The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 16

1 6 The Sydney Morning Herald Friday, November 4, 1988 11 Arts eL7 THEATRE degenerate Blanche may be, but she still carries her ideals aloft like a torch, proudly on her "dark By interval we have the makings of a fine play. What of the shorter second half? For me, disappointment. The playwright's strongly crafted machinery grinds; the screws of coincidence, conspiracy and casual bloody-mindedness turn; Blanche suffers and suffers. The play does become a tearjerker after all. force of nature charging boar-like towards the promised land.

With this collision of cultures and characters established, we see Blanche not just as a little girl lost, tearing at our heartstrings in her desperation, but also as a destructive element as deadly to Stanley as he will be to her. And indeed we discover in Stanley, as his domestic empire begins to crumble before the force of Blanche's desperation, a desperation employed and sometimes devastating in the unexpectedness of the results. Take the little scene with The Young Man. The ache in Vivien Leigh's playing of this evocation of loneliness had tears pricking at our eyes long ago. Our Australian star shows us, instead, resilience, a kind of crippled life force struggling for acceptance.

The unexpectedness tickles laughter as well as sympathy from us, and on that response she moves towards the boy to kiss him. The scene could easily become ridiculous. The modulation, unforced in its pathos, instead made me think of Puccini. Martin Shaw is very strong and wholly unsentimental as Stanley, funny and frightening by turns, yet human in his subtlety: an animal in search of a soul. Katrina Foster as Stella is very much present and positive as a force of earthy goodness; and Max Cullen as Mitch shy, clumsy, a mother's boy about to lose his mother adds yet another dimension of loneliness and loss.

Such acting offers consolation as drama dwindles into mere "strong Brando. All the same, for me Streetcar remained at best a superior tearjerker. Given this prejudice, I can best praise what is good in this revival by saying that for about two-thirds of the performance, until the interval, I changed my mind. What changed it was a radical revision of approach by a director looking for the life behind the play's histrionic opportunities. His reading shows us Blanche's fatal intrusion into her sister's home as seen from Stanley's point of view.

From that unexpected angle, we see comedy comedy, it is true, often tense with resentment and danger; comedy often jarred by shudders of anguish; but nevertheless comedy, firmly based in a collision of values and manners that transforms the calculated histrionics in the writing of the star parts. The collision is between two of the many Americas the America of the Deep South, of the "purple dream" of aristocracy governing a rural empire of cotton, slaves and trade; and the new America, populist, multicultural, mechanised, materialistic, the America of Stanley, the son of Polish immigrants, the ail-American returned soldier, a We discover in Stanley a desperation to match hers, and made the more moving by inarticulacy. H. G. KIPPAX A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE By Tennessee Williams With Angela Punch McGregor.

Martin Shaw, Max Cullen, Katrina Foster Director: Robin Lefevre. Set and Costumes: Kristian Fredrikson Her Majesty's Theatre, November 2 HAVE not been an admirer of this famous play. I saw it first in London in 1949 directed by Olivier as a vehicle for Vivien Leigh as Blanche. Stanley, Blanche's brother-in-law and destroyer, the counterpoise of the play, was acted at low voltage and Blanche's plight became an excuse for a virtuoso study of pathos. It failed because its star did not command that kind of virtuosity.

She was too cool, too collected, Scarlett on the rocks. Her Blanche in the subsequent film, directed by Kazan, was much superior, indeed very moving when set against the elemental passion and violence of to match hers, and made the more moving by inarticulacy. The comedy can be troubling. When Blanche denounces Stanley to his wholly devoted wife as an ape, we watch an act of petulant violence as brutal as his outbursts. Yet from this speech there whirls up feebly, but achingly, her commitment to a dream of "such things as art, as poetry and music that we have to make grow.

And cling to." Infuriating and Angela Punch McGregor and Martin Shaw in Streetcar named Desire comedy often tense with resentment and danger. lake's vision trapped in a spiral of the senses A EM I I 1 uvy lis Many may disagree. But there should be little disagreement about the production's virtues the towering set cocooned in half-lights and shadows; the intelligence of Lefevre's approach; above all, splendid performances from the principals. Angela Punch McGregor has done nothing better, her sense of comedy (and irony and incongruity) is finely judged, very sure in the means 19: mAmtiJk i aiMammmui film iuit nrinnnr rxiinn i a GALLERIES ANNA JOHNSON Like a Blake of the video age, Pople presents the contemporary dilemma of men and women suspended in a perpetual sensual and cultural spiral. Pople's figures, like Blake's Paolo and Francesca, are trapped in a moving purgatory of words; diagrams and images.

Unlike Dante, or Blake's vision, they are not deprived of sensual pleasure but overloaded with it, and there is no certainty of heaven or hell. The promise of the water-colours is fulfilled in the large painting in the exhibition (in the second gallery) which really goes to town in its synthesis of 19th-century and contemporary style. The shimmering paint surface of this work could be seen as both highly romantic and gestural and at the same time computer-generated. The shifting rainbow colours affect the eye like the blur of fast-moving vivid particles. Appropriately it is titled Painting with Photo Finish.

Pople's crammed references bring to mind Delacroix's high decadent painting The Death of hi iiij ji ii 1 1 hi 1 1 i i ayu mi i in Ji-in nil iii MWJimwuiun f'-l II 'ukuiiuii jgMWtt.inmm, amU'r jWMS-inwe Ii I jj m'tki rotimiil jninainnr-iin-ii ton-tn jp I Vw 4w jkit nttr-iMiiaiinw 111 1 umiriiii itii rrrrr -irrrrr- Sardanapalus which illustrates slaves, horses and worldly possessions all heaped on the king's bed to form a funeral pyre. The sheer scale of Crash, a huge sculpture installation by Simeon Nelson and Stephen Crane, also creates theatrical impact. The work, which occupies the well-lit raw space at E. M. R.

Gallery, consists of four huge (5-metre-high) sheet-metal sculptures in the archetypal geometric forms of cubism the spiral, circle and hexagon. The large pieces, in their precarious, almost floating state it's not magic, they are actually fixed into the cement with long steel rods defy gravity and compose a graceful dance within the large airy space. Like the ambitious monuments of the Third International by Tatlin or the Italian futurists, the material and style of the work speak of modernist optimism and a faith in industry. Simeon Nelson's experience in film-set construction bears a direct influence upon the sculptures, reminding one of a set from Metropolis, This impermanent or stagey feel is reinforced by the lightness of the materials used. Unlike the massive bronze public sculptures of the 1960s and 1970s, this work shows the human touch of smudges and footprints on the metal.

Crash will continue in its ambitious and successful use of space until it falls to earth on Sunday. Booroora, a cute little salon piece with an Aboriginal father and a Hispanic mother by Ross Edwards, a difficult 12-tonish Song and Dance for Gabor by George Dreyfus, and the cerebral but sonically intriguing Spirits' Spring, by Phil Treloar. There were also duos by Bottesini and Armand Russell, plus respectable performances of Mozart K.498 and Brahms Opus 1 14. It was a long program. But it had a common denominator in the uncommonly expert clarinetting of the celebrant.

For four decades Australian music has been in his debt, and he continues to show the others how the clarinet should behave. 1 at points the way TWO exhibitions this week display an unusual energy, ambition and theatrical scale. At E. M. R.

Gallery (30 Renwich St, Redfern) is a collaborative drawing and sculpture show by Stephen Crane and Simeon Nelson, the highlight of which is a large, futurist-inspired sculpture installation. More modest in its presentation but possibly more intense and eclectic in its references is a watercolour exhibition by Rodney Pople at the Ray Hughes Gailery (1st floor, 270 Devonshire St, Surry Hills). The small, jewel-like drawings in the show function as microcosms for Pople's large canvases, an example of which was exhibited in last year's Moet et Chandon touring exhibition. Pople's preoccupations are with the fractured and diverse sensations of the television age. Within the compositional spirals of each watercolour dance a veritable cyclone of artistic references and icons Matisse's goldfish, Delacroix's Tiger, Uta-maro's courtesans, profiteroles, crucifixes, Buddha and Keats's Grecian urn to name a few.

Such eclecticism creates comedy as in the instance of fictitious meetings between a Japanese concubine and His Master's Dog in one drawing. But the effect, is not merely comic. Pople in his diversity has succeeded in creating a rich personal mythology. Gabor MUSIC FRED BLANKS CENTURY CONCERT Gabor Reeves (clarinet) with Rachel Valler (piano), Alex Todicescu (viola), Georg Pedersen (cello), Ron Reeves (percussion), Stephen Reeves (double bass) Music by Mozart, Brahms and others Verbrugghen Hall, Conservatorium, October 30 THE entire known repertoire of music for a trio of clarinet, double bass and percussion consisting of three Choreography by GRAEME SYDNEY ROGER si jf I ummtiVliunmkUiUMtnMnmiTTiin tiMUm lurnrtim works taking all of 19 minutes was played at the Conservatorium on Sunday. It had been specially composed for the occasion.

This was the Gabor Reeves Century Concert. But anyone who expected Gabor Reeves to hobble on stage with a long white beard and a walking-frame supporting his clarinet was headed for a surprise. He was celebrating his 60th birthday plus the 40th anniversary of his arrival in Australia from Hungary. His son Stephen is a double bass player and his son Ron is a percussionist. Their professionally competent participation led to those strange trios.

These were 1987 W. G. Walkley Awarcl W. G. Watkley Award DANCE COMPANY Michael Gawenda's Award is TIME Australia's sixth major award since the Australian edition started, and fifth major award won in the past 12 months.

It highlights TIME Australia's virtual scooping of the pool of all the major print section awards for which the magazine has been eligible. If you want to keep up with the best in Australian journalism, read TIME Australia, Australia's only international weekly news magazine. It's an award winner, time after time. TIME Australia is proud to have won the G. Walkley Award for Australian Journalism for the Best Feature (Print) for the second year running.

This year's Award was won by Michael Gawenda for his May 23, 1988, TIME Australia cover story: "Echoes of a Darker Age; Australia's Nazi War Crimes Trials." Last year, TIME Australia won the G. Walkley Awards for Best Feature (Print) with Frank Robson's "Deaths in Custody; The Black View" and David May won the Best News Photograph Award with his cover picture for the same issue. Conducted by Music composed by Designed by IANNIS GEORGE MURPHY WOODWARD XENAKIS I FREEDMAN Powerhouse Museum, State Bank, Macquarie exciting theatrical debut greatest living performer of contemporary music" "He can make a stage a place of wonders" 0 Barnes Vk "The of the major ballet scores of the Century" CtveBames Listener MM SCAM NOVEMBER 4-26 OPERA THEATRE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE Choreography Graeme MURPHY. Music Iannis XENAKIS. Music Director Roger WOODWARD Set Design George FREEDMAN.

Costume Design Jennifer IRWIN, lighting Design John MONTGOMERY and featuring the SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY ORCHESTRA BOOK NOW at the Sydney Opera House 20525 or Ticketek Agencies'266 4800.