The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 12

ARTS GUARDIAN Thursday July 30 1981 12 ption sayY or, every ca is worth a thousand television pictures v.v:.!- Nancy Banks-Smith reviews the Royal Weddjhg through the eyes, of the deaf hard of hearing on a word you know he can't handle. 0 Lord, don't let Horace say oranges and lemons. But carried away by the life garls and keers and the csea of hugh man faces and Prince of Wales very mucks A mman of the twentieth century," there was no holding Horace. "The bells of St Clament Dames, which say wnjn js and lemons nu joayn they happy sad to ehe saunts of In dn" (the bells of St Clement Danes which say Oranges and Lemons now join their happy sound to the sounds of Buckingham Palace is insight." The cheers are ever lubber," cried Horace, breaking down completely and wiping like Earl Spencer, a tear from his aye." 1 myself was holding my po ct handkerehif before my streaming ayes. God sieve the Queen SOME TALK of Tom Fleming and some of Andrew Gardner but for me there is no wedding commentator -to touch Horace, the BBC-2 computer.

Horace was BBC-2's contribution to the Year of the Disabled. By providing instant captions it was hoped he would increase the enjoyment of the deaf and I don't doubt that he did. One of Horace's own disabilities was that with a vocabulary of only 8,000 words, he had to translate into captions the commentary of BBC-l's Tom Fleming. Mr Fleming is the vox humana of the BBC, a commentator lush as plush. His troths are plighted, his toasts are pledged, his churches are "pale as a bridge on her wedding morning." Mr Fleming, like the true, the blushful Hippocrene, has a purple-stained mouth.

Horace's attempts to get all this down on paper, so to speak, read at times like Daisy I. was iiiildly concerned to hear Lady. Diana promise to marry Philip Charles Arthur George (a slight rearrangement of the Prince's Christian names), and wondered of she had inadvertently married Priiice Philip. Prince Charles, in "his turn, cleverly promised all thy goods with thee I share." Impatient of human error, the sub-titles overrode all this and printed what they ought to have said. The bells were wringing, according to Horace, as the Royal Family made their way home, including a certain canon Lips who puzzled me as, on the right hand side is where Grlnldng Gibbons had his workshop, who carved so in St Paul's).

By now, to Hor- ace, the Prince of Wales had; ascended the Redcar pet with Dew of Edinburgh, Prince Andrew in val eun fin. Prince Eddfrd in morning dress and udder members of the royal fasmli. "Here," said Horace, much moved is a seen that outshines any. We weight for thris gate moment." As the bride (or Lady Dja na, Horace called her) foamed out The Queen Mother had a cloud of prays round her face while the Queen was' "wearing ere sheen, sparkling with qui and saphires." Horace, evidently a right old softie, speculated about the contents of. the Queen's handbag.

Certainly eyed think today there might be a po cU handkerehif in it, he offered mistily. Some of his commentary took on a surrealist life of its own On the right hand sid is where-crin ling gi bns had his workshop, who caufrds so, many thins in sid St Paul's (which I translate Ashford and at others Doctor Spooner and, at best, both. "Heers the seen," cried Horace, who doesn't spell very well yet pushes on regardless. a po No pier of colour." Here is the Archbishop of Canterbury in his new cope of silver ma toe rjul made in nine tin twenty He has chosen this moment to ware it." There is Princess Anne wearing an a masing outfit. Very sump.

Shs flat a big firll down, the sid." (I find very sump one of Horace's more felicitous flights, it wrappd the. whole day up beautifully). Edward Fox as he "Aristocracy is not an accident of prepares to play another nob's role behind a stfSffS nappe for some time -until I identified him wuh relief as Captain Mark Phillips. Even the parts of London I know well were transformed by Horace into something rich and strange. Fleet Street for instance Past all those' qne dfl Fleet Street restronts, the printers pup and the newspaper people have tunt auth." As the air to the throne approached St Clement Danes, I felt my toes tie themselves in anticipatory knots.

I began to pray as when, during a pause in the conversation, you see a stammerer about to embark man Scott matched them with aggressive but flowing guitar work. And, over' this almost heavy-rock backing, a vastly improved, elegant looking Chrissic Hynde sang or half-sp'oke her way through songs of an emotional intensity and subtlety not usually possible against such stirring playing. It was a difficult balance, but she matched her band's playing with her own guitar work, while singing powerfully enough to ensure that her tough, personal or emotional lyrics were never swamped. New songs like the melodic English Roses, the ballad Birds Of Paradise, and the sneering Jealous Thoughts (a worthy successor to Private Life, which preceded it on stage) were interspersed with old favourites from a seductive Brass In Pocket to an emotional Kid. The support band were the excellent Bureau, an offshoot from Dexy's Midnight Runners, who are still waiting for some of Dexy's commercial success.

An eight-piece, dominated by the old Dexy's horn section, The Bureau played a sophisticated, sometimes jazzy blend of stirring new soul songs that would have been improved if the singer, Archie Brown, hadn't tried quite so hard to look aggressive. For the final song of the night they joined The Pretenders on stage (along with a Stray Cat), for a elorious work-out on Jackie' Wilson's soul classic Higher And Higher. Both bands are at Hammersmith Odeon tonight. SHAFTESBURY. THEATRE Michael Billington They're Playing Our Song MARTIN SHAW has taken over from Tom Conti in the hit musical packed even at the start of the week.

They're Playing Our Song at the Shaftesbury. And the result is certainly a radical change. Where Mr Conti played the composer-hero with a likeable irony, Mr Shaw endows him with a Bronxish twang and a wary southpaw wit. You feel that whatever brotherhood Mr Shaw is a member of, it certainly isn't the Songwriters' Guild. But even if he sometimes looks as if he'd be happier carrying a violin-case than caressing a piano, he does bring the show a welcome touch of asperity.

Neil Simon's story of a composer and lyricist struggling to get it together is, for all its flaky humour, simply an old-fashioned Manhattan fairytale. Dry as a sea-biscuit and more caustic than soda, Mr Shaw does add a flavour of bitters. And even if his singing-voice isn't going to endanger Pa varolii, he lends lines like I was going to take a Valium but I couldn't get my teeth unclenched" that wry desperation that is pure New York. On a second hearing, Marvin Hamlisch's score (give or take a title-song) doesn't seem any more remarkable but Gemma Craven's kooky lyricist wins one's heart all musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. of the class, coach," he described the of jarts of veil," the tiny bodies and gate big- skirt," and the bouquet in white and-gream." The sub-titles for what Horace called the marriage vus." were pre-recorded.

The spelling got better. the reporting worse. YThe subtitles came down pretty sharpish on carnal appetites, sin, fornication and such as have not the gift, of con-tinency," though the Archbishop, possibly feeling it was not quite nice, had omitted all this. Picture by E. Hamilton-West nised had ever been helpful to him.

He told me about the time he c-nfronled an intruder in the flat where he lives with Joanna David and tlieir six-year-old daughter. "Don't I know you said the intruder. "Yes," said Fox, clearly thinking this was no time for false modesty. So the intruder asked for his autograph, for his mother. Fox said he would do better than that he would give him a signed photograph.

Crisis over. Cool upper cucumber. Fox is not looking too far beyond Quartermaine, but he wants eventually to set up a season of classic plays, to enter the lists as actor-manager. Maybe Hamlet again, before he is too old he is 44, but then so was Forbes-Robertson when he did the Dane, and Fox has listened to antique records of that, and taken heart. Certainly Sheridan, preferably School For Scandal.

And by hook or by crook, Othello Fox thinks we have become too obsessed with the Moor as the big, thick-lipped buck, sexually magnetic to Desdemona. He reckons Othello has misread her interest in him from the start, which makes the tragedy inevitable. All he needs for such a season is, say, the Round House and a lot of money. He was not saying much about it. But it was a historic day.

Unusual omens. Victory snatched from desperation the impossible done. Stiff upper hopefuls, and outside the hotel, in St James's, something like sunlight. and Tristan und National Opera) and, like Mari Anne Haggander's Eva, was a matter of good and less good moments rather than an integrated whole. The one unconventional touch in the fluent Meistersinger production was the casting of Hermann Prey as Beckmesser and the one delicate step away from period realism the dressing him up as Wagner's 19th-century- critic Hanslick.

A singing not a barking Beckmesser, a fusspot intellectual rather than a grotesque in practice, not as illuminating as it sounds, though Prey and Weikl play well together (and the production's strong points is the sense of easy, long-standing relationships between people). Graham Clark from the English National Opera did well as a David with metal in his voice rather than natural high notes. A Walther one day There are complex manoeuvres going on in the Bavarian political-cultural world. Munich officials think Wolfgang Wagner will retire in 1984 and Bayreuth can then be annexed to the State theatre network this at a time when the Minister for Culture, Dr Hans Maier, has put through a scheme for placing that network under the central direction of a Generalintendant (August Everding) and has got away with it in the Baravian Parliament birth but a condition of the soul." bright enough for university, he was also not brash enough for the stage, by which his parents lived. His father, Robin Fox, was a well-known theatrical agent, his mother's father a playwright.

"I was too introverted for the stage. They didn't think I had the temperament to be an actor." He had left school with no idea what he wanted to do except that I wanted to be very dissolute." Was he Not at all. These things arc all in the head." When "no left the army, he still had no idea. But went to RADA, anyway, and started his ten years in rep, which he loved. (One of the conditions-of surviving as an actor is to love rep.) he used to complain to Carol Reed, his father-in-law by his first wife, about the difficulties of the profession, Reed replied: "Yes, but what else would wc do Fox never had an answer to that.

He'd already 1ried being a manager for Marks and Spencer. r.obin Fox was not Edward Fox's agent, but while Losey was still casting The Go-Between, it so happened that a Somerset Maugham play Edward had made cropped up in the TV schedules. Robin Fox was very ill and about to go into hospital, but insisted on phoning Loscy to tell him to watch it that night. Edward Fox got the Trimmingham part, which led on to his most extensive success in movies, as the hired killer in Day Of The Jackal the film that made his face familiar. I asked Fox if being recog Hugh Hebert meets Hnaffmrn HALF WAY through our conversation, the hall porter burst in like a messenger from another world, or another production, in some feeble imitation of Wodc-house.

"Excuse me sir," he said, the performance well over the top, excuse me, but we've won the third Test." Trembling with excitement, or shock, he related the dropped catches, the speedy Willis, the scattered stump. And Edward Fox beamed. This was, he seemed to suggest, something like service. The porter began to apologise, but Fox's pleasure was so patent, his thanks so gracefully expressed, that the good servant turned and retired happily to his pavilion, to live the game again. Perhaps," Fox said, "we are once again able to do the impossible." The manners, even in this moment of delirium, had been impeccable.

We talked a lot about manners, and about aristocracy. "The only good definition," Fox said, is the one you know as well as I do it's Mozart's. He said aristocracy was not an accident of birth, but a condition of the soul." It seemed quite natural to talk to Fox about such matters. The character he plays in Simon Gray's play, Quater-maine's Terms, which opens at the Queen's Theatre tonight directed by Harold -Pinter, comes well within Mozart's definition. Top drawer in bearing, an all-round charmer, declines to take his iloneliness out on others.

Quartermaine is only the ALBERT HALL, RADIO 3 Hugo Cole Wedding Prom BY HIS conjuror's art, Stravinsky takes the lamentations and tipsy celebrations of a Russian village wedding and, while even intensifying their characteristics, transforms them into an intricate and highly organised piece of music that comes over at fuli force in concert hall or theatre. But the Albert Hall is another matter. The jollity somehow evaporates before it reaches the audience. The soloists placed behind the four pianos have to work too hard and all intimacy is lost. The solo pianists unnamed in the programme surely for the first time in musical history were rather too discreet, as though afraid of upsetting the ensemble; yet much of Les' Noces should sound like a free-for-all, a film car chase in.

which collisions are miraculously avoided. Mendelssohn's gentler and poetic Midsummer Night's Dream music came off much better. In a wonderfully spacious yet still lively performance of the overture, every detail found its proper place and degree of importance. The Scherzo was not turned into a virtuoso scurry, the Nocturne was not sentimentalised. Here and elsewhere, Rozhdestvensky took a classical rather than romantic view, though he did allow Alan Civil an extra top in his horn solo; The March werit lightly and brightly stage xa'ther than church music Jennifer Smith sang and cleanly in the fairy solos without trying for too big a sound.

The finale, with the Wedding March fading into Ihe distance, the of fairy music with the Sullivanlike tune for the fairies and ending with the wind chords from the beginning of the overture, was pure magic. HAMMERSMITH Robin Denselow The Pretenders WHEN The Pretenders released their first album, over a year ago, their only problem was an inability quite to match such a stunning recording debut live on stage. This lime round, no such problems exist. The long-awaited follow-up album Pretenders 2 is released tomorrow week, and however good it proves to be (and it should be excellent if the new songs at the Palais were typical), it will still have been difficult to capture the intensity (hey are now capable of showing live. After their six-month layoff for recording, The Pretenders sounded like a brand new band.

The rhythm section of drummer Martin Chambers and bass player Pete Farndon were both slick and thunderous. James Honey- 'CatsJThe double album of the bit inciuaes tne nit single i over again. She has an unbeatable blend of roller-coaster energy and nervy vulnerability, dances like a dervish and boasts a molar flashing grin that would melt, an igloo, she is the sweet, to Mr Shaw's sour. And even if the show belongs to the hyper-efficient rather than truly inspired category of Broadway musical, it has one moment of visual magic as Douglas W. Schmidt's Manhattan projections recede into the distance as the characters tool along the freeway towards a dirty weekend in Quogue.

Sondheim the show isn't but the house loved it. CAMBRIDGE M. Grosvenor Myer Medieval Plays A SET of real medieval bagpipes, just like the ones in Breughel, plays the audience in to the Medieval Players, cycle of four plays The World, The Flesh, and the Devil. The atmosphere thus established is consolidated by their mode of presentation. There ds juggling and stilt walking dialogue is in actual Middle English staging is simple they start early enough to need no lighting for open production and the actors wear either no make up or crude character, masks.

It takes only a few minutes for the ear to get attuned to the odd pronunciations and idioms and the jingling couplets. The night I saw them in Cambridge, they opened with A Merry Play Between Johan Johan the Husbande, Tib his Wife, and Sir Johan the Preeste, attributed to John Heywood a standard knockabout comedy of cuckoldry, full of typical-late medieval anti' clerical ism. and notable for a lively drag performance by Mark Heap as Tib, and for' the strange emblematic uses to which a candle was put. The main piece The Play of the Conversion of Sir Jonathas the Jew by the Miracle of the Blessed Sacrament, concerned another familiar late medieval theme, the supposed obsessive desire of the Jews to desecrate tibe Host. (There is a rather nasty panel on the subject by Paolo Ucccllo in the ducal palace in Urbino I remember a coach load of English tourists busily buying reproductions without really looking at it, because it looks so The anonymous author o( the play was pretty confused, making his villainous Hebrew conspirators pray tn Almighty Machomete." There is, though, some sensuous verse as the merchant enumerates his jewels, a sort of forerunner of Jonson's Sir.

Epicure Mammon. For all the play's crudity George Gabriel as Sir Jonathas managed a most subtly sinister performance, and Carl Heap's contained some specular effects. eeooeooooeooe ONLY 3 PERFS IIlMTTTi SEPTEMBER 9 Turgenev's 9 9 MONTH IN THE COUNTRY? acclaimed in Isaiah Berlin's 9 9 translation "FrancescaAnnis 9 stunning T. Times) 9 splendid sequel to Peter Gill'slRiverside Cherry Orchard" (Times) 9 i 9 NOTIONAL rPTTnAainT? 3 01-9282252 5933 eoeveeoeoo 9 I 9 fvmk 9 Wf At-. 9 latest in a series of what you might count as upper class, honourable failures acted by Fox.

No points for naming Edward VIII in the expensive television serial There is a cherished canard that when he played Edward Windsor, he assumed a kind of royal mantle, so intense was his identification. Fox is rude about this belief, and maintains he never becomes that involved in any part he takes, keeps his psychological distance from them. The basis' of the persona of Edward's Edward was really in the part of Lord Trimmingham which Fox played in Joseph Losey's 1971 film of The Go-Betwcen. Fox nodded enthusiastic agreement witli the thesis his disagreements may be silent, but there is no mistaking when he agrees The face creases, the head is thrown back and sideways. A sharp spasm of sincerity seizes him.

It's the same in his stage style. First the big white grin, the deep crevasses radiating from the eyes. Then the sharp raise of the eyebrows, by which point everything is going off in different directions, and the only possible next move is to po back to square one charm by numbers. It works. It may seem mechanical, but I suppose the charm is real.

Trimmingham, was the elegant aristo who. in The Go-Between, was in hopeless competition with farmer Alan Bates for the then quite shattering Julie Christie. Fox said that he had put quite a bit of himself into the por eavesdropping, were architecturally thought through. As the performance was, besides, a feast of baritone and bass singing (with Bernd Weikl the warm. soft-grained, young-sounding Sachs) cal pleasures were many.

The Tristan prelude also told one what to expect lingeringly erotic rather than passionate, delicate and intense but low in dynamics, as though Daniel Barenboim was trying to keep the orchestra from flooding a normal theatre when, in fact, the Bayreuth baffle already did that job for him. Though there were many lovely things, especially in the nocturnal ecstacies of act 2, they remained episodes. Barenboim at times pulled the speeds abou. so slow in the wonderful invitation to the land beyond birth as to drive the singers into mannerism. How much of this was due to the production The name Jean Pierre Ponnelle makes some of us shudder This time he had come up with two-thirds of a conception, certainly justifiable, potentially splendid.

Wc were to be taken to the core of the work, the longing for the Other that can find fulfilment only in annihilation. Ponnelle goes for a daring combination on the one hand sets, costumes, groupings in the first two acts that hark back to pre-Raphaelite idyll (the great tree and trait, and lie won a best supporting actor award for it. It wasn't his first film (there had been, among others, The Jokers and I'll "Never Forget What's His. Name?) but it was the first in which he really made any impact. point about Trimming-ham was while' he' appeared a deckle-edged De-' brett" dunce, there were sensitivities under the- casual arrogance, and he "did' know the sexual score.

Noblesse obliged him to show none of hat he was not a world away from Quartermaine and the tradition' of the upper leg. So it is possible to see Fox as a sawn-off Leslie Howard the sharp blond looks, the drawl, the narrow vowels heard only from foreigners and some Old Harrovians. But Fox has usually hinled just faintly at self-parody in his nobles a touch of self-awareness in an otherwise risible character. It suggests a slight discomfort in the officer-class clothes. Though he looked even more uncomfortable as the bogus Major in Anyone For Denis (Fox was only standing in for a couple of months for the sick Peter Woodthorpe).

After all, Fox may have gone to Harrow, but he left at 17 because he wasn't much good at exams. He may have started his National Service as an officer cadet in the Col-streams but he was chucked out after basic training and spent the rest of his time, much more in the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers. Not, by his own admission, all grassy hank in act 2. an Arthurian image by Millais, with the torches of the departing hunt glimmering behind); on the other hand, insistent use of symbols that show the lovers in thrall to the unconscious, so deep that they have eyes for scarcely anything else. So Isolde spends much of act 1 caught within the circle of her enormous cloak the love potion comes in a wide dish like a Hindu symbol of female sexuality instead of embracing, the lovers gaze at each other's reflections in it, just as, in the' garden at night, they lean rapt over a pool.

It did mean keeping the lovers on their knees for long stretches one longed to rush down and get them off the floor so they could sing out freely (no. aisles at Bayreuth, though; just as well). But the drinking cf the potion, with day suddenly breaking grey at the moment of landfall, was overwhelming. Something went wrong. The whim that seems inseparable from Ponnelle's work decreed that the whole of the last act from the sighting of the ship should- take place in the dying Tristan's mind.

Not only did it keeping Kurwenal, Brangane, and King Mark offstage, casting giant shadows and emitting muffled so that those coming fresh -to the work (there arc: such, after all) must have' been, hard put John Rosselli Isolde at reviews Meistersinger Bayreuth The music above to it to know what was going on a smart gloss, this, not a realisation. It also meant an abstract staging at odds with what had gone before Isolde a vision, static in the of the cleft tree. Tristan tore off his bandages (as Wagner directed) and waved them wildly about, a gesture that would have made artistic sense if it had echoed Isolde's earlier 'waving of her scarf. But Isolde had no scarf. Ponnelle had wanted her just then to lie writhing.

At such times one seemed to get a string of bright ideas, all coherence gone, with the ending crafted to let the lovers die together, as in a Thirties French film. Vocally, it was Tristan's opera Rene Kollo, signing with even, finely focussed tone (one or two scoops on and off the note apart) a bit worn by the delirium in act 3, but still phrasing with poetic concentration and grace. Hanna Schwarz was a strong Brangane liquid chocolate tone, exemplary diction. A pity King Mark could not have -been sung by the grateful Pogner from Meistersinger (Manfred Schenk) rather than by the bull-voiced Matti Salminen. In both operas the heroines, were young and five lyric sonranos with more bloom on their voices than experience of such taxing work.

Johanna Meier's Isolde lacked 'Volume at points (L gather she did it better, with the Welsh EVEN on its home ground at Bayreuth the Wagnerian total work of art is open accidents. A contributing may falter or take over. 'Who would have foretold Jhat, of the two new offerings at this year's festival, 'Tristan und Isolde would seem musically subdued in a striking but ultimately mixed-up production, while Meistersinger which pro-jiiises so much more action colour would be carried above all by the jnusic As experiences they could Jiardly have been more Meistersinger, produced Wolfgang Wagner (the composer's surviving grandson in a manner sane rather than enlightening, found in the youni British conductor Mnvk F.lder an interpreter who could guide the orchestra over the long span. Probably because the Prize Song failed to give the im-'mensely long third, act the needed lift the tenor who 'went through it has a voice no means as exciting as name, Siegfried Jerusalem the first-night raudlence did not feel authorised to give Elder his due. In its springy lyricism and unhurried dignity the overture forecast what was to come a performance that sang.

In the bird episode 'cf Sachs's monologue it positively took wing the work as a whole, and such things as the scherzo Beckmesser's Tiemory' by Elaine Paige. Available fromjjrecord departments, subject to stockavailability. Album or cassette 549..