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

FILMS Daily airgraph anil Morning Pont Friday oremher 27 19SI is The Not for A Renaissance in i Repertory hearted half-awake spectators more costly mesmerised by small screen serials and to give others a hint of what the theatre can do more forcefully on its own ground? Could it also be the frustrations of free-lance acting in London and sitting by the telephone? The greater importance which schools and universities now place on the role of the modern theatre? The hard work of producers who have the courage and the jaower to rely on their tastes and no one What matters is the healthier provincial prospect: and perhaps the healthiest sign of all is that no formula can explain it Look for a moment at the Bristol Old Vic and at the new Nottingham Playhouse two of our leading companies operating outside London Both have anniversaries coming up both within the limits of their worthy ambitions can be considered highly successful and neiiher bears the least resemblance to the other except in offering local playgoers an intelligent choice of plav in surroundings that London ers must envy Old and New The Theatre Royal at Bristol whose foundation stone was laid 200 years ago next Monday is not only the oldest playhouse in the country but also among the most charmingly successful in the relationship between actor and audience The Nottingham Playhouse I which opened nearly a year ago to the sounds of civic discord and a Napoleonic production of Corio-lanus" is among the most pleasant and gracefully effective examples of post-war theatre architecture But the play kseM is the thing by which every theatre most ultimately be judged: ad both Nottingham and Bristol have met thia challenge The Bristol Old Vic eompany has grown considerably in recent years It now pots on nearly 30 plays a year at the Little and the Theatre Royal as wd! as touring extensively running a drama school and co-operating with the drama department of the university Although Nottingham cannot boast two theatres under one artistic director the new Playhouse remains one of the few repertory theatres which ever dared to mount a repertoire It is a repertoire moreover of runge and controversy hopp ng about from Wilde and Shakespeare to Bill Naughton and Alan Si 11 it oe wi'th a double HvM now of Sophocles and Moliere Nor need we imagine that Bristol and Nottingham are pleasing of the people all of the time or that their jxilicies would work I elsewhere Much depends on the character of the theatres them- 1 selves not to speak of their directors: Val May at Bristol and: John Neville at Nottingham But it does suggest that the demand is widespread if anyone knows how to meet it ERIC SHORTER THE legend on the provincial theatre hoardings used to be familiar and like many of its kind steeped in myth-j ology it said from the So-and-So (a West End theatre) And everyone knew it They knew from the names of the actors to begin with none of whom had ever appeared in London except perhaps in a TV commercial Nor did it take much research to unearth the fact that the alleged hit had merely spent a few draughty months in Shaftesbury Avenue several years ago and was now running round the local repertory theatres before being handed over to the amateurs Things are no longer quite like that False claims continue to be made for plays London cast is one to watch out for) and most of the reps are still largely dependent on London for modern plays But the pattern in the provinces is gradually changing and not before time Pre-London touring is now regarded as little more than a series of dress rehearsals to hich provincial guinea-pigs are gladlv admitted Post-London touring is even less inspiring because few stars can be persuaded to go on a road rhat no longer seems to lead anywhere in particular except away from rhe television studiqs And so we are left with the local repertories traditionally in the red A bleak outlook? Well red is a colour most of them are used to and the battle for survival continues The difference now is that it is being waged on an altogether healthier front The future at last begins to look hopeful: more than a question of mere survival possibly one of prosperity Higher Standard No longer are the provinces the Siberia of drama to which old players withdraw in banishment Nor is it now considered to be a sign of defeat for an established oung Uest End player to join a provincial theatre company He prefers the hard but coherent I sense of teamwork to the London scramble for occasional hirings in any medium that offers work Authors naturally still regard a West Fnd production as the status symbol of greatest earning power But they seem less reluctant than they used to be to let the better provincial companies give a play its first performance Chiefly however it is the higher standard of play and performance that has injected new life into the repertory movement and improved its public esteem Mho is resjjonsible for making theatregoing outside London so rewarding? The Arts Council with its modest widespread encourage-jment of longer rehearsals and 1 better plays? Television and its tendency to empty theatres of half- Bluffing THL basis of 36 Hours (Empire A is a good idea though it seems to be one better suited to development in print than on him and indeed it derives from a book called Beware of the Dog" by Roald Dahl For this is a spy story and this subject seems to me to present a problem in the cinema hich has become more serious of recent years Nowadays the essence of spy stories is a wild improbability and paradoxically if they are factual rather than fictional this element seems to increase often to the point of fantasy whereas the essence of the cinema is to present reality the occasional success with a Cocteau or Wellsian fantasy is the exception to the ruie What the reader's imagination will accept the eye will reiect unless the director is unusually persuasive as Joseph Mankiewicz was with that emoy-ab spy story Five In his handling of 36 George Seaton does little to bring reality to a fantastic plot It is a war-time story starting just before D-IXi with an American Into ligence officer who knows a 1 the deta is of the invasion plan bcng sent to lisbon to contact an agent in the German Embassy Amnesia Ruse Sounds unlikely: might be swallowed if only the episode looked like As it is this Major Pike wanders round the Lisbon water-fr nt with an notice ttten all over him When he gets diugged and flown to Germany in a eofhn it seems all he deserves His next appearance is in an American military hospital at least according to the notice on the gate and here I think the film makes a mistake in not keeping us in the dark a little longer as to the real place and actual date The hoax should surely have dawned on us as s'owlv as it does on the major the hospital being an iborate reconstruction on German soil to persuade him along with other details such as American newspapers dated 1950 that the war is over He has been suffering from amnesia all these years of course he will talk freely His hair has been tinted grey Ms eyes doped so that he can't see Clearly and around him are American-speaking Germans suitably disguised as hospital pjtients and staff his attendants being a nurse from a concentration camp (Eve Marie Saint) and a psychiatrist (Rod Taylor) Knowing as we do that the Russians have reconstructed the mam street of a typical American city for -he training of their sp es there's no reason to reiect the German ruse out of hand except that the usual method of torture would seem a simpler way of obtaining the information Absurd Escape There is in fact conflict on this very question between the psychiatrist and an man (Werner Peters) the psychiatr st supposedly taking a purely intellectual view of the case which is never suggested in the performance Nor does the major (James Garner) seem the sort of man to be sent on a delicate mission consequently his duel of wits with both psychiatrist and man when he belatedly rumbles the trick comes to little The opportunities offered by the conflct which develops between By PATRICK GIBBS the SS and other Nazi organisations resulting so ironically in the retection of the information extracted arc simiharly neglected and all ends not so much in improbability as absurdity with nurse and patient making a escape Indeed the him can only be said to do one thing really well and that's to bury a good idea Unheroic Hotel Marcel Hotel dn Nord (Academy Cinema Club of 1918 provides a reminder that style is the great preservative It is a pleasingly economical little piece in which the story moves on steadily and logically from the early scene when a young couple bungle a suicide pact in an hotel bedroom But while the plot moves in the rare theatrical sense by developing characters it does not move geographically hence the importance of the setting the little hotel overlooking a lock on the Seine canal being at once romantic yet ordinary ordinary enough to keep unusual goings-on down to earth The hotel characters too both staff and guests who are so naturally introduced over a festive supper are made to seem ordinarv Ondy the girl whose suicide fails and the middle-aged man trying to escape differently from his past are unusual and it is with the ironic development of their relationship that the him is concerned It remains a satisfying study in the realistic style beautifully constructed and owing much to the acting of Jouvet Blier Perrier and Aumont I'm not so sure about some of the women Annabella very pretty Arletty very stagey Holiday Pop Seyeral films have presented pop singers Every a Holiday (Warner seems to take the process a stage further the him as a whole making an attempt I think to qualify as a work of fop art" As such I would say rather guardedly that a trifle old-fashioned guardedly because this isn't a field in which I set up as a sound judge though it occurs to me that soundness with its heavy jsarental associations would not be a term much prized in the world of pop criticism: indeed the further I go the more I feel I should leave this hm to our young critic who differs from me so sweetly (as an 18-year-o certainly should) in her film critic sm on another page once a month She writes on this film to-morrow Will she single out first I wonder Nicholas Roeg's extraordinary colour photography of the holiday camp background as giving the film a unity it might otherwise have lacked? The plot how these old fashioned terms will keep cropping up! merely assembles a number of vocalists instrumentalists and comedians to work at the camp and rather leaves them to get on with it What seems to me traditional rather than pop are the characters some of them are asked to sustain The Hon Timothv (Mike Samel complete with monocle and la-de-dah accent recalls a dude from Fdwardian farce the rich (Grazina Frame) and the aunt who insists on her niece having an operatic training are of similar vintage: as for the maestro who's teaching her (Ron Moody) he is Even if your husband were a millionaire probably be wearing Maj orica pearls If you were fabulously wealthy you'd have a real pearl necklace worth about £3000 It would live in the bank while you happily wore Majorica simulated pearls Majorica have been known on the Continent for year They are so utterly perfect that only a real expert could he trusted to know them from the costliest jearl- in the world I his is why many wealthy women choose Majorica while their oyster-made pearls are in sale keeping they know that no-one will recognise Majorica reproductions Heavy Hint Department I ry on Majorica choose your favourite stvle then drop outsie hints about them to the man in vour tile How delighted he'll Je to surprise you with the verv present you wanted most Majorica internationally guaranteed for five years From 5 gn MAJORICA I Ml LATFD Farh Mainrira Strklart it pMtmnlttd Ihrniighnut th BARCELONA LONDON FARTS NEW YORK ROME interiors to delight any connoisseur of the style The backgrounds in fact look both beautiful and horrible which is exactly how Chabrol has regarded his central character based on the murderer Landru who during the First World War ussd to attract women of property and then kill them this being his idea for supporting a wife and four children I attribute the view to the director rather than the author Francoise Sagan because there seems to be so little of her in it Landru's procedure of advertising in the papers for a wife making a conquest then luring the victim to his country retreat is ewed poetically and also musically each lady being associated th a heroine of opera The final stage with the body burning in a stove is seen humorously neighbours being annoyed at the smoke and smell While all this will no doubt appeal to specialists of the macabre I myself could find little enjoyment or interest The association between mass murder on the Western Front and the smaller-scale slaughter at home is not developed and the motives behind Landru's actions remain enigmatic In this part Charles Denner makes much of ever hint of character he is allowed and a long procession of ladies led by Micheie Morgan and Danielle Darrieux go to their death elegantly in some dazzling dresses Inept dubbing deals another sort of death all round A programme note to The Troublemaker (La Contmentale A tells us that Theodore Flicker divides his talents between directing collaborating on the storv and screen play and playing one of the key roles" Cruel to divide this talent rather than concentrate it Mr surrealistic view of the graft game as played on a zany who tries to open a coffee bar in Greenwich Village has its funny moments widely spaced in a desert of amateurishness Don Basilio from The Barber of Pop should surely be of the present and pop criticism when it develops will surely have no memories I have the idea that even a contemporary comparison would be off-beat The aunt and teacher coming to the camp to try and find the runaway niece stimulates a little action so does the rivalry between the Hon and a singer (John Leyton) hoping to be discovered in a talent competition which is to be televised of course With this final sequence in the camp's theatre the film comes into its or rather somebody showing itself to be effective television material after the style of Top of the Pops at one remove Our view is from behind the cameras and in fron of the monitors a view obviously thought fascinating to filmgoers to judge from the frequency with which it comes up Elsewhere there are numbers for Freddie and the Dreamers for Mr Same Mr Leyton and Miss Frame for the Baker twins and the Moios th Charles Ilovd Pack as the camp's manager an amiable master of ceremonies and Liz Fraser his secretary a no less amiable mistress But even pop art one assumes needs unity of style (which we had in the Beatles' him) and here I t'ound the trad tional elements disturbing The dances in fact recall those in which revolutionised musical choreography when it came to London in 1947 and that is a long time ago I confess to being alive then Pop-wise I'm afraid I must be considered quite dead Domestic Slaughter In Claude Chabrol's Bluebeard ijacev colour photography (by Jean Rabier) also plays a prom nent part Even more prominent are the backgrounds so fastidiously reproduced scenes in the Luxembourg Gardens recalling the canvases of Tissot on an off-day and a succession of art nouveau s0ltr! of Folorold Corporatlw The Worst Spectator Sport in the World The business machine ART DAVIS heaviest members they play next to the wall and wear padded protective hcmets and jackets The two Seconds are small wiry boys who go in under the Walls' legs like terriers to flush the ball out when it becomes stuck Outside these are the Third Fourth and Line who wait hopefully for the ball to emerge: if it does they rush at it launching vicious kicks which usually fetch up on their opponents' shins Behind the bully is Fly whose job is to keep up a running commentary on the whereabouts of the bail often less easy than it sounds Behind hm again is Long a kind of full back Scoring contrary to popular opinion is perfectly possible Admittedly no one has scored a goal on St Andrew's Day for more than 50 years but roughly the equivalent of tries in rugger are comparatively common The referee uses nothing so ungentlemanly as a whistle but controls the game by word of mouth He penalises fouls only in response to appeals hence the continuous cries of Sneaking (getting in front of the ball) Furking (heeling it) Hands and Playing on the Occasionally one hears an outraged "Biting! and sometimes when hirsute old boys are playing Pulling my beard! Serious injuries are surprisingly By DUFF round a form of 18th-century mud-larking The playing area is a strip of ground 110 yards long and six yards wide beside a wall built in 1717 The ball is about half the size of a football and the basic object is to coerce it by a combination of brute force and guile to the far end of the wall To do this you may have your hand- and feet but not your elbows or knees on the ground and vou play the bal with feet shins and knees only You are not allowed to strike an opponent but you may certaimly knuckle him that is put your clenched hst in his face and grind his eves and nose about with your knuckles Another good method of making someone lose interest in the ball is to apply your elbow to his backbone and with all your weight on it run it up and down his spine A variety of other illegal but effective tricks can be practised surreptitiously such as stamping on hands or clapping handfuls of mud in their mouths Of the 10 players a dc eight make up the bully or scrum They pack down much as in rugger and bind on each other for a combined shove Three of them the Walls form the blunt instrument of the team: the AT 1135 to-morrow morn-ins 10 of the most academic boys at Eton will form up against 10 of the less intelligent for the 124th annual Wall Game between Collegers (the scholars) and Oppidans so called because they live in the town (Latin oppidum rather than the original college buildings The St Andrew's Day match is the best known event of Eton's winter Press and television cameras try generally in vain to probe through the fog and the steam rising from the players Enterprising sound engineers dangle microphones from the top of the Wall to pick up the oaths and groans of agony that emanate from the struggling heap below Yet very few of those present have any clear idea of how the game is payed For this they can hardiy be blamed because the ball sometimes does not move and often is not seen for 10 or 15 minutes on end The Wall Game must be the worst spectator sport in the world It is however fascinating to plav and much more subtic than it As The rules one must adm are odd they seem to have grown up haphazardly few Although tremendous pressure builds up inside the bully movement is so slow that you are rarely subjected to a shock that mght break a bone You can however get nastily twisted stretched and compressed On wet days the mud is sometimes six inches deep and on dry days a fine gritty dust is ground off the wall so that your face and elbows are fiercely sandpapered If a player is in real trouble he may shout Air" at which everyone is supposed to lay off But a story is told of a master at Eton whose refereeing policy was simple: if the person appealing was still capable of calling for air he need it So he would let the game go on It may well be wondered where amid such discomfort the fun comes in The answer is in the scientific application of force Even if you weigh 20 stone and push like an elephant you achieve nothing unless you are a master of the fine art of deflecting undermining or annihilating the oncoming human bulldozers The skill in short is in knowing when where and in what drection to shove and in deploying your arms and legs in the most effective pattern Some knowledge of bodily mechanics is also a help: it is extraordinary for instance what pressure you can exert to prise people away from the wail by levering sideways with your knee using your hip as the fulcrum St Andrew's Day is the climax of the Wall Game season As there are only about 70 Collegers and more than 1100 Oppidans the result of the game might at hrst sight appear inevitable In fact this is far from being the case The Oppidans though generally larger are handicapped by the fact that they play for only one or two seasons The Collegers on the other hand are indoctrinated into the more tin-p easant tricks of tire game from the moment they arrive at the school and so make up in cunning and viciousness what they lack in weght One of the most curious features of the day is always the crowd of parents who stand shivering in their best country suits up to their hocks in mud From where they are neither the posit on of the ball nor the identity of individual players is often discernible There can be few audiences in the world so totally baffled and yet so ready to make authoritative pronouncements about hat is going on that becomes a pleasure machine The new Polaroid Land camera makes colour pictures i 60 seconds black-and-whites in 10 seconds It also makes money And it can even make your week-ends more fun! To make the pictures is simple You focus then push a button pull a film packet from the back of the camera wait a moment and you can peel off your finished photo i Polaroid I to damage reports In fact there are profitable uses for Polaroid cameras in verv nearly every business and profession our photo dealer will be happy to show vou this remarkable new camera as ell as ot her Polaroid camera models that can make colour photos in a minute ami blark-and-whites just 10 seconds See him soon Hatheld Herts To make money ith photograph is simply good business And long before ordinary pictures would be readv the pictures you take with a Polaroid camera can be in the hands Helping to sell to demonstrate to record Advertisers can use them for layouts Physicians can illustrate case histories with instant photos and insurance inspectors can attach pictures POLAROID CAMERA Limited Queensway House Queensuay.