YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: PERFORMING-ARTS: SPECIAL REPORT

SPECIAL REPORT: Nontheatrical Films. The Swedish company Dockhouse scored an unusual victory in 1996, taking the grand prize at the U.S. International Film and Video Festival in Chicago for the second year with another Volvo promotional film, Beams and Dreams, along with 14 additional awards. The American documentary Looking into the Face of Evil by Sam Nahem, which graphically depicted the horror of the Holocaust, won a prestigious CINE Golden Eagle and several other top awards. An animated Czech film, Repete, by Michaela Pavlatova took the grand prize at Japan's Hiroshima '96 Festival. The film followed three couples determined to break from the mechanical routine that determined their lives. The most successful film from Florida State University, which had moved into the top ranks of cinema schools, was Paul McCall, the story of a shy second-grader who outwitted class bullies. A student film by Benjamin Hershleder, it was screened at 38 festivals and won eight awards. Short Order by Marc Marriott of the University of California, Los Angeles, took the Canal+ award at France's Henri Langlois Festival. The film featured a businessman whose work as a short-order cook transformed him. The Water Carrier by Patricia Cardoso won the Academy and Directors Guild student awards and screenings at 25 festivals. Set in 1926, the film showed a blind man in Colombia who had to decide whether to go through with an eye operation. (THOMAS W. HOPE) See also Art, Antiques, and Collections: Photography; Media and Publishing: Radio; Television. This article updates motion picture. THEATRE The Royal National Theatre (RNT), both in London and on tour, continued to rule the roost in 1996, while the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), in London and Stratford-upon-Avon, showed signs of wear and tear. Arts Council of Great Britain annual grants and subsidies were frozen, for the fourth year in a row, at 186 million. While national lottery money went to maintain old buildings and supply new facilities, Arts Council funds for companies, actors, writers, and directors were, in real terms, diminishing. Trevor Nunn, former director of the RSC and the man responsible for staging Cats, Les Misrables, Starlight Express, and Sunset Boulevard, was named as Richard Eyre's successor at the RNT. His appointment at the age of 56, which was to take effect in September 1997, surprised most observers, who were expecting to hear the names of younger men such as Stephen Daldry (of the Royal Court Theatre) or Sam Mendes (Donmar Warehouse). Daldry, meanwhile, masterminded the exit of the Royal Court from its Sloane Square home to the West End. While the Royal Court was being refurbished and rebuilt, thanks to 16 million of lottery money, its program of new plays was to be spread over two West End houses, the Duke of York's and the Ambassadors, itself temporarily divided into two small venues. The Royal Court continued to discover gifted new dramatists, and Eyre alleged that the new writing talent in the British theatre was now greater than at any other time since the Arts Council was formed in 1947, which included the Royal Court's golden era in the 1950s. One impressive debut in 1996 was that made by 26-year-old Martin McDonagh, whose The Beauty Queen of Leenane arrived at the Royal Court from the Druid Theatre Company in Galway, Ire., going from there to the Duke of York's, after a long Irish tour and winning for McDonagh the award for the most promising playwright from the Evening Standard (ES) en route. McDonagh appeared to have taken John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World as his model in his vengeful comedy of a suppressed spinster and her cantankerous mother in a remote Connemara kitchen. There were also themes of emigration and escape and of sexual longing and cultural identity wrapped up in ferociously good dialogue and faultless plotting. Another notable Royal Court discovery was Mark Ravenhill, whose controversially titled drama contained scenes of explicit sex but also a terrifying authenticity in its study of a lost generation pumped up on drugs, fast food, and false dreams. The work played in tandem at the Ambassadors with Harold Pinter's Ashes to Ashes, a short but poignant mysterious two-person contemporary drama of unspoken violence and terror in the shadow of Auschwitz. Lindsay Duncan and Stephen Rea played their roles to perfection. There were two other Holocaust plays in the West End, both already seen in the U.S., Diane Samuels's Kindertransport and Jon Marans's Old Wicked Songs. Both boiled down to sentimental, not very memorable encounters between, respectively, a mother and daughter and a Viennese music professor and his pupil. Neither had the public impact of Art (ES best comedy), translated from the French of Yasmina Reza by Christopher Hampton and played to wildly enthusiastic audiences at the Wyndham's by Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and Ken Stott. Art portrayed male friendships torn apart by arguments over the merits of a large white blank canvas. Much of the comedy pandered to an audience only too prepared to scoff at the very notion of modern art, and the play might have benefited from proposing a more ambiguously interesting painting. One great moment occurred as Finney advanced on the derided exhibit in order to deface it, and the audience, which shared his contempt, suddenly stopped laughing and drew in its breath at the possibility of brutal vandalism. Two fine plays by Stephen Poliakoff were presented during the year. In Sweet Panic, at the Hampstead Theatre, a child psychiatrist is stalked through a hot London summer by the mother of a young patient; the piece was expertly performed by Harriet Walter and Saskia Reeves. In Blinded by the Sun, at the RNT, Frances de la Tour and Douglas Hodge played science researchers at a provincial university threatened with financial cuts to its research programs. Two other new plays stood out at the RNT. Pam Gems's Stanley (ES best play) starred Antony Sher as the mystical, screwed-up, sexually insatiable British painter Stanley Spencer, torn between his wife and his mistress, and it had fine performances by Deborah Findlay and Anna Chancellor. John Caird's production transformed the Cottesloe auditorium into a Spencerian wraparound mural of bulky artisans in tweed suits and cloth caps. In Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, the U.S. director Mike Nichols appeared alongside David de Keyser and Miranda Richardson in a stunning but static production by David Hare that dolefully reported the end of civilization as we know it: the barbarians were through the gates, literary society was destroyed, and everyone on Earth who could read John Donne was now dead. Richardson was one of the year's outstanding performers. After the Shawn play she went to the Edinburgh International Festival and gave a brilliant solo performance in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, ingeniously adapted by the U.S. poet Darryl Pinkney and directed by Robert Wilson. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) Another star turn was made by Janet McTeer as Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. It was a definitive performance, directed by Anthony Page at the Playhouse in Charing Cross, full of pent-up justification from the start for her shattering exit. For once, the viewer believed in the sexuality of Nora's marriage to Torvald, who was well played by Owen Teale, and when the hapless husband innocently protested that no man had ever sacrificed his independence for his marriage, the air crackled as McTeer wheeled savagely around with "Thousands of women have!" Diana Rigg continued her astonishing late flourish in roles once thought beyond her range as the alcoholic earth mother Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (ES best actress) at the Almeida in Islington. Howard Davies's production, in which David Suchet was equally good as George, then transferred to the Aldwych. The restored version of Shakespeare's Globe opened on the South Bank in August with a modern-dress production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The arena was exciting and its potential clear, and after more work on the relationship between the stage and the audience, the venue was expected to reopen for an extended summer season in 1997. The Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden scored with Katie Mitchell's revival of Samuel Beckett's Endgame. The two touring companies, Mike Alfreds's Method and Madness and Stephen Unwin's English Touring Theatre, made an impact, the latter with a wonderful Hedda Gabler (the year's second great Ibsen performance, this time from Alexandra Gilbreath in the title role) and a lucid, enjoyable account of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Parts One and Two, in which a real-life father and son, Timothy and Samuel West, played Falstaff and Prince Hal. The French film star Isabelle Huppert was a welcome visitor to London in the RNT's Mary Stuart by Friedrich von Schiller, directed by Davies, and Sir Peter Hall returned to the South Bank to direct Sophocles's two Oedipus plays. Eyre produced a stunning John Gabriel Borkman in which Paul Scofield (ES best actor) gave his best stage performance in 30 years as Ibsen's disgraced financier waiting for the world to welcome him home. On a snowbound hillside, Scofield's battered, dying, and remorseful hero sang a croaking lament to his life and to the loves of two sisters, played by Vanessa Redgrave and Eileen Atkins. It was one of the greatest of all RNT productions. The RSC found its best voice on smaller stages; the Stratford-upon-Avon season was illuminated by Katie Mitchell's (ES best director) whirling and inspirational revival of Euripides's forgotten Phoenician Women and by a truly magical new version of The Comedy of Errors, directed by Tim Supple in the Other Place. The latter venue also provided Peter Whelan's riveting new play about Shakespeare's second daughter, The Herbal Bed, and an eye-opening version of the medieval morality play Everyman, directed by Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni of Theatre de Complicit. The main Stratford stage offered an enjoyable Troilus and Cressida, with Joseph Fiennes--Ralph's younger brother--and Victoria Hamilton, and a decent As You Like It. The Stratford season would now run from November to August, as RSC head Adrian Noble was rejuggling the scheduling in the Barbican, the company's London home, and on tour. In London the company failed badly with a stage version of the film Les Enfants du paradis. Its productions seemed random and rudderless, although the company received a shot in the arm with a rare revival of Shakespeare's Henry VIII in the Stratford Swan that combined the values of pageant and power politics to an exhilarating degree. The postmodernist tendency of British culture to look to the past was reflected in a disappointing West End season that included the courtroom classic Twelve Angry Men, admittedly given an electrifying production by Pinter, the old thriller Dial M for Murder, and the rather sad sight of Tony Randall and Jack Klugman reheating their TV performances in Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. When Jason Donovan stepped up in Emlyn Williams's creaky thriller Night Must Fall, the outcry was deafening and the show was removed almost immediately. Simon was also represented by an undistinguished revival of Chapter Two, starring Tom Conti and Sharon Gless, and a distinctly below-average London premiere of his Sid Caesar tribute, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, in which Gene Wilder was misleadingly winsome and sedated as the tyrannical comic surrounded by gag writers. Lynn Redgrave drew rave reviews but sparse audiences--London had forgotten about the peerless actress during her U.S. sojourn--in her Shakespeare for My Father. Middle-aged, middle-class Londoners tapped their toes in nostalgia to Ned Sherrin's affectionate revival of Salad Days, the 1954 nostalgic musical revue, and to the pleasantly diverting By Jeeves, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn's improved version of their 1975 flop Jeeves. The big musical hope of producer Cameron Mackintosh, Martin Guerre, by the authors of Les Misrables and Miss Saigon, opened to indifferent reviews in July, was withdrawn and rewritten in the autumn, and reopened to a better reception in November. It still seemed unlikely, however, that an interesting attempt to rework the story best known from films starring Grard Depardieu and Richard Gere would become the talk of the town. Director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod eventually came up with a lucid, tough, and often moving production, with wonderful stomping choreography for the peasant community by Broadway veteran Bob Avian, but it seemed that it may have been too little too late. Stephen Sondheim's Passion (ES best musical) struggled at the box office, but it impressed audiences with its emotional fervour, the knockout performances of Maria Friedman and Michael Ball, the ingenious intricacy of the music, and the sense of satirical homage to 19th-century opera. Those Sondheim admirers who lamented the absence of jokes preferred Sam Mendes's blistering revival of Sondheim's earlier Company, which transferred intact to the West End but failed commercially. Sir Henry Irving's "temple of the drama," the Lyceum Theatre in Covent Garden, reopened as a theatre on a permanent basis for the first time since 1939. The event was triumphantly marked by a sensational production, by Gale Edwards, of Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's first commercial blockbuster, Jesus Christ Superstar. Zubin Varla was an evil, troubled, Iago-like Judas Iscariot. John Napier's design placed some of the audience on the stage as spectators in a Colosseum-like arena that spilled out toward the audience in walkways along the side boxes and climaxed in a Golgotha-like rubble mountain behind the action. The international theatre impinged to good effect on the British repertoire. The Qubcois auteur Robert Lepage brought his final seven-hour version of The Seven Streams of the River Ota to the RNT, but he failed to deliver Elsinore, his one-man show based on Hamlet, to the Edinburgh Festival when a rivet on the complicated design proved impossible to fix. Elsinore later returned to some acclaim on a British tour starting at the Nottingham Playhouse. The Romanian director Silviu Purcarete brought his French-financed restoration of a lost Aeschylean trilogy, The Danads, to the International Conference Centre in Birmingham, courtesy of the Birmingham Rep. The tale of 50 brides for 50 brothers and of the birth of the Greek nation was a fine example of spectacular theatre of minimal means: brandished torches for the brutal invaders, white suitcases for the emigrant women. The scene of mass murderous betrayal on the wedding night was brilliantly done under the cover of simple white tents, the wedding sheets then doubling as body bags. The best new Irish play was Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, in which Derbhle Crotty played an incestuous sister troubled by her twin's death by drowning. The form of the piece, using flashbacks and memorial confessional speeches, was unusual and daring. The production visited the Royal Court. Regional theatres battled on in an atmosphere of deepening crisis. The Glasgow Citizens' Theatre made the most impact on its smaller stages with revealing excursions into the forgotten territory of leading U.S. dramatists Tennessee Williams and Albee. The former's In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel was amazingly restored by director Philip Prowse, while the latter's Seascape was a genuinely funny echo of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The West Yorkshire Playhouse continued to be lively, and the Nottingham Playhouse put on Ben Elton's Popcorn, a Shavian discussion play, to continue the debate on violence in movies. The Birmingham Rep tried hard to hang on to dwindling audiences with a topical play about the monarchy, Whelan's Divine Right, and an excellent rewrite by David Edgar of his own Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Much-loved actors who died in 1996 included Beryl Reid (see OBITUARIES), Margaret Courtenay, and Simon Cadell. Veteran musical star Vivian Ellis also died. Shaftesbury Avenue dimmed its lights in honour of Jack Tinker, the effervescent 58-year-old critic on the Daily Mail for a quarter of a century, whose death was all the more shocking for its unexpectedness. Tinker was probably the last great critic in the tabloid and middle-brow press, someone who performed in print vividly and relentlessly, night after night, often surprising himself as much as his readers with the vehemence of his recommendations for the untried and unexpected. Theatre coverage in Britain, and theatre itself, was incalculably diminished by his departure. (MICHAEL COVENEY)