The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 19

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH MONDAY MARCH 9 1998 19 ARTS REVIEWS An early Tennessee Williams unearthed at the National a good value Fidelio plus new dance in Spring Loaded on the road to nowhere First time out for a gripping prison drama IRONICALLY' this road play by Steve Waters one of a clutch of premieres in Hampstead's New Directions season turns out to be chronically lacking in forward-drive Jumping between two cars we are supposedly motoring along with three desperate characters who have upped and left their family homes and are weaving around East Anglia in the small hours They are manifestly a hazard to themselv es and others for we hear blaring horns and see headlights swerving across their faces in the dark Despite such exciting effects from Gemma Bodinetz's technical team narratively speaking we are not going anywhere Kathy (Lizzy Mclnnerny) is a well-connected barrister who is we gather falling apart psychologically after Theatre Not About Nightingales National Theatre Overdoing it at the high altar lift to an infuriating disturbed voting hitchhiker (played by Gem Durham) Fnqlish Journeys is Waters's first professionally staged play so he may still go places His setting does have dramatic potential cars after all can be alarmingly claustrophobic while also encouraging imaginative flights He paints vivid pictures with words too as when Kathy env isages her car shooting over a cliff and bouncing on its wheels like a cut and there are amusing flashes of lass satire On tht" other hand there are Peter's conversations witli he hitchhiker which veer around disorientingly and the play just doesn't know when to stop Pull in and let this one puss 1 rfrts: ill 71 722 itjul KATE BASSETT floor but no one loses their dignity and the audience feels none of the tension of the score Much more explicit is 1994 Rumours I isions Set to Les Illuminations it shows Rimbaud and erlaine in love Some of it is too selfconsciously but Alston creates two magical sections: here Rimbaud disentangles skeins of people to find Verlaine and in his dream here Verlaine comes to him with his wife borne on his shoulders and allows him to take her place not sure that Alstons are best seen in bulk you notice the trademark motifs the lack of "quick" dance vocabulary hut Rumours I isions and the third piece seen here Brisk Singing are works that arc even better second time round Yolande Snaith tour information: til 71 217 5102 ISMENE BROWN and minds Music Christine Schafer Wigmore Hall Picture: ALASTAIR MUIR Nightingales YOLANDE SNAITH comes to The Place WCl for the Spring Loaded season trailing plaudits from Stanley Kubrick ith whom she worked on his new film Eyes Wide Shut She the most ingenious of choreographers but she has an arresting way of mixing theatre with a gymnastic dance style Her new Blind Faith piece on show here before touring draws on Renaissance religious and anatomy painting Snaith little and voluptuous with long red curls is the priestess at a mass where five people in black fur coats raise each other from the dead on a grand altar Later they change into white and celebrate something like the Last Supper Snaith seem deeply interested in meaning however more inspired by the choreographic potential of the drooping male bodies of Renaissance A voice to FEW would deny that Tennessee Williams wrote some of the greatest plays of this century but he was also responsible for some of the worst As recent misguided revivals of several of his flops have shown bad Tennessee Williams is like a lethal parody of good Tennessee Williams: shrill florid and full of whimpering self-pity So when Trevor Nunn announced that the National Theatre was going to perform a previously unstaged unpublished Williams play I feared we could be in for a dire night Not About Nightingales which Williams wrote in his twenties in 1938-39 has long been accesible in the archives If it were any good surely someone would have put it on by now? In fact we owe a debt of gratitude to Vanessa Redgrave who went to the trouble of seeking out and reading the manuscript and to Trevor Nunn who directs it magnificently Not About Nightingales quite a long-lost masterpiece but it is a raw angry prentice work which offers consistently gripping if occasionally melodramatic theatre It also fascinatingly anticipates Williams's later work The play is a slice of the radical docudrama that was fashionable in Thirties America Williams was appalled by newspaper reports of four American prisoners who were broiled to their deaths in a punishment cell where radiators capable of heating a small sky-scraper were left on at full blast have never written anything since that could compete with it in violence and the dramatist wrote in 1957 and production in which he finally puts his own confident stamp on the theatre of which he is director remorselessly chronicles inhumanity to man Prison dramas have become a cliche particularly thanks to the hilarious Prisoner: Cell Block II but Nunn simply ignores this difficulty and directs with scorching intensity At times the result comes across like an exploitative movie the set costumes and even human blood are deliberately monochrome but at others both Williams and Nunn achieve effects of extraordinary dramatic force Theatre English Journeys Hampstead Theatre giv ing birth to her unplanned first child Alone in her tar she expresses her confusion in irritating semi-poet it monologues choked up with repetitions and rephrasings If Kathy seems to be stuck on a metaphorical roundabout Waters sounds as if he is stylistically struggling to follow in the tracks of Samuel Beckett Mtlnnerny's speeches under Bodinetz's direction are monotonously quavering and over-punctuated Lloyd Hutchinson gives a more natural performance as Kathy's husband a Eurocrat called Peter whom we see driving about drunkenly in alternate scenes Though regrettablv he has given a Dance Yolande Snaith Touring Richard Alston Queen Elizabeth Hall art the cadavers and crucified Christs The four men manipulate and examine each other's bodies swapping "dead" and "doctor" roles and for a while the work has a weighty sensuality But then it looks like someone who had one good idea and blew it Also on the Spring Loaded bill was Richard Alston with three works including a premiere of his newest piece Red Run at the Queen Elizabeth Hall It uses a gritty jazzy 1988 composition by Heiner Goehbels played live by the London Sinfonietta to purvey yet more of Alston's fluted graceful ly limbed ensemble work In the piece two men are lightly attracted to each other a woman mournfully collapse's on the lift hearts Mark Glanville (left) Mefistofele i i igu Be me ciiitliKiei Bernard Hail ith NelU Miruioiu Samuel 14 and 16 March at 7pm I kc Is I I dill 9(1 Bov mi uj (i vs ss'i i i 1 nl Bit hard ol the hat row i I in I nuisfeiei Strauss sinqer Mien her raiislormed mhulntimz the world ol oars ness non Billed to end front Martial' burnimz lor the while humans ac om pan i me nt ot Nations the audience final iii se ot semied into the pltni lor the recital had of intellectual inspiration and THE EXTRAORDIN ARY thing about Christine Schafer voice and you have to hear her live in acoustics as advantageous as the Wigmores to fully appreciate it is that everything seems to be plumb in the centre of her range She has no weak note's there are no discernible gear changes bet ecu registers She never seems to be appro limn her limits high or low A lack of flaws does not necessarilv make an interesting singer But Schafer has tone ot ravishing beautv breath control that uives her phrasing rare finesse and a ombinal ion of intelligence anti presence that takes an audience to the heart of a song There was an intensity to her three religious airs by JS Bach (arranged bv Britten i matched by the luminous piano ot Graham Johnson In three further songs bv Carl Philipp Fmanuel Bac the empathy between the performers was complete the threads ot counterpoint in the piano aspirated in svn-chronisation with the voice After a final sermon-in-song liv Mozart Schafer moved into conventional I ieder territory Yet her tender performances ot these Mendelssohn songs went beyond the merelv conventional They were affecting hut unaffected detailed but unfussy poised but charged with emotion Strauss was here anv susj-aestinn imderprojet tinn 1 was sitting in hut the losing quasi-operatit showed her true mettle as a deliverv mu hanged St haler hersell into a aharet singer intuit idealistic -ugainst-the-odds Kurt Weill with neither vocal umlesc niMou the rec it a I was Weills ssi a pertinent vision of a world sake ol petroleum rithes mm eat oilier down to the ol speet lies Ire im the I ('a gut' prepared to applaud the engeant St hater and Johnson Bat h's I lohstrr llrrr Jesu Christ's cininm with which begun It was a stroke genius and spiritual BRIAN HUNT The action follows the lives of prisoners and staff in the tense days leading up to a hunger strike after which the ringleaders are incarcerated in the overheated cell from hell known as the Klondike The designer Richard Hoover has come up with a magnificent clanking all-metal set while epic production staged in traverse at the Cottesloe Theatre powerfully suggests an enclosed dangerously simmering community which final explodes like a defective pressure cooker The scenes in the Klondike with great spurts of steam hissing out of the ground as the men writhe in agony are almost too cruel to bear as are the brutal beatings Though the production employs Brecht-like captions to introduce the short taut scenes there is no sense of alienation here you follow the travails with your guts as well as your head The performances even in the smaller roles are tremendous Corin Redgrave has never been more mesmeric than as the brutal governor a Southern good boy who grunts and giggles grotesquely as he paws up his secretary and goes horribly sentimental about his baby daughter even as he calmly plans his next atrocity Finhar Lynch as the prisoner who collaborates with him in the hope of remission gives a performance of anguished inward intensity Sherri Parker Lee is moving as the appalled but helpless secretary who supplies the love interest and James Black is terrifying as the prison bully who becomes an avenging hero What unites the play with later work is the sense of mounting desperation of people at the very end of their ropes Here of course their suffering is caused by the cruelty of others but in his greatest work Williams showed that people can create their own particular hells their own private Klondikes of the mind without any outside intervention whatsoever Tickets: 0171 928 2252 CHARLES SPENCER Mrgrajjlj On the inside: Picture STEPHEN VAUGHAN musical performance TELEGRAPH TRAVEL PROMOTION sort the acting out Opera FidelioETO Touring characterful Marelline But certain other members of the cast were wickedly ox er-parted to an extent that made me doubt the sanity of ETO's audition process The wretched young bass-baritone lumbered with Pizarro's aria could no more-sing it than I could Robert Chevaras production provided an adequate frame for tin-drama Sensible and resourcefully designed he 1 Devlin and beautifully by Bruno Poet it is unemphatically set in the late 18th centurv and Paul Hudson in Fidelio Richard Ziman in Not About Polished now NOT before time standards at English Touring Opera are rising This important company which travels to parts of the country that Welsh National Opera and Opera North don't reach has had a had run tor the past few years but I sense a brisk pulling-up of socks Last autumn's version of Rossini Iu Ceuerenlolu had its charms and this new production of Beethoven's Fidelia is in several respects positively creditable So it should be with nearly £1 million of taxpayers' money in the organisation that's behind it Strongest of all its elements is the conducting of Andrew Greenwood ETO's music director With an orchestra of only 26 you can hardly expect the instrumental texture to sound like the Berlin Philharmonic's but for forthright pace and muscular line you could not really fault the interpretation At moments indeed it struck to the very heart of the music: 1 have for instance rarely heard the introduction to Act 2 played with such stark passion Among the singers a promising young dramatic soprano Susan Stacey stood out Her account of the enormously challenging role of Leonore as accurately pitched and thoughtfully phrased There's a steely gleam in the upper register of her evenly produced voice and she cuts a handsome figure on stage I only hope her talent isn't prematurely exploited Further down the line Geraint Dodd had a good old blast at Florestan and Denise Mulholland made a doesn't aim to startle or shock There are some nice touches particularlv in the domestic first scene hut the dialogue is flatly delivered and the staging of climactic encounter with Pizarro generated 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