THEATRE

Giddy heights

HILARY SPURLING

Whose Turn Next? (Cinoherni Klub at the Aldwych) Richard III (Stratford) Medea (Greenwich) Widowers' Houses (Royal Court) The Cinoherni Klub from Prague will have been here for two weeks on Saturday, and it is one of the wierdest and most absorbing fortnights I can recall, even in the World Theatre Season. They are, for one thing, a company of &Ming acrobats: we have seen nothing quite like Jiri Hrzan—and I cer- tainly saw Mr Hrzan dance a foxtrot, shimmying over the stage in elaborately syncopated rhythms, his feet meanwhile a good fifteen inches off the ground—since the Piccolo Theatre's harlequin from Milan, who ran up the walls in Goldoni and danced upside down on the ceiling. The scene (in Alena Vostra's Whose Turn Next?) in which Mr Hrzan, cornered by an enemy, dives at the floorboards as though they were made of water not wood, or skids on his head across a stage as slippery as greased glass, is dizzy beyond description.

But it is not simply their elegant and often alarming velocity which makes this company so exhilarating: the two produc- tions we have so far seen are respectively five and four years old, and both have the assurance and the exquisite timing which come of long playing. Both are imbued with that doleful, delicate humour peculiarly Czech, a sense of the perfect absurdity of all human affairs; and both suggest those musical and painterly skills which are closer to the Italian theatre than to anything normally seen on an English stage. Agitated crescendoes alternate, in Mandragola, with patches of bleak exhaustion—whey-faced clowns worn to a frazzle, and lolling in bright sunlight like understuffed rag dolls. Scenes of frantic, uncouth and ludicrously fierce affray, in Whose Turn Next? (directed by Jan Kacer) contrast sharply with the subtler tempo which gives the nightclub scenes their extraordinary atmosphere, at once desultory and minutely organised, so that one is aware as in a dream of patterns of light and space, or the texture of sound: bursts of laughter, a song, sudden pockets of silence.

The play concerns the various ploys designed, by a group of friends collected in a nightclub, to spread alarm and despondency among the solider citizenry. Chief of these is a middle-aged customer (Pavel Landovsky) in a baggy suit who, like so many of his generation in this country, is maddened by the very sight of youth, taking their clothes, their manners, even the fact that they exist at all, as a personal affront: Mr Landov- sky's face, passing from simple tetchiness through consternation to mute and massive

outrage, eyeballs hurtling round their sockets, is a treat to watenz So for tnat

matter is the maniacal nouse-painter (Josef

Somr) who traps our hero, Onside um Hrzan): one will not soon forget Onside

grovelling for his spectacles among a litter of wallpaper strips as squashy, anu as male- volently incline°, as so many banana skins, while his tormentor, douoled up with laughter, roars unhelpful instructions from the sidelines.

The play works, in short, on the grim, crime-and-punisiiment principle of tarce.

For, just as Feydeau s gaiety depends

entirely on emotions—greed, tear and jeal- ousy—too frightful to contemplate, so nere

a succession of appalling physical catas-

trophes reveal gults of pain and treachery which there is no time to ponder, and against which the only defence is the self- possession, the giddy humour and the hard, dry, ironical detachment of Offside and his friends. This is, m so far as one can judge from a fairly scanty translation, an immen- sely witty play; and it is, like Mandragola, delectable to watch. The company end their visit this week with The Government Inspec- tor which, on past form, no connoisseur can afford to miss.

And so to Richard Ill, directed by Terry Hands at Stratford in a production which is so good in parts—namely, the dying king's attempt to reconcile his warring kins-

men, a dull scene on the page but here in- fused by Patrick Stewart (and I cannot think King Edward has ever been more brilliantly played) with a passionate, futile urgency which is infinitely sad; the wooing of the Lady Anne, in which both the lady (Helen Mirren, a performance of uncommon strength and beauty) and Norman Rod- way's Richard are superb; and the mocking chorus of ghosts on Bosworth lield—that it is hard to forgive so much flat clumsiness else- where..

It must have been difficult, after the Wars of the Roses, to see Richard out of sequence and with new eyes; nonetheless, Mr Hands seems to have been daunted out of all pro- portion at the prospect. He has lost his customary aplomb, relying instead on funny business—blood spurting on all sides and the Lord Mayor fainting at the sight—and on a half-hearted formalism which, if it had been more rigorously conceived (and if it were not so sharply contradicted by Farrah's stained glass sets, which suggest a flashy, sham 'modernity' more appropriate to a jumped up Christmas card), might have made the battle as spectacular as his masques in Pericles. Mr Rodway's tense, louche, play-acting Richard is, like the whole pro- duction, fine by fits and starts; Barry Stan- ton's Hastings is an excellently solid piece of work; and 'deep-revolving, witty Buck- ingham' fits Ian Richardson like a glove. But this was an evening calculated to turn its audience, like Richard's victims peering through the clouds, into a sad set of 'moody discontented souls'.

Meanwhile, David Thompson's produc- tion of Medea, in a new translation of his own, has the truthfulness, the matter-of-fact precision and the blazing grandeur of his productions of Euripides' six years ago at Stratford East. This Medea is a pleasure, and so—at any rate for those who prize, as I do, the neat wit of Shaw's first play above

the odious complacency of his others—is Widowers' Houses, which reached the Royal Court last week in Michael Blake- more's brisk, clean and shapely production from the Nottingham Playhouse.