbusters. Mr Spielberg obliges and meets his Waterloo with this epic which only occasionally displays his gift for hinting at the sinister properties of things outside our experience yet within our range of fear. His apocalyptic tendencies, though exciting enough in Jaws and Close Encounters," find here no concentration for our imag- TELEVISION SYLVIA CLAYTON Lords of the soapsuds THERE IS an alarm clock on sale which rouses the sleeper with Annie Laurie," continues. with Men of Harlech," that fails tries Rule BritanJames Bellini, who called his six-part A TV documentary series about the state of the nation Rule Britannia (I TV), evidently intends to stir us out of apathy.

The second instalment, Family elaborated Fortunes," in which he on his theory that Britain is regressing into a state of neconomic feudalism, focussed the Leverhulmes, the soap barons Merseyside. He had attractive period illustrations to show how William Lever, the first Viscount, a Victorian of immense drive, pioneered mass production and packaging and ruled his industrial community at Port Sunlight with a firm paternal hand. The present Lord Leverhulme is not involved with day-to-day industry; he is Lord Lieutenant of Cheshire; his interests are sporting, regimental and charitable. 'He has no heir spoke of wanting to be remembered by work of the Leverhulme Trust. Yet nowhere did this lively but patchy programme explain what the Leverhulme Trust actually does.

What looked to be a leisurely, aristocratic style of living was contrasted with the depressing present conditions around the Liverpool docks, where a third of the teenagers are unemployed and job prospects in general are poor, Since James Bellini is a reporter with both academic and television experience, best remembered on The Money Programme," one might have ex-, pected this contrast to be not merely described but explored. ERIC SHORTER Wales Walt Disney's. TAPE CENTRE MEMOREX NORMAL BIAS MEMOREX Normal 8185 MEMOREX MAX, OXIDE 1 1800 MAXI 90 MEMOREX MEMOREX HOLT MIT 838. HIGH DIAS I 20 off new Memorex cassettes. Normal Offer Price Price Memorex cassettes are now even better than ever And with this Memorex Normal Bias significant improvement in quality comes a dramatic change in price.

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At these special offer prices until August 15th 1981 for the Special Touch ination in a stunt-filled fantasy about an invincible American superman (labelled professor archaeology) finds himself trying to beat the pre-war Nazis in a race to possess- what? The Ark of the Covenant, no: less. lieves would make him also Something which a Hitler beinvincible. The thing sought could have been the Holy Grail. Or any treasured key to what men crave. And so the proposition that Hitler was after what the sacred artefact" is another synopsis an "ancient and pretext for a series of violent adventures in which an absurdly intrepid hero (played by Harrison Ford) dashes about the world in quest of the unobtainable.

have only to consider from the the assortment of production units Tunisian, French, PeruvianHawaiian, Elstree to realise why the film founders. It lacks unity of aim, time, place action. Worst of. all (for this director) it lacks. thrills.

The screen fills with chamber-ofhorror effects from time to time: descents into a snake pit, hair's breadth escapes, jungle explosions, flames, smoke and visual tricks of shattering silliness. But that is all film leaves -a sense empty gance, especially the music, which pre-supposes earplugs and which trumpets the epic's vacuity with pauses for dialogue such as: You bastard, I'll get you for this," or want is the girl." And to think that Mr Spielberg was once rated as director of. talent. Sad, really. THERE IS (of course) no mystery about The.

Muppet Caper, which may not please the addicts of this Sunday ritual on television because it comes at feature length instead of half an hour and because it has to have a plot and too many human beings' to interrupt the puppets' witty progress. 'These are characters which have sprung to mythical life on the box because their creators (among whom the writers Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses and Jerry Juhl and Jack Rose must rank high) are an artistic team to compare with the original Walt Disney's. Noise, pollution, overcrowding. who said Cumbria had everything? partly why you'll choose Cumbria. No doubt that with all the enticing things that Cumbria offers, as millions of tourists find out each year--the quality of life and the beauty of great outdoors' freedom-there's also much you'll be glad you left elsewhere.

If you're ready for industrial growth with first-class factories from 1,000 to 25,000 sq ft and would be attracted by a rent from around or your own fully serviced site, the good news begins here. you're thinking of spreading your wings to a new site there are one of two things you don't want to bring with you. The noise, the pollution, the overcrowding. The industrial problems The overpriced and over-close accommodation. The long drive to work The unrelenting grind of it all.

Industrial Promotion Officer, Cumbria County Council, Room No 27, 84 Warwick Road, Carlisle CAl 1DZ: Tel Carlisle (0228) 23456 Cumbria UT Please send full details of the opportunities for expansion in Cumbria are certainly persuasive taskmasters. Our own Elizabeth Connell a hugely popular artist here--presents an Ortrud of vicious, a malevolence, and sinecure, part with unflinchingly exciting tones. Telramund, 'her partner in crime, is no less commandingly portrayed by Leif Roar, surely the most tensely overwrought performance of role since Uhde's. Goodness and light are also well done by. Peter Hofmann's Lohengrin was near the ideal in looks and voice, once he had overcome an initial prejudice.

Karan Armstrong's Elsa is more controversial. For me, her occasional unsteadiness is forgiven by the way she suggests Elsa's distraught, insecure state of mind under her husband's discerning direction. at the best not only out Friedrich, is a past master of his soloists but also out of his chorus: their important comings and goings were as under thorough as' their singing, Nelson's well ordered conducting. Only the bare settings-suggestive of no milieu something to be desired. As a whole.

and after two taxing the quality of these revivals testifies to the extraordinary discipline and unobtrusive control of stagecraft that are so often welcome features of Bayreuth performances. other than a concert work, its theatricality lying as much in the vividly imaginative character of its scoring as in the picturesque detail of the musical scenario, derived from Byron's poem. Some of the wind solos in the two central movements could perhaps have been played with a little more finesse but it was indicative of the disciplined strength and astutenes of the performance that the theatrical elements were allowed to make their maximum effect without ever impairing the music's symphonic thrust or cogency. DEAF ACTORS FOR MERMAID By Our Arts Staff Trevor Eve, hero of BBC TV's serial, has. been learning the American sign language for his: part as a speech therapist in- Mark Children of a Lesser God," which opens at the Mermaid Theatre, London, on Aug.

19. He is playing opposite Eliza'beth Quinn, a deaf American actress, who takes the part of. one of his pupils, a role she has already, played, on Broadway. play love story which explores the relationship between the therapist and the pupil will be directed by Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, who will be making his production debut in London, As in America, three of the roles in the play will be performed by deaf or partlyhearing actors. But So much emphasis was placed on making the programme visually varied that only a message came through strongly.

This was an echo of apocryphal exchange between Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. "The very richer different more from us. 99 Yes, have It is a compliment to the naturalism of Southern Television's drama 'series about the Army, Spearhead (I TV), which returned for a new tour of duty last night, that it is sometimes compared with tabout C's documentary series the Navy, 66 Sailor." In "Night Games," filmed on location in Hongkong, Nick McCarty, the scriptwriter, managed the tricky remainly from Platoon, the introducing known, characters, Royal Wessex Rangers, with skill. He seemed much more at ease with the practical realities of their work than with the poetic genius of Keats, the subject of his recent two-part play. The programme did not pretend that the soldiers enjoyed their assignments, guarding the Chinese border to stem the flow illegal immigrants, nor that they took much interest in the politics of the situation.

It handled routine activities crisply but with a certain sympathy. The company sergeant major had a captive audience and some of the best lines. "It's a triumph of mind over matter, he said. "I don't mind, and you don't matter." This episode of "Spearhead was a thoroughly professional piece of film-making, not great drama but well presented fiction. It made the reasons for changes of command among the ITV companies seem more than usually obscure.

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